Marketplaces are ruling the e-commerce industry!
Life is incomplete without marketplaces like Amazon, Zomato, and Uber.
Entrepreneurs [like you] competing with these behemoths are working tirelessly to get their websites in front of potential clients.
Marketplaces have to acquire both the customers and the service providers to run efficiently.
First, we’ll go over a few marketplace SEO tactics in this article to help you double your existing search traffic.
What is an online marketplace?
An online marketplace is a platform where sellers and buyers meet and make transactions.
Airbnb, Uber, Alibaba, and Upwork are some of the marketplace examples.
Why is SEO important for marketplaces?
Let’s see an example, shall we?
The term ‘beach house rentals in Florida’ receives 2.9K monthly searches.
What does it mean? It means that 2900 people are searching for beach house rentals in Florida.
Imagine your website shows up when those 2900 people search the term on Google.
You gain more exposure, and if they enjoy what you have to offer, they will become customers.
In turn, that is how effective marketplace SEO is.
12 SEO tips for your marketplace business
#1 ASO
The process of boosting the visibility of an app in the app store is known as app store optimization (ASO). It is closely related to optimizing a website for SEO.
Let’s say you have used the Uber clone app to create a taxi app, but it only has a few downloads.
It’s not going to end well for your business. That’s why you have to optimize your app to maximize your downloads.
Number of downloads = Revenue you make
#2 Create webpages to target local queries
29M people search for ‘Restaurant near me’ on Google.
Doordash recognized this possibility and established a local search page with this phrase as its focus.
Any guesses on how well it went?
Well, it receives 10.5M organic traffic per month from this keyword alone.
They also tailored the page for people to order from their local restaurants.
Learn more about the Doordash’s SEO strategy in this video – https://youtu.be/Ag_-pPtJpuI
You could use this strategy for any marketplace business model. For example, you can create ‘rentals near me’ or ‘Apartments for Rent in San Diego’ pages to get the local traffic.
#3 Master the user intent
User intent is underrated.
Understanding the user intent behind the search query helps tailor web pages to satisfy users’ demands.
For example:
For a single term – places to visit in India – Holidify, an online travel marketplace platform, generates over 51.1K organic visitors.
Furthermore, their website appears on the first page of Google search results for over 4000 ‘places to visit’ keywords.
Consider how much traffic they could generate from those 4000 keywords.
Isn’t it massive?
Moreover, they satisfy the user intent by compiling a list of the top locations to visit in each country and region.
When a user is ready to visit a location, they simply need to click on the ‘Get quote’ CTA on their website.
#4 Utilize TOFU keywords to nurture your audience
Top of the funnel keywords are keywords used by your customers with an informational intent to learn something.
Here are some of the TOFU keywords for the clothing marketplace:
- Best outfits for summer
- Different types of jeans
- Best winter wears and combinations
- What are oversized t-shirts?
People who wish to learn are using these search phrases on Google. You may nurture them to take action on your marketplace website if you can aid them with your blog.
And they would eventually buy from you as they trust you.
#5 Navigation
Navigation plays a crucial role in the marketplace site architecture.
Other pages, such as product and category pages, do not have the same authority as your homepage.
So link all your major category and product pages from the header and footer navigation.
No page should be more than 3 clicks away from your home page.
Here’s an example from an online fashion wear brand:
You can also use ‘Breadcrumbs’ to improve the user experience and navigation between pages.
For example, here’s a breadcrumb navigation used by H&M:
#6 Internal linking
Internal linking helps search engines discover your pages on the website.
However, when a page is not internally linked, Google will not crawl or index it. In other words, your page won’t show up when you search for it on Google.
Optimize pages for internal links by adding related products sections, trending products, or any informational content on the product page.
#7 Category page SEO
Your category pages are a hub for your product pages with internal links pointing to them.
When you optimize your category pages for SEO, they will rank higher on Google. And when a customer discovers them there, they will eventually learn about the products you have to offer.
Here are a lot of things to optimize your category page for SEO,
- Add focus keywords in URL, title, and content.
- Create a unique title and description.
- Add internal links to category pages from product pages.
- Link to sub-categories and related products.
- Add content related to the category.
#8 Product page SEO
💰 Product page is the page that makes you money!
Here are the things to follow while optimizing your marketplace product page for SEO:
- Add keywords to the title, URL, and product name.
- Clear URL structure
- Use alt tags for the images.
- Create product content and include keywords.
- Add a list of features.
- Product reviews.
- Create product-related FAQs.
- Use product structured data.
- Add related products and link to them.
#9 Optimize for page loading speed
Nearly 70% of shoppers say page speed influences their willingness to buy from an online company – Unbounce.
Conversion is heavily influenced by page speed.
You can use Google’s page speed insights tool to audit your marketplace website speed.
The tool will provide you with the speed score and a list of suggestions to optimize your website speed.
Here are some of the things that can help you speed up your website:
- Use CDNs
- Compress image file sizes
- Get a better hosting
- Optimize your website code
- Limit the use of third party plugins and scripts
#10 Add related schema markup
🤔 Which one looks better? A or B?
The latter is eyecatching, right?
That’s because of the use of schema.
Marking up your marketplace product pages with schema helps search engines better understand the page and provide detailed information on the search results page.
Here are the schema markups that you can use:
You can also check whether you have implemented your schema markup correctly using the following tools:
- Google rich results tester
- Schema.org validator
#11 Implement canonical tags to avoid duplication
👻 Duplicate content is a nightmare for marketplaces!
Content duplication occurs when similar content appears on two or more pages. It impacts your search rankings.
The most common cause of duplicate content on marketplaces is search filters.
Search filters would create dynamic and unique URLs that contain the same products/services as the original page before applying filters.
Imagine if the marketplace has 20+ filters. Now, you would have 20+ similar pages.
So, what’s the best way to get rid of it?
You can use the Canonical tag!
Canonical tag helps search engines find the original version of the page among the duplicates found.
<link rel=“canonical” href=“https://example.com/product-page/” />
This is how the canonical tag looks, and you have to place this code on the head section of the page.
You can use the self-referencing tag on the original page, and on the duplicate page, you can reference the source.
Inherently, by using the ‘Noindex’ tag on the head section of the duplicate pages, you can block the duplicate pages from indexing.
#12 Build links to important pages
Lastly, links are the holy grail of SEO.
Google considers the number of links as votes of trust.
When a page/website has a higher number of links [ofcourse, with better content], Google will rank them higher on the search results.
Try to get links to your product and category pages to rank higher.
You could use:
- Guest posts
- HARO
- Original research posts
- Unlinked mentions
- Broken link building
- Phew! That’s it.
Now it’s your turn. Implement these tips, and let me know If you need any help with optimizing your marketplace for SEO.
👋 See ya in another article.
