Online marketplaces are great. As a co-founder of a live yoga classes marketplace, I enjoy not incurring any production cost, storage cost, or delivery cost. Our revenue comes from taking a % on sales and from subscriptions. Most of our costs are technical costs and marketing costs.

But marketplaces also have challenges. A complex thing to achieve with a marketplace is a match in between the supply and demand. Too much offer and a weak demand will deter your makers from staying on the platform, and too little offer will deter clients from buying your products or services. Growth must be managed carefully. 

Another drawback about marketplaces is that you don’t “own” any product or services. You’ll need to buy products from your makers if you want to give away free products for marketing purpose. It’s limiting opportunities for PR and for partnerships with other brands. It also reduces the type of promotion you can run, as you need the maker’s agreement for discounts and special offers. 

Managing makers is time consuming, managing buyers is time consuming too as there are always customer service issues that need to be sorted. So on marketplaces, you’re in fact doubling after-sale cost.

By “SEO for online marketplaces”, I mean SEO to help marketplaces themselves rank on Google, not SEO for marketplaces to sell on, like Facebook or Amazon. These are SEO tips for people who run a marketplace!

Famous marketplaces in the UK are Etsy, Not on the High Street, Spareroom, Fiverr, Treatwell, Uber, Airbnb, Deliveroo…

Marketplace SEO: how to manage your 2 target audiences: buyers and makers

SEO for an online marketplace is like SEO for e-commerce, the only difference is that you have to cater to 2 audiences. Your buyers and your makers. Like E-commerce SEO, it is important to track your performance, create meaningful content for both audiences, optimise your site and get backlinks.

Choose a Niche, but not too Niche

Everyone has heard that many businesses flourished by stealing Craigslist ideas specialising in one of the niche covered by them – AirBnb is a good example for housing, and any second hand items now have specialised platform (for example, Vinted for clothing, cazoo for cars, eBay for everything else)

But beware of how niche you want to go! Too large of an offer and it’s difficult to get topic authority, but getting authority in a super narrow niche – with products or services that not many people are buying – will obviously limit your turnover. You can easily get an idea of existing demand by looking at Google Trends, or Google Keyword planner.

Tracking performance for 2 audiences

How to track your content performance ? By having conversions goals for both audiences. Make sure you can differentiate buyers from makers. Transactions tracking is necessary, but make sure you also track sign ups with no purchase, as those are just as important. They might not convert straight away, but you can always re-target them with marketing using audiences or include them in your emailing.

Content topics for 2 types of audience

In any industry , there will be keywords that are common to both makers and buyers. Thos will be generics topics about the state of industry, main players, and latest industry updates. But you also have topics that are specific to each user. 

For example, you’ll be able to attract makers by writing high quality content about what they are making, about pain points they may have while making, and about official bodies in their fields.

On the other hand , buyers will be searching for the product or service name, how to make something, or how to solve a problem.

It’s best to always monitor the performance of your content by looking at conversions before investing in more!

Watch your conversion rate

People need trust to buy a product from a marketplace. And since you don’t control product quality, you must find ways to re-assure a potential buyer. One way to build trust if to share other people’s experience with the product (reviews).

You can also ask the makers to provide as much information about the product as possible: product description, photos, videos, testimonial  etc.

Good UGC (user generated content) doesn’t always come naturally though, and its best to show examples of what is required and guide the makers in creating their profiles and product descriptions.

Also make sure to tell your buyers they can trust you. You are a neutral third party who can help sort out any issues with orders.

Backlink strategy for marketplaces

You can suggest your makers to link to the marketplace and the ones who don’t have an e-commerce website themselves will do.

On the PR side, as a marketplace you can position yourself as an industry expert. You’ll need to monitor journalists request and answer them when a request related to your industry comes up.

But the best opportunity with marketplaces in a link building strategy is to analyse the existing marketplace’s data and come up with interesting facts about the users. Sent out in a press release, such a piece of content can generate a lot of press interest and backlinks, as well as being a “link baiter” long term.

Looking for help with the SEO of your marketplace ? Get in touch!