Increase Organic Traffic of Your Marketplace: Be Visible to Grow Customer Base

A marketplace needs two very specific types of users to develop: buyers and sellers. To be found by your potential users, it must be quick and easy. In this sense, capitalizing on your SEO must be one of your priorities.

With ever-increasing competition in the marketplace sector, it is essential to develop your audience in order to attract visitors capable of selling or buying on your platform.

We offer you some tips to increase your organic traffic and, mechanically, your income potential.

Keywords related to products

It is these specific queries that will allow the products available on your marketplace to be visible and easily found from a search engine. It is also strongly recommended to carefully study your keyword strategy in relation to the competition: if a keyword is too loaded, you will potentially have more difficulty positioning yourself on it effectively. On the contrary, if a keyword is not loaded but is in line with what your customers are looking for, betting on it can prove fruitful.

You should always ask yourself these questions when studying the keywords on which to position yourself for your marketplace:

• Is the keyword result on the search engine too busy?
• Is this keyword often searched for by my customers?
• Are my direct competitors positioned on this keyword?
• Are the giants of the sector present on this request?

Never forget this little joke: “The best place to hide a body is the second page of Google results”.

The product page URL and title

Let's start with the URL. The latter must be simple and understandable. 3 or 4 keywords are more than enough, there is no need to overload your URL with keywords, this will confuse the message you will send to visitors to your marketplace.

The title of the page should also be studied with the greatest attention. Indeed, the title of the page is a very important criterion for Google or any other search engine.

For these two elements, you must therefore deal with maximum readability and ease of understanding for your visitors, while giving the robots in charge of indexing the pages the necessary resources so that they understand and promote your products in the results.

The content strategy of your marketplace

Answering the questions your customers have about a service or product is one of the best ways to turn them into customers of your marketplace.

Adopting and capitalizing on a content strategy is generally a winning bet. For example, you can launch a blog that discusses the products for sale on your marketplace.

This can result in tests, unboxing, previews, news articles, etc.

Don’t hesitate to use several formats to maximize your visibility and your SEO on different platforms! You can produce articles as well as videos (in different formats: short, animations, reports, etc.), and why not podcasts. The more quality content you have on topics that concern you, the better your positioning will be in search results.

Regularly publishing content, beyond the impact on SEO, also allows you to create a quality brand image and highlight your in-depth expertise in the market in which your marketplace operates. It is a guarantee of seriousness which reassures consumers and necessarily encourages more people to make purchases.

Netlinking to link your marketplace to influential sites

Netlinking is a technique aimed at ensuring that sites which have an audience in line with your sector redirect their visitors to your marketplace. The more your marketplace is cited by other sites, the more search engines will consider your marketplace as a platform of interest.

Where your product pages are not necessarily easy to “netlink”, this technique should be put in symbiosis with your content strategy so that your productions, whether in the form of articles, posts, or even videos, are cited by as many third-party platforms as possible, as qualitative and popular as possible.

User experience on the marketplace

Many people are still unaware that the user experience you offer has a direct impact on your natural referencing! A good SEO score means a good experience for your visitors. This quality of use is expressed through a certain number of points.

Pages that load quickly

Several techniques exist to increase page loading speed. If a user arrives on a product page on your marketplace and it takes several seconds to load, you can be almost certain that the visitor will leave your platform and probably never return.

To optimize these loading times, you can, for example, compress your images, or even authorize the caching of resources.

You can also test the loading speed of your pages on https://pagespeed.web.dev/

Make your marketplace accessible 

A good user experience also requires the accessibility of your marketplace to the greatest number of people. Whether the Internet user is on a computer, a tablet or a smartphone, they must be able to navigate your marketplace smoothly. Today, more than one in two French people buy with their mobile! It is therefore essential to adopt a “mobile first” logic and make the experience impeccable.

You can test your marketplace to see if it is mobile friendly from https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly?hl=fr

It is also recommended to think about people with disabilities. Today, tools allow better accessibility for disabled people, capable of reading the content on your marketplace, modifying the characters, etc.

A methodical and efficient purchasing experience

Always make sure that the product sheets are as readable and attractive as possible. It is the duty of a marketplace owner to find the perfect balance by being able to inform, reassure, and make life easier for a potential customer.

These must be created carefully, with clear titles for the visitor, quality images that make you want them (with the right descriptions for the search engine, do not neglect the results of Google Images for example!), a description effective and attractive, all of course being indexed in the right category of products or services in your tree structure.

Customer reviews and other testimonials are also very important in the act of purchasing. In order to make these even more effective, it is decisive to offer verified and authentic reviews. Many services allow you to collect verified reviews, such as Trustpilot, Verified Reviews, etc.

The product pages must be able to answer the main questions that an Internet user may ask, the purchase must be as smooth as possible, with a minimum of clicks. To do this, you must be able to offer the right payment methods, but also the right delivery methods.

Choosing the right partner for managing your transactions

Even if it does not have an immediate impact on your SEO, choosing the right partner will allow you to offer a buying and selling experience that will retain your customers, whether they are buyers or sellers.

With Obvy, you benefit from an all-in-one solution including dozens of services like payment, delivery, dispute management and security, as well as all the administration services necessary for your growth.

This way, you can relieve yourself of all the complexities related to managing your transactions and can focus on improving and optimizing your platform in order to attract new customers.