Marketplaces and eCommerce sites that have lists of items / products face unique SEO challenges. For the three years we’ve been running Binpress, organic search has been our number one source of traffic, and we had to learn some lessons the hard way.
Before we go over a few of the common SEO challenges marketplaces have, here are some definitions of terms I use in the article, for clarity:
Marketplace – A site listing products / services / offerings provided by users of the site rather than the site administrators. Examples of marketplaces include eBay, Airbnb, oDesk, CreativeMarket, and so forth. In this article, I will focus on marketplaces with long-lived listings instead of listings that expire quickly (such as Craigslist), though some of the advice below can be applied to both.
Products – For conciseness, I’m using “products” to refer to the items listed on the marketplace, whether those are actual products, services, offerings, or anything else.
Listing Pages and Product Pages are not Content Oriented
Google’s official line (I’ll concentrate on Google, as they are the dominant engine) is that you should focus on creating great content. If you create great content, people will link to it, Google will notice it, and traffic will flow from the mountain tops.
While it might be as simple as that for straight up-content pages (such as this blog, for instance), listing pages and eCommerce product pages are a different species.
