|SEO| SEO Optimization of a service marketplace, the leading technique for high visibility

In this article, you will find all the basics of SEO optimization to boost the reputation of your marketplace!

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization, from its acronym SEO or natural referencing, means all the techniques used in order to improve the position of a website during a search. It is therefore important to use the best levers so that the user is directly led to you, to your marketplace of services. The objective: the first position on the search results!

When the first search engines were created in the 90’s, SEO was only about the link between words on the Internet and a search. It was at this time that users understood that if they insert keywords in their content, their place in the ranking increases. So was born the “black-hat” technique consisting in filling a content with a lot of keywords.

At that time, it worked but today, after the various updates of Google and a complexification of SEO, the algorithm no longer accepts keywords too recurrent.

However, the objective is still the same whether it was in the 90’s or today: to appear at the top of the searches to increase the number of views on a website and generate more revenue. This is even more important in the field of marketplaces, because it is through the traffic generated on the platform that the chances of making sales or reservations increase.

The first SEO techniques could be observed around 1993, when six American students decided to create a search engine called “Architext”. This engine was based, for the referencing of Internet pages, by the keywords detected in them. The SEO adventure was thus launched! The search engines multiplied and so did the SEO techniques.

Techniques to optimize your SEO

There are many techniques, all more interesting than the others, to improve its SEO. Let’s see the main ones in detail here:

• The heading, which mainly represents the titles or even the subtitles of a content. There are six, from H1 to H6: H1 being the most important and H6 the least. The interest of these headings is that the search engine better detects the subject treated in a paragraph or even in a content in general. It is therefore essential to add them throughout the writing of its content and to choose them intelligently. According to the keywords you have chosen beforehand, don’t forget to add them to your Hn, because that’s how the search engine qualifies you as an expert on the subject! It will therefore make you rise in the ranking of results. The keywords present in headings have more weight than a keyword simply introduced in a paragraph.

• The number of words in a content, because indeed, writing a content of 100 words will not be enough to optimize your SEO. However, you should not focus on the quantity and produce a very long content if it is not qualitative and well structured! According to a Semrush study, 88% of the 22,000 articles analyzed that rank on the first page of Google searches are composed of at least 600 words. This shows that producing long content is not necessarily the solution and that it is even more important to focus on what you write.

• The Meta, divided into meta title and meta description. These are what you see when you do a search on Google: often the name of a page or a site, and a description of what you can find there. It is the first thing your potential customers see, so it is essential not to neglect them. Inserting your keyword is one of the first things to do to impact your SEO, in a good way. Last tips: keep the description between 140 and 160 characters, and do not use the same meta for several pages!

• Internal linking, which allows you to guide your users to other important pages of your site, which you also want to increase in searches. The more logical internal links you make between your pages, the more Google will increase your brand awareness. This is called PageRank, where a score from 0 to 10 is given to judge the link in your page and thus overall improve your SEO.

• You can also set up a Content Hub, which is where all this content is grouped together on one platform. This is a place where it is also important to apply your keyword strategy so that the Content Hub is well referenced. This allows you to easily find all your content when you need it.

• Fight for the authority of your domain: Google gives you a trust rating from 0 to 100 and this is what will impact your ranking during an Internet search. How to improve the authority of your domain? Nothing could be simpler, you have to apply correctly all the above mentioned techniques, and your pages should reach the top 3 without worries!

• Finally, don’t hesitate to add backlinks to your content. In other words, external links that lead to other pages outside your site or inside your marketplace. They will increase the reputation of your page depending on the relevance of these backlinks but also that of the destination page.

In summary, improving your SEO is not an easy task. It is a daily work and that extends over the long term to get results. If you apply all the points mentioned above, your pages will eventually reach the top!

Google updates

One of the reasons why optimizing your SEO is a long-term and never-ending job is that it is changeable. Indeed, when Google makes updates to its algorithm, it can affect the SEO and the way pages are referenced. So it’s important to keep up to date on what’s new, because even though it usually doesn’t have a big impact, you could see your SEO drop.

The updates of the Google algorithm are quite recurrent but never fixed. Over the course of a year it is possible to have a dozen or even fifty. The updates of the algorithm have taken place since 1998 until today, so we count a lot of them! To stay informed as soon as a new one is coming, we advise you to follow Matt Cutt on social networks, precisely on Twitter, which informs its community as soon as an SEO update is planned by Google.

Next step: the Google Page Experience, the new algorithm update scheduled for May 2021. The user experience will therefore be included in the criteria for a good SEO. Three criteria will be taken into account to measure this new SEO and adapt the rankings:

• The LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): which calculates the loading time of the largest content of a page.

• The FID (First Input Delay): the time that the user takes from his arrival on the page until his first interaction with it. A loading speed is therefore important.

• The CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): which calculates the loading time of the elements on a page and the possible shift that it can produce. It still allows to measure the possible interactions between the user and the page.

So continue to focus on the quality of your content, which remains the first element taken into account, but don’t forget to focus on your user experience in the process!

The importance of SEO for a service marketplace

If you’ve made it this far, you’ve probably figured out that keywords are a central element in content creation and SEO. However, it’s important to think carefully about this strategy because filling your content with lots of keywords won’t necessarily improve your SEO.

If you over-optimize your text, Google will not take your efforts into account and will not rank you properly because it will feel that you are trying to play him. Finally, it is important to focus on a specific keyword per page, because it is complicated to rank correctly on several keywords via a single content.

As an operator of any type of marketplace, your goal is simple: to attract as many sellers and buyers as possible to your platform. SEO is therefore not only beneficial for you but also for the sellers on your platform. If your marketplace does not have much visibility and does not appear in the first search results, a seller will prefer to offer his services on another marketplace. It is therefore necessary to offer him the best ranking if you want him to stay on your platform to deliver his services.

SEO is in a way, an almost “free” user acquisition. By adding only specific words in your content, you offer the highest visibility to your marketplace. But it is obviously not totally free, because you need to use software that allows you to know what are the best words and if your content is of quality.

For this, we recommend Google Ads to define your most relevant keywords and Semrush to measure the SEO of your platform, check the quality of your content and much more thanks to its many features.

In conclusion, SEO is a very important technique when creating a service marketplace, and it should be taken seriously. Thanks to SEO, you offer unprecedented visibility to your marketplace on the Internet and knowing that this is where users will find you, you need to continuously improve it. Now that you have all the keys, boost your SEO and lead your marketplace to success!