Launching a business on any of the world’s best marketplaces is far from easy, especially if you are a beginner. The competition is enormous on a local and global scale, making things even more challenging.
However, it’s not so much about focusing on which platform you are going to start selling, but a lot more about how to attract customers from around the world. The answer for all marketplaces is the same – powerful SEO practices.
The primary reason why an SEO marketplace is essential for you to understand is that marketplaces rule the online world. Therefore, the best and only way to achieve better rankings on Google and other search engines is via search engine optimization.
And since this is a fact and not a question of whether we like it or not, let’s not waste time since your competitors are already doing the same on Amazon, Alibaba, Walmart, eBay, and other top-rated marketplaces.
So, here are the best SEO practices seen on the top-rated marketplace platforms worldwide.
Content Marketing Is A Priority
One of the best SEO practices seen on all top-rated marketplaces is making content marketing a priority. This aspect is used as one of the Amazon SEO best practices as well as on other marketplaces since it’s a crucial part of search engine optimization.
You must have relevant, unique, and high-quality content to reach your target audience at various customer stages.
Some of the most effective ways to use proper content marketing to improve your marketplace SEO include:
- Share articles related to particular topics via a content hub to help customers during their customer journey stages.
- Use SEO-friendly content on all your pages and keywords that will increase the level of relevance.
- Make product and service purchasing guides for your current and new buyers.
- Use videos and infographics to improve content marketing efforts and decrease the bounce rate.
- Share successful customer stories to attract more buyers and let them see how customers praise your services and products.
The same goes for Walmart SEO best practices and other platforms since there’s no success in SEO without excellent content marketing.
Breadcrumbs Optimization
The optimization of breadcrumbs is essential for SEO since they are site links that provide potential customers with a way to track how far they are from your homepage and where they are precisely at the moment.
Breadcrumbs improve user experience and make it easier for users to navigate through a store. Even more importantly, they encourage them to browse various sections and keep them engaged.
It’s one of the Alibaba SEO best practices since, using breadcrumbs, one can easily navigate the user from one page to another. If a potential buyer ends up on an About Us page, they still have a perception of where they are and can quickly go back to a previous page since they can see everything.
They also improve site ranking since they make Google and other search engines happy. Google uses breadcrumbs to categorize your content and even adds breadcrumbs to the result pages. In the SERPs, it also helps potential customers understand where that page is on your website, especially regarding sites with several state or local-level pages.
And most importantly, they help users stay on your site longer. The reason is that breadcrumbs are a navigational tool that makes the user feel on a journey while searching through your store, making the experience much more enjoyable.
Schema Markup
Another highly valuable and one of the eBay SEO best practices, but also Amazon SEO best practices is using schema markup. It is a language used by Google and other search engines to understand the info contained on a page.
In addition, it also helps improve the site indexing in the search results and provides marketplaces to display additional information about products and services through rich snippets. You have the advantage of showing aspects such as product details, reviews, ratings, and also breadcrumbs in the SERP by using schema markups.
Having a proper schema markup is essential for any marketplace since it improves product visibility in search results. One can use various schema types for a marketplace site, but the crucial one is the product structured data.
You can use product markup to display various product properties like:
- Brand Name
- Product Name
- Image
- Reviews
- Product Description
Another crucial reason using schema markups is one of the Amazon SEO best practices is because it helps you beat competitors by improving your products’ Click-Through-Rate.
Use Appropriate Sitemaps
In order to display current and potential customers with the latest product information, a marketplace website needs to update thousands of pages frequently.
Therefore, having a sitemap comes in handy since it provides proper indexing of your target landing site pages. This way, Google and other search engines will know which pages to index and how often this should take place.
You can use a service such as XML Sitemaps or even create a sitemap in a manual way. After doing so, you need to upload the sitemap to Google Search Console to make sure all your target landing pages are indexed and show information that’s updated in the SERPs.
You can perform this action by opening the Search Console and selecting your domain to submit a sitemap. You will be able to see your sitemap status and the entire number of discovered URLs.
Also, it’s valuable to mention that you should update your sitemap when you revise the content of existing URLs or when you add new URLs to your marketplace site.
Increase Customer Engagement with Reviews and Ratings
Another perfect example of Amazon SEO best practices is using reviews and ratings in order to increase customer engagement.
Why?
Because reviews and ratings encourage potential buyers to purchase a product much faster.
Amazon is also the perfect example of a marketplace where sites have ratings and reviews. You can easily find hundreds of Amazon product pages with reviews and ratings from thousands of customers, showing trustworthiness, relevance, and expertise.
Reviews and ratings make it much easier for customers to make that final purchasing decision since it boosts customer engagement and satisfaction. You can also send regular emails to buyers who have bought a product but didn’t bother to leave a review; make sure not to be too aggressive but pleasant.
In addition, it’s essential to make it easy for customers to leave ratings and reviews, so make sure to use various ways to encourage your buyers to rate and review your products.
And yes, this isn’t valuable just for people seeing how great your products are, but it’s also helpful for Google since it signals that your site is trustworthy. Therefore, remember to take adequate steps to attract buyers to leave rates and reviews on all your products.
Use SSL to Secure Your Site
SSL or Secure Sockets Layers is a security protocol that is more than important in marketplace sites since it creates an encrypted link between a web browser and a web server.
Using SSL isn’t just one of the Amazon SEO best practices but also one of the essential SEO practices for all marketplaces and websites. Once you secure your site with SSL, HTTPS will appear in the URL showing users that the connection is secure.
However, it’s also essential when it comes to SEO since Google uses HTTPS as a ranking signal. Therefore, keeping your marketplace safe by using SSL is more than necessary.
Furthermore, it prevents security breaches and keeps all the user data safe, so by using SSL, you are both keeping your users’ data safe and improving your SEO. Also, Google values safety significantly since it wants its users to be safe, so not having SSL can provoke rank dropping on search results, which would be devastating for your site.
Have A Fast-Loading and Responsive Site
And the last on the list, but equally essential Amazon SEO best practices, as well as used from all top-rated marketplaces, is having a fast-loading and responsive website.
Speed is critical when it comes to user experience since people simply don’t like slow sites. More than 70% of customers leave a site or don’t buy anything only because the site’s pages are loading slowly. Even more importantly, having a slow site leads to a significant drop in conversions.
Speed is also one of the crucial ranking factors for Google, and it concentrates on user experience metrics like bounce rate and website loading speed. Therefore, a much faster site on a marketplace can certainly bring much more customers and sales.
Use these tactics to improve your website speed:
- Use an excellent web hosting provider since hosting plays a crucial role in fast loading.
- Resize and compress all images on your store using free tools such as iLoveIMG to boost speed comprehensively.
- Have a responsive site since it’s much more mobile-friendly, and most buyers use smartphones instead of laptops or PCs.
- Reduce the number of external HTTP requests since a marketplace website has various components such as images, videos, JavaScript, and CSS.
- Use a Content Delivery Network because it will help serve your content from the user’s nearest location and cache content in multiple locations.
Remember, after implementing all of these best SEO practices seen on the top-rated marketplace platforms worldwide, it would be a shame not to achieve results only because your site is slow.
To Sum It All Up
If these are the Amazon SEO best practices as well as best SEO practices regarding other top-rated marketplaces such as Walmart, eBay, or Alibaba, then it’s more than evident that you must implement them immediately.
So, please don’t waste any more of your precious time and hire our agency to boost your site traffic and implement these SEO practices the best way possible with our expertise!