← Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
How To Win At Marketplace SEO With Advanced Tactics
00:28:30
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- [00:00]
Tyson Stockton
The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast. A member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts. Sit back, relax, and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search podcast, Tyson Stockton.
- [00:43]
Hey, what's going on? My name is tyson from Previsible I.O. and joining me today is Kristen Bauer, who is an independent SEO consultant at Bauer Growth Consulting. Bower Growth Consulting provides tailored services to help companies reach their full potential. With a focus on innovative strategies and personalized approaches, the company assists clients in achieving sustainable growth and success. Today, Kristen and I are going to be discussing how to win at Marketplace SEO with advanced tactics. And with that, here's my conversation with Kristen Bauer, independent SEO Consultant at Bower Growth Consulting. Kristen, welcome to the Voice of Search.
- [01:22]
Kristen Bauer
Hey Tyson, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to join today.
- [01:26]
Tyson Stockton
Yeah, so we're talking kind of marketplaces in this episode and maybe just to kind of level set with like the listeners, probably a little more straightforward, but kind of just reconfirm with us like what's our, what's our definition of marketplace in the sense that we're talking about?
- [01:44]
Kristen Bauer
Yes, with marketplaces, that is a particular type of brand and website that from an SEO perspective has a unique set of pages and inventory and skills scale. That marketplace might be something from a real estate website or childcare marketplace or healthcare marketplace or an automotive marketplace. And so I think of marketplaces as any type of brand or website that has a collection of, we say listings, profiles, et cetera, collection of individual resources across a scaled location like a country or or around product types. And that's what I would consider marketplace websites, they can be anywhere from maybe 10,000 pages to 100 million pages in terms of what could be relevant indexable content for users.
- [02:39]
Tyson Stockton
And with that I'm assuming too we're talking then likelihood of very high volume of URLs. So these are going to be enterprise type websites, correct?
- [02:51]
Kristen Bauer
Correct. With marketplaces they can range in terms of the size just depending, I think on levels of inventory, type of inventory. When I say inventory, that could be anything. That could be, you know, a child care provider or real estate listing. And so that can really vary in terms of marketplace, it could also be a marketplace like Etsy or ebay, where you have individual products that are being listed as well. And so that scale can really vary depending on the product or services being offered. But with marketplace SEO, it's all about scale, and that scale really needs to support that content, and technical SEO strategy needs to lean into that scale and help support that scale, regardless if it's a site of 10,000 pages or if it's a site of 100 million pages. So everything within your SEO practice for marketplaces needs to lean into that scale and help support the scaled content. Content in terms of sheer number of pages as well as the type of content you're also providing on those pages as well.
- [04:02]
Tyson Stockton
And like within the the type of content for it, like what guidance or what advice would you have for kind of driving that? I assume it's going to be pretty dependent on like the type of marketplace that you're dealing with, correct?
- [04:17]
Kristen Bauer
Definitely. And so in terms of that content approach, I like to break down the content in a few different capac. You have your page types and so the actual type of content that you'll be providing, breaking that down into specific templates, like you might have your category, might have category refinements or subcategory pages filters, and then you might also have your individual, where I say profile pages or listing pages or product pages. And then you also have other supporting page types too. And that could be hitting any kind of specific head terms, resources, calculators, anything that might be relevant but isn't necessarily scale content. But when we think about that marketplace, the content types, really building out those category infrastructures, and then also the individual, I'll just call them like listings or profile or product page types as well. And so each one of those pages needs to have its own specific content plan. And that's typically how I like to approach it, is let's say we have a category page that needs to have its own specific content plan in terms of page template and structure. That URL, title, tag, metadata, all those elements need to be aligned. And then you need to decide what type of content to actually provide on that page. And then on category pages, you need to actually outline, okay, what does the listing details look like, and are you pulling any information in from those types of pages as well? Then you have the individual listing pages, and that needs to have its own separate content strategy as well in terms of how detailed you want to get in terms of any description, product information, listing information, and then also kind of backtracking from there, in terms of what other types of content, if you want to pull in Other related content FAQs, anything that would help support freshness, anything have you like that. So that's kind of a loaded, I'd say a big mix bag of how to approach content across different page types. But really the fundamental pages to me for marketplaces would be categories, refinements, and then individual listing pages. And from the category and refinement perspective, understanding how to build that out is going to help support that scale that you're looking at for marketplace strategy. So let's say you have a childcare marketplace you want to have by location, you want to have categories by location. So where I live, like Ben Door, Oregon childcare, you might have daycare, you might have infant daycare, you might have weekend childcare, toddler daycare, drop in daycare, et cetera. So there might be different permutations that you want to build out and scale across each location or each kind of product theme or type as well. I know I just threw a lot at you with that answer.
- [07:22]
Tyson Stockton
No, no, no. I mean it's, I think it's fair with. It was a pretty open ended question. But I think like within that you hit on I think several like key kind of like themes as well. So obviously the specific direction you're giving of having that kind of page template approach makes total sense. And within the marketplace you have a variety, I think of sources or like databases of information that you also kind of touched on as far as what's fueling this kind of like programmatic content approach by page type. But I think like an interesting kind of like theme on that is you're hitting on the importance of thinking in a perspective of page templates rather than one off. So it's like you're thinking in scale, you're already segmenting out like what could be the fuel or the sources to then generate these type of content elements at scale. But we're also kind of like diving down into like the content area. And so maybe before we get too far down the rabbit hole, I want to kind of like take a little bit of a step back and how are you thinking about this topic though as far as like we're grounding the conversation within the marketplaces, but then we're kind of leaning into these advanced tactics. And I already made the assumption of content being kind of one of them. But what are some of the other kind of tactics that you're thinking of that are successful in these types of websites?
- [08:52]
Kristen Bauer
So in terms of other tactics Besides content, I would really lean into the technical aspect. And so you might have internal linking networks, your inventory management, your indexation management, those are all really crucial areas to focus on in terms of SEO strategy and management for marketplaces. Internal linking is by far one of my most favorite SEO tactics to leverage for marketplace strategy. And with internal linking, there are so many different ways you can slice and dice the type of links you're providing, where they're being surfaced to users, to search engines and how they're loading. And so internal linking is a huge portion of what I would consider a successful marketplace SEO strategy. And happy to dig into that further as well. Inventory management, really, really important as well, because marketplaces at the core are really about trying to surface multiple results or listings or products or profiles. They're basically multiple results to users. So there's this collection of these individual results, and managing that inventory for those individual result pages can be really challenging. Depending on the cadence of turnover across the inventory, you might have legal requirements as well. I've worked with brands that have different legal requirements. Let's say for real estate in Canada versus the US versus Europe. That is something that has to be considered as well. You might want to apply noindex or redirect or keep evergreen landing pages and URLs. I'm a big fan of evergreen landing pages and URLs, especially in real estate, or if you know that inventory is coming back or that specific item. And in terms of that inventory management, I think it's really a case by case basis on how you need to manage that in terms of turnover, like I said, legal requirements and then also availability. So is it coming back? Is it temporarily out of stock, things like that, is it sold, et cetera. And then that indexation management component is really part of that cornerstone of that technical SEO strategy, where the indexation management is really how you're trying to get all your content indexed, where you might have, like we said, 10,000 pages or 100 million pages. And so that indexation management is really important to make sure Google's getting the right directives on what to actually surface in search results. And so I think, for example, a big issue I see with a lot of marketplace brands struggle with category pages that might have few results or no results that can be really cyclical, like a category page that has one result today might have 10 results or 20 results tomorrow, or it might have zero results the next week. And so that can really vary quickly depending on product or inventory lifecycles and availability. And so for that Instance, I know a lot of folks in the SEO industry might just say okay, let's no index those pages. I personally am not a fan of that because I think it can be really hard to get pages re indexed at that large marketplace scale once Google discovers that no index. And so there are ways to go around that. But I do think making sure that you have a strategy in place for, for that kind of that category inventory life cycle can be really helpful. And then also making sure you're managing your data quality around that indexation management. I've worked with a lot of brands that might have localized inventory and landing pages and data issues can sneak in so easily and cause duplication. They can cause low quality issues with content and then this can just be exacerbated. Let's say if you have real estate across the whole country of the United States or Canada and you have different and inaccurate geography permutations, that can be a major issue. And so that data management really should be tied in with that indexation management protocol and strategy. So those would be kind of my core technical items. I would focus on the internal linking, the inventory management, indexation management.
- [13:36]
Tyson Stockton
You hit on a couple of my favorites there. And I feel like it spans beyond just the marketplaces, but more of just enterprise websites. But like internal linking 100%. There's so many levers you can pull with link packs and the algorithms going into those. But I'd like to go a little bit deeper on the indexation management because I agree this is one of my favorite typical initiative areas of an enterprise website. You mentioned though, having that preference of not wanting to de index those pages because of challenges getting them back in. Like I'd like to dig a little deep in that and maybe like to level set with like the listeners. I think like a common practice would be hey, the low value like pages that I'm getting, you know, low inventory on, maybe it's a combination of facets that then result in zero results based on the inventory to de index those pages. So a search engine is not spending, you're not wasting kind of crawl budget on it. I'd like to hear a little bit more on your kind of perspective of this and like maybe kind of you can elaborate on some of those challenges that could arise from that re indexation of the URLs.
- [14:55]
Kristen Bauer
Yeah, definitely. And I know that that argument that a lot of SEOs do make there is trying to preserve crawl budget and most of us are well aware of this. But by using a noindex in those indexation Directives that doesn't prevent crawling. I mean technically Google has said that, oh, it should deprioritize a noindex page from its crawl. I actually have not seen that in the wild. So if you have or anyone else has, I would love to talk about. And so with the indexation piece, having a no index on a page that might have a variable life cycle of content or inventory that can be confusing to Google. Like let's say we talk about one week you have a no index, next week you don't. Google might not crawl that page within a week if you have 100 million pages that you want indexed and so they might not see that. Also, it's my belief based on what I've seen in the past, that Google can hang on to those signals as well. And with the no index tag, it can be really hard just to get a page re indexed even if it has been crawled successfully. That's something I've seen with bad migrations, accidental noindex tag being added on. You really have to be, I'd say, proactive at trying to get Google to crawl those pages quickly and repeatedly and get them in front of Google multiple places. And so let's say you do employ that dynamic index no index directive. That might be something where if it is indexed one week, then you have specific internal linking networks you push those pages into, you have a separate dedicated XML sitemap and RSS feed you push those pages into. So there would be ways to surface those pages, I think more aggressively to Google to try to push to get them indexed. Not being said. I just think from a historical perspective, having that noindex tag on there might provide a hint that that page just may not always be as high quality and indexable. And so I prefer to have that index persist. You know, if you want to have an indexation directive persist, knowing that that inventory might change if it's really not relevant, you don't want that page index. That inventory is never coming back. That's another discussion. But if it's a cyclical inventory management for a specific category page we're talking about, I think there's other ways to improve that page. Let's say you don't have inventory, you need to beef up the content, you add more information links to redirect users to other pages with inventory or locations or profiles, you might drop that specific page out of internal linking networks. And so what I would do instead of adding a noindex, you just drop it out of the internal linking network so you're not Promoting it to be crawled more quickly. You might want to drop it from XML sitemaps or have a separate XML site map to monitor indexation. And so I do think there's ways to manage that thoughtfully. It's always helpful to check what's also being served in search results as this is something I do with my marketplace clients that have this cyclical inventory, I guess experience. Where are other competitors keeping their pages indexed even when they don't have inventory? And or do you have related or nearby inventory or similar products or anything that you can pull in to help redirect the users and still maintain that integrity of user experience. And so that might be someone landing on a page. For example, I'm searching for Bend homes for sale with a mountain view and a three car garage. You know there might be, well there's, you know, knowing Ben, there's a lot of inventory with that right now, but maybe there, there's only one result. I still want to see it as a user or I want to see other similar results. Can you show me that? To really kind of continue my experience or search throughout that marketplace.
- [19:10]
Tyson Stockton
Got it. I love that you made that distinction too of there is a difference between not being indexed and being crawled because I think that is a very good distinction in the overall why you would make certain kind of efforts in these scenarios. Because I think too maybe an element that really differentiates. I guess in some ways I'm already disagreeing with myself in some regard to this. But like so a lot of times like you could have enterprise website, millions, hundreds of millions of pages and it's going to be relatively like more kind of like stagnant. And then you could have other areas in the marketplace where you have yeah, a lot of stagnant pages in the sense of like the categories are the facet combinations. But obviously inventory is going to be coming and going like quite rapidly with like this. Like do you have a preference or are there any guiding elements that you could share with the listeners that would help kind of guide you in your prioritization of the indexation health of a site? And so like are you looking at more of where Google's spending most of its time and then addressing those areas that maybe are at not in the same priority that you would set to it or what's kind of zeroing you in on the parts of the website to address more aggressively?
- [20:45]
Kristen Bauer
That's a great question. And where I would start, to be honest would be the pages that we collectively as the brand want index and that we see are Valuable and then cross reference that on where Google is spending their time. And so let's say you have a core set of page types that you are launching or pushing, or that we know are really important, or a geography that's being pushed or specific product themes or topics that are being pushed. I would dive in deep to that category and say, okay, hey, here are all the different variations within that specific category that we as a brand want indexed. And let's say, can we get data on when has Google last crawled these pages? Are they all indexed and how to diagnose that? You can dig into crawl reports. Obviously if you have your own crawl and server log data, that's always the best. You can still use Google's GSC crawl stats as well. Even though that is kind of a slice of that data, it does give you some visibility into what's being crawled, what's not. And then also from that indexation monitoring perspective, I would suggest setting up a separate XML sitemap to more closely monitor indexation. That's a really easy way to say, okay, let's say we want to focus on this specific set of pages, create an XML sitemap on that, and then you can start to collect and see those results based on what's actually being indexed and what's not. And then from there kind of digging into what are the differences across those pages. Let's say the pages that are indexed, do they have more inbound internal links? Do they have more inventory? Are they like larger populations? An automotive marketplace I worked with last year, one thing that we noticed that Google wasn't indexing the super small cities in terms of any kind of make model variations for cars. Let's say you have like used, you know, Toyota Tacoma and XYZ Town. Those really, really small towns were taking up the bulk of Google's crawl, but not necessarily indexed consistently. And just because Google does crawl a page doesn't mean it's going to index it. We all know those discovered or crawled, but not index reports. I feel like that's where pages go to die basically. And so you want to avoid that. That being said, one thing we noticed that cities with a population under 2,000 or less, the nearby, closest, nearby larger city, we call it quote unquote, parent city. That's just how we call it in this project was actually the result being served in most instances. And so what we did was redirect up those really small geographies to that kind of nearest, closest geography that was let's say above 2,000 population or 10,000 population. I can't remember the threshold that we use and that did promote better crawl and ranking and consistent data like that one level up in terms of pages. And so I know I'm kind of going on a tangent here, but that could be leaning into how you specifically diagnose issues across a category that you want indexed, that you might be having challenges getting indexed across search.
- [24:29]
Tyson Stockton
It's a great point. I mean, minimal tangent, but I think also an element that you brought in there is you can also in these conversations around especially indexation, you're looking at it from a very broad scale and so you're not able to say like page by page and pulling in additional external data sets, whether it's population of locations kind of depends, I suppose on like the type of marketplace that it is, but more of that concept of pulling in external data sources to also be an input into what guides you of what's good, what's bad, what do you want to prioritize, I think is super, super helpful when you're operating at this level of scale. As a final kind of question before we close out the episode, is there anything else about marketplaces that really change your focus, your strategy from a more traditional E commerce site?
- [25:31]
Kristen Bauer
So in terms of strategy with marketplaces that shift, I think a lot of freshness indicators I've seen can be very helpful with marketplaces. And so making sure you have freshness indicators in your content. So that might be your last updated dates, last added dates, or if there's anything that you can do to indicate to Google, hey, this content is fresh, it's up to date. And then also promoting that fresh content via, like I said, separate RSS fees, XML site maps, internal linking network. So having fresh content and that freshness can be really effective and a competitive advantage if you can nail that first before your competitors as well. Not something that I do think is helpful to illustrate throughout page content and tagging and other technical networks as well. And that's not necessarily something that is as prevalent for E commerce. You might have a product that you know varies in terms of availability, but it's not like that product is on the market for a day and then it's gone. And so the freshness indicators I think are really important to marketplace.
- [26:44]
Tyson Stockton
Excellent. That's a perfect tip and differentiator. But with that, that also wraps up this episode of the Voice of Surge podcast. Thanks again to Christian Bauer for taking the time to jump on and speak with us. And tomorrow we're going to be continuing the conversation and we're going to discuss SEO tactics that drive growth and results. If you can't wait until the next episode and you'd like to learn more about Kristen, you can find a link to her LinkedIn profile in her show notes. Or you can go on over and contact her on X, where her handle is Hristenbauer, and visit her company's website@kristenbauer.com.
- [27:26]
Okay, thanks to Tyson Stockton, our guest host. If you'd like to get in touch with Tyson, you could find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes. You can contact him on Twitter where his handle is TysonStockton. Or if your team is interested in SEO consulting or organizational education, you can always head to their company's website, which is Previsible IO that's P R E V I S I B L E I O Just one more link in our show notes I'd like to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to Voices of Sir, where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, and you can even send us your topic suggestions or your marketing questions, which we'll answer live on our show. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is voicesofsearch on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or you can contact me directly. My handle is Ben Jayshaph B E N J S H A P and if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed, we're going to publish an episode every day during the work week. So hit that subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today. But until next time, remember, the answers are always in the data.