Andrew Allen

Co-founder

Andrew Allen

**This audit is perfect if you run a marketplace and wonder how to best optimise for SEO, as we focus on established sites like airbnb and eBay. If you’d like a FREE audit for your website then join our Facebook Group.**

Any marketplace founders in the group? Wonder what you can learn from marketplace giants like eBay and airbnb?

Well today we’ve got teaching startup marketplace CPDBee posted by founder Niall Alcock.

Learning SEO from airbnb and eBay

“Hey Niall Alcock

Thanks for submitting your site. I’ve had a look over and I wanted to give you some strategies – one strategy in particular – that marketplaces like eBay and Airbnb use to increase their SEO traffic.

So marketplaces like CPDBee usually have a drawback when it comes to SEO; dynamically generated results. So, when someone comes to your site and lots for a teacher you dynamically update the results they see based on the data they give you.

The problem with dynamic URLs for SEO

The marketplace provides users with the results, but updates ‘on the fly’. And the key bit here for SEO is that no new static page/URL is generated; rather the results are sorted.

This is a clean, fast and efficient solution for UX but harms SEO because you’re not giving search engines lots of different web pages, on their own static URL, that they can use in their search results.

Hope this makes sense so far! Here’s an example from CPDBee. When a user selects courses for ‘Leading CPD’ the page URL is:
https://cpdbee.com/find-providers/…
When they select secondary schools the URL is:
https://cpdbee.com/find-providers/…

The first bit is the same https://cpdbee.com/find-providers/ ands then you tell Google to ignore the last bit (using a ‘canonical tag’ – this is a special SEO technique when you can tell Google to ignore certain URL variations).

This means that Google will never see your range of suppliers that are specific for ‘Leading CPD’ in secondary schools. And if someone searches in Google for this then you won’t appear!

So what’s eBay’s solution?

To do what mammoth marketplaces like eBay and airbnb have done incredibly well; create separate static landing pages that Google can crawl and then show to it’s users.

Here’s a couple of examples…

eBay want to rank for many many terms, as their product range is so large, so they’ve created a range of static landing pages for specific categories of products. Here’s one for ‘vinyl records’ – https://www.ebay.co.uk/bhp/vinyl-albums

If you go to the homepage and then navigate manually to see all vinyl albums you’ll actually land on a completely different URL! So the above landing page is a page they have control over and can optimise for SEO and better conversions.

What about airbnb? They do the same.

So, if I search ‘airbnb Birmingham’ I see this page in Google – https://www.airbnb.co.uk/s/Birmingham–United-Kingdom

BUT if I login to airbnb and search for Birmingham locations look at the URL I end up on – https://www.airbnb.co.uk/s/Birmingham/all… (not quite as search engine friendly eh?!?!?!)

So both off these marketplaces have understood that if they want to drive traffic for all off the products/services/locations they operate within they need to create separate landing pages that were well optimised for the keywords they wanted to target.

This is a tactic any marketplace can use, so hopefully it’s something that could really help CPDBee too!” (Andrew Allen)

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