From eBay to Amazon to Etsy, the rise of online marketplaces in the last few decades has reshaped the e-commerce landscape, with U.S. consumer spending expected to hit $468.33 billion in 2024. Given their convenience, it’s no wonder. But beyond giving users the ability to shop from anywhere and at any time, these platforms also dominate because of their strategic approach to programmatic SEO (pSEO). 

Thanks to pSEO, online marketplaces can generate hundreds of optimized category and subcategory pages from individual product listings. It’s a clever strategy that creates a seamless browsing experience for users while also boosting products’ search visibility. Below, we tackle the details behind how this strategy works and all the steps to executing it. 

How marketplaces leverage programmatic SEO

Imagine the classic online marketplace—Etsy, for example.

Thousands of independent sellers list items for sale on Etsy, providing details like the item’s price, size, materials, and so on. The structured data included in these product listings provide the basis for Etsy’s pSEO engine to then automatically generate broader category pages like “Clothing” and “Pet Supplies.” It even allows for more specific subcategories like “Gender-Neutral Adult Clothing” and “Pet Furniture.”

These templated pages, in turn, rank for long-tail keywords like “gender neutral sweaters” and “dog cage stand”—keywords that Etsy might not have otherwise captured without these programmatic category pages.

Since this strategy relies on aggregating data provided by platform vendors, the marketplace approach to pSEO resembles the user-generated content (UGC) tactic used by sites like Pinterest and G2. Rather than manually optimizing their sites for long-tail phrases, marketplaces can instead rely on their sellers to create relevant content. 

Besides its SEO benefits, the marketplace strategy also enhances the user experience for both buyers and sellers. Buyers can more easily find what they’re looking for, and sellers can rest easy knowing their listings are organized for optimal visibility.

Naturally, the best candidates for this strategy are two-sided marketplaces where sellers create their own product listings. In this model, vendors often optimize their listings to increase their visibility within the platform, feeding valuable data into the pSEO engine. 

This strategy doesn’t only apply to traditional e-commerce marketplaces that sell physical goods, though. It can also work for job boards, freelance matching sites, and ride-share platforms. So long as one party creates listings for another to browse and choose from, the marketplace pSEO strategy can be applied. 

Examples of marketplace pSEO in action

Poshmark

According to Ahrefs, the fashion and home goods resale platform Poshmark captures more than 2.7 million organic visitors per month. The vast majority of its 2.5+ million pages are product listings, but they’re organized categorically so that users can easily browse by gender, item type, and brand.

 The /category/ subfolder includes high-level product categories like “Women” (/Women), “Men” (/Men), and “Electronics” (/Electronics), which form the top of a content hierarchy with even more niche subcategories. Think “Women’s Asymmetrical Dresses” (/Women-Dresses-Asymmetrical) and “Kids’ Halloween Costumes” (/Kids-Costumes-Halloween). 

Alternatively, users can also browse Poshmark’s listings by brand, using the simple poshmark.com/brand/[brand] URL structure. As with the product categories, these also break down into more specific subcategories like “Nike Men” (/brand/Nike-Men) or “West Elm Home Decor” (brand/West_Elm-Home).

You can get a sense of all the category and subcategory options by taking a look at Poshmark’s comprehensive navigation menu. 

The straightforward URL structures provide clear pathways for Google to index Poshmark’s category and subcategory pages. As a result, Poshmark ranks for more than 4.4 million keywords, including highly specific phrases like “hermes womens loafers” and “louis vuitton men slides.”

Goldbelly

Foodies’ beloved marketplace Goldbelly similarly leverages programmatic SEO for its curated gourmet food delivery services. Its nearly 12,000 listings, which include both restaurants and dishes, are organized according to a variety of high-level categories like restaurant type, location, and food. Here are a few examples:

• Restaurant type: goldbelly.com/restaurants/categories/bakeries

• Location: goldbelly.com/regions/northeast

• Food: goldbelly.com/foods/burgers-and-hotdogs 

Goldbelly’s individual listings feed into these categories, helping the pages rank for niche search queries. For instance, Goldbelly’s cake category page (/foods/cake) ranks for more than 1,000 keywords, including long-tail terms like “luxury cakes delivered” and “sponge cake delivery.”

Goldbelly also curates even more specific product categories in a /collections subfolder to capture long-tail phrases like “gluten free delivery” (/collections/gluten-free) and “ship thanksgiving dinner” (/collections/thanksgiving-dinner). Doing so lets Goldbelly take advantage of its seller-provided listings and capitalize on new and seasonal trends in the food scene. 

Swappa

The peer-to-peer marketplace Swappa lets users buy and sell used tech, making it ripe for generating hundreds of product category pages—both on the buy and sell side. 

Compared to Poshmark and Etsy, where sellers have more creative freedom to write custom product descriptions, Swappa’s listings (/listings) are more standardized. Sellers need only find their item in the Swappa catalog, fill out a one-page listing form, and then upload photos to get their products live on the marketplace. 

Despite this, Swappa still leverages pSEO by automatically generating category pages for different types of items, like phones, laptops, and tablets. Since the items sold on Swappa are more technical, the category pages feature informational sections comparing products to similar models—all programmatically created. 

Take a look at its Apple iPhone 13 page for an example. 

These information sections actually link to another high-level programmatic template, Swappa’s “guide” pages (/guide) that provide greater product details. Taking pSEO one step further, the guide pages break down into even more detailed subpages, like so:

• swappa.com/guide/apple-iphone-13/

• swappa.com/guide/apple-iphone-13/specs

• swappa.com/guide/apple-iphone-13/compare

• swappa.com/guide/apple-iphone-13/colors

As a result, Swappa ranks for over 307,000 keywords. Its broad buy and sell category pages rank for long-tail terms like “buy used iphone 13” and “sell oculus quest 2” while its guide pages capture other highly specific phrases like “how much storage does the iphone 13 have.” 

What makes pSEO for marketplaces so effective?

1. Scalability and automation: Marketplaces contain vast amounts of user-generated content, all thanks to the sellers listing items on them. By pulling data from the product listings, pSEO automates the creation of hundreds—even thousands—of optimized pages.

2. Long-tail keyword dominance: Since sellers create detail-rich listings based on buyer demand, they naturally feed into a pSEO engine that creates pages optimized for long-tail keywords. For Poshmark, that means brand-specific phrases like “tommy bahama kids shoes,” while for Goldbelly, that includes food- and location-specific terms like “nyc bagel delivery.” 

3. Improved user experience: By organizing their content into structured, easy-to-navigate categories, marketplaces enhance their usability. Users can more easily find what they’re looking for, as opposed to sifting through thousands of disorganized listings. This also establishes a clean content hierarchy and SEO-friendly site structure.

4. Up-to-date content: As new listings are continuously added and removed from a marketplace, pSEO automatically keeps their related category pages fresh. Users see only active listings, helping contribute to the marketplace’s content freshness. This can mean improved search performance as well as a better user experience all around.

Steps to build an effective marketplace pSEO engine

Step 1: Identify key product or service categories

Begin by identifying the most important product or service categories in your marketplace. This will be specific to your domain. For instance, a jewelry marketplace may identify different types of jewelry, e.g., “rings,” “bracelets,” and “necklaces,” as its main categories.

Consider using a keyword research tool like Ahrefs or Semrush to validate that search volume exists for the categories you’ve identified, both for head terms and long-tail keywords. You could even build a diagram or spreadsheet to map out possible categories and subcategories. In the jewelry example, possible subcategories under the broader “rings” category could include “engagement rings” and “wedding rings.”  

Step 2: Create a page template using product data

Look to your marketplace’s listings to build a standardized template for your category and subcategory pages. Important pieces of information will vary depending on your domain but could include:

• Product name

• Price range

• Location

• Product attributes (e.g., material, color)

Organize and structure the data into a standardized format—one that’s optimized for search with unique meta titles, descriptions, and headings based on the available data. 

Step 3: Generate pages for each category and subcategory

Now that you’ve created your template, you can create your category and subcategory pages programmatically by pulling combinations of products or services based on different filters, e.g., “diamond engagement rings,” “emerald stud earrings.” This way, your marketplace will cover every relevant user query, no matter how niche. 

This step can be done in two ways:

• Use a programmatic SEO SaaS platform like daydream. Tools like daydream can help create your page template, pull in data from various sources (both internal and external), and generate pages at scale, which can then be directly deployed to your CMS.

• Leverage internal engineering resources. Alternatively, you can turn this task over to your internal engineering team. However, since this option relies on manual effort, it tends to be slower and more expensive than the former route.

Step 4: Track and optimize performance

As with any SEO strategy, keep a steady pulse on your marketplace’s analytics to track how your programmatically generated pages perform. Keep an eye on metrics like organic traffic, conversion rate, and keyword rankings. 

Underperforming pages may require further tweaks and optimization, like adding more relevant filters and product tags. Potential fixes might even be needed for the marketplace interface, like modifying your navigation menu to display the major category and subcategory pages more prominently.

In addition, you may want to regularly refresh category pages with the latest product data, seasonal trends, or high-demand services. Also consider using customer insights to create new product categories or filters where there’s relevant interest. For instance:

• Poshmark regularly adds brand pages as new clothing brands come into vogue. According to the Wayback Machine, Poshmark’s Louis Vuitton category page has been around since 2013, while the more recent Vuori category page went live in 2020. 

• Goldbelly swaps out categories in its navigation menu based on the time of year. A “4th of July” collection of foods appeared over the summer but by fall, was replaced with a link to the “Jewish Holidays” collection.

Level up your marketplace with daydream

The marketplace approach to programmatic SEO succeeds because it capitalizes on seller-generated content to further scale content creation and pinpoint buyers’ exact interests. 

Marketplaces not yet leveraging pSEO have a lot of untapped potential—which daydream is happy to help transform into meaningful results. Our SaaS platform supports some of the fastest-growing startups in accelerating their organic growth through AI-driven pSEO. 

If you’re ready to unlock your marketplace’s SEO potential, email us at thenukak@withdaydream.com.