Marketplace owners make three SEO mistakes: building too much technical infrastructure before getting traffic, relying on AI-generated content without human editing, and killing SEO programs too early when conversion rates look weak. Start small with 20-50 manually built pages, heavily edit any programmatic content, and stick with it long enough to see real gains.
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What are some of the other kind of common mistakes that you're seeing marketplaces make when it comes to, you know, implementing some of these SEO strategies?
Yeah, mistake one is overscoping what you need to build. So I mentioned before, if you're starting out, you don't have to create a whole backend to create a million category pages. You could just manually create 20 of them in Webflow. So we use Webflow a lot. You can actually build stuff pretty quickly in Webflow, even search pages, browse pages you can build in Webflow. So overscoping it and having a really elaborate backend, make 20 pages because you don't know how much traffic you're going to get. You might not have enough authority. So if you don't know, don't build the whole thing, build 20 pages, launch them, and then if they get traffic, then build the other 2,000 and, you know, build an elaborate backend. Building 20 pages is, you know, very inexpensive. So start with a low scope thing to get signal and then Decide to invest more after you've proven that those 20 or those 50 are actually performing. So that's mistake 1. Mistake 2 is over-indexing on, quote, programmatic and AI content. So programmatic, you know, again, in the Thumbtack example, we look at Canva and they don't really have much content on their page and they're auto-generating all these and they're working like Zapier, Sheets plus Gmail. Works really well. It's not going to work for most people because the on-page content is not optimized enough and you don't have enough authority to get away with not having a lot of on-page content. So for a thumbtack, yes, go ahead and manually write snippets and that will scale. Don't worry about scaling to millions of pages. You don't need millions of pages. So, and then AI content, AI content can work, but you can't just say write an entire page and it's gonna work well. You need to heavily configure the AI with like unique metadata, Or a human editing pass at the end so that it's not just a straight ChatGPT response. And then the third is shutting the program off. You've got a bunch of visits and they're not converting and assuming that you can, like, it's, you know, a common thing is it's 0.001% and if it went up 50%, it would be 0.0015%, which is zero. So if you do conversion optimization, it's not 50% greater than 0.001%. It's like 0.001% to 1%.
