Ethan Smith advises finding five marketplace sites with proven traffic growth, contacting their SEO professionals directly, and asking specific questions about what actually worked. Skip generic blog posts and intuition. Test the tactics that won.
Chapters
One last question for, usually it's part of my kind of parting question, which is, you know, if you could go right back to before you entered the world of marketplaces, you know, what you would tell yourself about them. But I guess here, you know, if we kind of, you know, slightly reframe that to SEO, you know, what would you tell yourself about SEO right before you kind of entered in the world of SEO?
I would say study rather than focusing on coming up with ideas and testing them, go talk to other people who have already done this and ask them what they did. Ask them in very specific ways. So go find someone, go find 5 other people who are doing marketplace SEO. Make sure that they're people where their traffic is actually good versus someone where their stuff isn't working, because a lot of times it's not working. So find 5 sites where you can see that their traffic is growing and it's performing well, and you can see that in Ahrefs. Find the person who works there, who works on SEO, ask them the most impactful things that are performing, and then ask them about specific elements on the page. Like, what about this? Did you test this? And what worked the best and what were the results of their tests. And they will actually tell you all of this, even though it seems like they shouldn't and wouldn't, but they will. And then take the stuff that performs the best and then test that yourself. Don't go online and read blog posts because most of those don't have actual data. Don't look at people and companies where they didn't actually cause an impact. And don't just rely on intuition because most of your intuition ideas will fail. Just take the learnings from others and you can fast-track them to impact.
