In this discussion, the speakers compare SEO playbooks used by high‑authority marketplaces such as Canva with those suitable for earlier‑stage platforms like Thumbtack. They explain that Canva’s massive domain authority lets it succeed with only moderately optimized on‑page content, whereas Thumbtack must rely on precise on‑page tactics to compete. The core tactics covered include: (1) structuring browse pages with keyword‑rich metadata for each service listing; (2) creating unique, keyword‑dense snippet copy for each professional, initially by hiring low‑cost writers (~$0.25 per snippet) and later swapping in curated review snippets, ensuring each snippet is unique across pages; (3) scaling snippet usage to the roughly 1,000 high‑traffic pages rather than a million; (4) improving internal linking—moving from random link insertion to a principled “related‑but‑spread” linking module that increased traffic by about 25%; and (5) optimizing title tags. The conversation emphasizes that these on‑page improvements can let mid‑stage marketplaces outperform higher‑authority competitors on specific queries, even if they can’t surpass them in overall authority.
Chapters
Could you maybe like give us some examples of, you know, marketplaces and maybe we could use, you know, Thumbtack as an example of just like their overall kind of SEO strategies and maybe the playbooks that they use?
Let's do it. So Thumbtack is a good example and, you know, most examples that people know about are larger companies like a Canva and those strategies will not work that well for earlier stage companies. The reason why Canva is able to do well They have the core strategy down and they have tons of authority and their on-page strategy does not need to be 10 out of 10. It could be 7 out of 10 and they'll still beat everyone because they have so much authority. So most of the playbooks for programmatic are for very large companies with super high authority, which will not— and earlier stage or even mid-stage companies will not succeed with the exact same playbook. So I'll describe Canvas and then I'll describe the add-ons that have thumbtacked it that other people would need. So for Canva, they're one of the most successful marketplaces and they have browse pages for templates. So invoice templates and then there's user and they have thousands of these. So there's user-generated templates and then there's a grid of the templates, there's links to other browse pages and then there's page-level editorial content at the bottom. And that's like the core structure of any browse page and that may or may not work for most companies. And for Thumbtack, it probably, you know, maybe they're ranking number 6, but they're not gonna win. But earlier stage and mid-stage companies can beat a Canva with better on-page. You'll never beat them with better authority, but you can beat them with on-page. So I'll describe what we did with Thumbtack. So the first thing is that for a Canva, you have a grid of, let's say, 20 different templates. But if I'm Thumbtack or if I'm, you know, Thumbtack or, you know, a Canva competitor, there's a few ways you can do that. So the first way is that on each item in the browse page, you can add words and you can add metadata. So for Thumbtack, there's a list of the services that the plumber provides and that's keyword-rich content. And then the second thing is in the early days, we would do snippets. So And like Yelp and TripAdvisor have snippets. Yelp search pages, you'll see have review snippets. So adding these snippets adds lots of keyword rich data for free. So you're programmatically selecting these, you don't have to spend money on that. So for Thumbtack, let me know if there's too much detail, but for Thumbtack, we started by manually writing snippets on each pro and we basically hired an army of snippet writers. And the reason why is because you can't show the same string of text for the same pro on 100 different pages. Every single snippet needs to be unique on that on that page. So, and it needs to be keyword rich. So we basically created an army of snippet writers following a guide of like, write, you know, keyword rich data, include these keywords. Each snippet was unique. And, you know, typical programmatic strategy would say, well, it has to be automated. You cannot manually do stuff because it doesn't scale. It actually does scale. So we got it down to about $0.25 per snippet. And the number of pages that you care, actually care about is gonna be about 1,000. It's not gonna be a million. Even if you make a million, there's gonna be 1,000, 2,000 that actually bringing all the traffic. So any of these programmatic strategies, manually doing stuff actually does scale. So we did manually written snippets and then as we had more reviews, we removed those and then we selected reviews. The reviews also, you cannot show the same review snippet on every single browse page when that pro shows up, just like Yelp, same restaurant's gonna show up on many browse pages, but the snippet, the review snippet has to be unique. So then you can, for each individual pro, you can automatically select, let's say, 50 different snippets from their 10 reviews and then have different snippets show up on different pages. So that's thing one. The second thing is internal linking. So I, early in my career, Search Console used to have internal link counts, actual internal link counts. They have fake internal accounts now, but they had real internal accounts. And we had, I was at a shopping comparison company. We had like 5 million products, product pages, and not many of them got traffic. And so I went in and saw that the pages that didn't get traffic had no links or had like one link, one internal link. So then we added a section that randomly linked to other products, which is not great for users, but we randomly linked to products and now every single product got links and traffic tripled. So then for Thumbtack, we did a more principled approach, which was like a related but spread links. And because a bunch of the browse pages got 0 links, 1 link, 2 links, because they had facet-based links like other service categories and city, other cities for same service category. And what happens is there are a bunch of browse pages that didn't get links. So we added this module that spread the links more and traffic went up 25%. The last thing was title tags. Happy to go into more detail on title tags, but those were the 3 key things, which is the on-page content, the internal links, and title tag optimization.
