Link Building Strategy for Online Marketplace

Society today is going to online-enabled human interaction. Going online through the Internet is not only common today, but also seamlessly integrated with our ‘physical’ world.

The Internet also revolutionizes how people do business – how people buy and/or sell products and services.
If you wish to buy a product, you can look for the best deal from online marketplace just from one click of your mouse.

Online marketplace is lucrative, indeed. Big guys, such as eBay, are raking in millions of dollar in revenue. Competing with them is impossible. The best way is to ‘join’ them, utilizing their infrastructure for you to use to capitalize your piece of the online business pie.

Unfortunately, small online marketplaces are competing with each other. One thing for sure: If you rank higher in search engine result pages (SERPs) than your competitors, you win. One of the surest ways to achieve this is link building.

Here are some link building strategies for you to consider:

1. Understand your marketplace

Online marketplaces are evolving fast, and to understand how fast they are evolving, you must understand the niche your online marketplace is within.

You must know what keywords to target, and analyze the keywords – How harsh is the competition? How is the growth potential?

2. Develop good content

No matter what “revolutionary” SEO experts said, the mainstream consensus has always proven effective and efficient: There is no substitute for a good content.

Customers mostly look for the good and valuable content related to their interests and that’s why you should work toward developing good contents. Every piece of information on your website should be there for a purpose; it should support your sales pitch and should direct customers into the sales cycle.

Another benefit, search engines also love good content. Optimal keywords use, useful information inside and writing style will definitely help the content to be listed higher in SERPs.

You can outsource content writing for better quality and time management, allowing you to focus on your main job: growing the business. You can always find good quality freelance writers at www.Guru.com and other freelance marketplace websites.

3. Look at social media sites

With the stellar growth of Twitter and FaceBook, individuals and businesses alike are rushing to use the social media to connect and network with others.

The exponential growth of members means one thing – bigger and bigger market to sell your products and/or services.

Combine this with your excellent content, you will receive the benefit of going viral – People recommending your site, article and eventually your business to their friends, family and colleagues, and so on. This will bring in organic traffic to your marketplace from the growing number of back links.

4. Other, mainstream, link building strategies

Link building is not about how many number of links you could get but what kind of quality inbound links you are receiving and what is the quality of incoming traffic.

Make sure you cater your target audience interests and understand what they are looking for first, then you employ the right link building strategies. One of the strategies is Directory submission – No matter what people say, it is still useful to link building purposes.

5. Monitor your progress

Just like in conventional businesses, online marketplaces have to monitor their progress. You must tailor your marketplace link building strategy according to your traffic information – Your audiences’ origin, what links bring in more traffic, what search engine terms do visitors use to visit your marketplace, etc.

You should monitor your marketplace as a business – how much your conversion rate, how much your sales increasing due to the employed link building strategies, etc.

Good luck on your link building endeavor!

Image by Dru Bloomfield – At Home in Scottsdale.