SEO for buying and selling websites
Posted: Wed Feb 19, 2025 7:08 am
In previous posts we have seen examples in which standard SEO strategies are not enough, due to the type of sector, regulation or product we are trying to position. Today we are going to look at a very special case: that of buying and selling websites.
What is a buying and selling website?
Types of buying and selling websites
SEO aspects to take into account in this type of websites
SEO success stories on buying and selling websites
What is a buying and selling website?
To define the concept clearly, here we are referring to websites of a client who wants to position himself through two types of actions around a product: on the one hand he wants to buy products, and on the other he wants to sell. We are not referring to the website necessarily being used for transactions, as it could be a corporate website in which services are offered, and which is channelled to a form or other forms of contact.
Types of buying and selling websites
There are many types of websites where you can buy and sell things. The most common ones we have found and which are already success stories in our portfolio are:
Real estate agencies: agents list properties for sale, and then sell them
I buy gold: the classic establishment where gold and silver jewelry is bought by weight, and then resold to the highest bidder
Buying and selling technology: there are numerous success stories in the online buying and selling of mobile canada telegram data phones, laptops and other technological devices
Fashion buying and selling: although it can cover many fields, it usually focuses on accessories such as bags, wallets, etc.
Car dealers: Most dealers sell new cars, but they also have a section for buying and selling used vehicles.
Broad buying and selling: these offer a large number of verticals for buying and selling.
SEO aspects to take into account in this type of websites
Dual purpose: this is generally always desirable, because it will be easier for us to position a website that has only one objective and is clear. In this case, with the website we intend to capture diametrically different searches . And as you know, in SEO the search intention is fundamental. You must consider separately the keywords oriented to the purchase from those of the sale, and take great care of the web architecture that we are going to propose.
SEO orientation of the home page: this is where you’re going to have a big dilemma. What is going to be the main keyword on the home page? This page usually has the most SEO potential, since being the main page, it has more authority than all the others. Should we orient it to “sell + product”? To “buy + product”? You may already have other internal pages dedicated to buying and selling, so the home page could cannibalize them and render them useless. You’ll probably consider other alternatives, such as orienting the home page to “buy and sell + product,” although if you use a keyword research tool , you’ll see that they usually have a very low search volume. So it’s very likely that you’ll end up opting to reinforce the brand on the main page.
Asymmetry between buying and selling: you must talk to the client to detect what their interests and priorities are. They are going to pay you to do SEO, and SEO is basically traffic acquisition, but you should not only worry about bringing them visitors by the kilo, no, the key is to bring them qualified traffic that brings them the desired business. If the client tells you, for example, that they already have a wholesale channel to buy cheap and that they want to do SEO predominantly for selling, then we must take this into account. Or the other way around.
The problem is often the following: the client tells us that with the website they want to buy and sell equally. We go to look at the page, and we find 300,000 URLs of products, categories and brands for sale. On the other hand, for the purchase we only have a sad form. This great asymmetry has of course a great impact on SEO, because for Google yours is not a website for buying and selling products, no. It is a website for selling second-hand products, with a form. If you want to attract SEO traffic from users who want to sell your used products, you should use your imagination. Some ideas would be: creating sales pages for different categories, or for different brands; even product pages, for those who want to sell an iPhone X with 256gb. Other options would be guides or how-to articles.on our blog, to guide customers who want to sell certain products or brands.
Keyword targeting: This is VERY important. Throughout this post we have talked about buying and selling pages, but from what perspective? If our client's priority is to sell watches, then the types of keywordsThe search terms we are going to attack are “buy watch + second hand”. Think about the targeting and possible search intentions: buy, sell, for sale, second hand, used, occasion, km0…
Deleted products: the good and bad thing about a second-hand product sales website is that we usually sell unique products. We have received a bag from a certain brand, it has been sold at X price, and in 99% of e-commerce sites that product is then deleted and that's it. At the SEO level this is a drama: we have been working to position that product in Google, and it turns out that one day when Googlebot goes to check it, that result does not exist. Our website gives it a 404 error , the robot gets angry and a little bit of SEO has gone down the drain. This is a very common problem and can be solved in several ways, such as: 1) keep the product on the website, marked as sold; 2) redirect the sold product to an identical or very similar one; 3) create fixed product or model sheets, which are always available and to which you only add or remove stock; 4) use canonical rules from the sheet to a similar and fixed content; or 5) not indexing product pages, and concentrating SEO on other content on the website. We personally like options 1 and 3, but they are not always possible to implement for business or technical reasons.
Duplicate content with platforms: in this type of business, our website normally connects to the client's ERP to obtain information about the products they buy and sell, and thus update the catalogue. But very often, this product that we display on our website is in turn sent to buying and selling platforms and marketplaces. And on these websites, which are huge and have very powerful SEO, a product sheet is published that is 99% identical in content to the one that is going to be published on our website. This clearly exposes us to the possibility that a large part of our content may be considered by Google as duplicate, even to the bot thinking that the original source is the portal and we are the copycats.
To overcome and solve this, we have several paths: 1) put no index on our product sheets (we know that the portals are not going to do it); 2) duplicate content, let's imagine that in the e-commerce and/or in the ERP we have some title and description fields for the portals, and another for our own website; and 3) look for some rule or pattern, from which the content generated for our website is slightly different from that which is going to be printed on the portals. Something like "Now you can buy your product name + second hand at the best market price. product category second hand of the brand brand name without shipping costs. Here again SEO experts are going to prefer option 2, but that is not always going to be viable because it is very expensive for the client.
What is a buying and selling website?
Types of buying and selling websites
SEO aspects to take into account in this type of websites
SEO success stories on buying and selling websites
What is a buying and selling website?
To define the concept clearly, here we are referring to websites of a client who wants to position himself through two types of actions around a product: on the one hand he wants to buy products, and on the other he wants to sell. We are not referring to the website necessarily being used for transactions, as it could be a corporate website in which services are offered, and which is channelled to a form or other forms of contact.
Types of buying and selling websites
There are many types of websites where you can buy and sell things. The most common ones we have found and which are already success stories in our portfolio are:
Real estate agencies: agents list properties for sale, and then sell them
I buy gold: the classic establishment where gold and silver jewelry is bought by weight, and then resold to the highest bidder
Buying and selling technology: there are numerous success stories in the online buying and selling of mobile canada telegram data phones, laptops and other technological devices
Fashion buying and selling: although it can cover many fields, it usually focuses on accessories such as bags, wallets, etc.
Car dealers: Most dealers sell new cars, but they also have a section for buying and selling used vehicles.
Broad buying and selling: these offer a large number of verticals for buying and selling.
SEO aspects to take into account in this type of websites
Dual purpose: this is generally always desirable, because it will be easier for us to position a website that has only one objective and is clear. In this case, with the website we intend to capture diametrically different searches . And as you know, in SEO the search intention is fundamental. You must consider separately the keywords oriented to the purchase from those of the sale, and take great care of the web architecture that we are going to propose.
SEO orientation of the home page: this is where you’re going to have a big dilemma. What is going to be the main keyword on the home page? This page usually has the most SEO potential, since being the main page, it has more authority than all the others. Should we orient it to “sell + product”? To “buy + product”? You may already have other internal pages dedicated to buying and selling, so the home page could cannibalize them and render them useless. You’ll probably consider other alternatives, such as orienting the home page to “buy and sell + product,” although if you use a keyword research tool , you’ll see that they usually have a very low search volume. So it’s very likely that you’ll end up opting to reinforce the brand on the main page.
Asymmetry between buying and selling: you must talk to the client to detect what their interests and priorities are. They are going to pay you to do SEO, and SEO is basically traffic acquisition, but you should not only worry about bringing them visitors by the kilo, no, the key is to bring them qualified traffic that brings them the desired business. If the client tells you, for example, that they already have a wholesale channel to buy cheap and that they want to do SEO predominantly for selling, then we must take this into account. Or the other way around.
The problem is often the following: the client tells us that with the website they want to buy and sell equally. We go to look at the page, and we find 300,000 URLs of products, categories and brands for sale. On the other hand, for the purchase we only have a sad form. This great asymmetry has of course a great impact on SEO, because for Google yours is not a website for buying and selling products, no. It is a website for selling second-hand products, with a form. If you want to attract SEO traffic from users who want to sell your used products, you should use your imagination. Some ideas would be: creating sales pages for different categories, or for different brands; even product pages, for those who want to sell an iPhone X with 256gb. Other options would be guides or how-to articles.on our blog, to guide customers who want to sell certain products or brands.
Keyword targeting: This is VERY important. Throughout this post we have talked about buying and selling pages, but from what perspective? If our client's priority is to sell watches, then the types of keywordsThe search terms we are going to attack are “buy watch + second hand”. Think about the targeting and possible search intentions: buy, sell, for sale, second hand, used, occasion, km0…
Deleted products: the good and bad thing about a second-hand product sales website is that we usually sell unique products. We have received a bag from a certain brand, it has been sold at X price, and in 99% of e-commerce sites that product is then deleted and that's it. At the SEO level this is a drama: we have been working to position that product in Google, and it turns out that one day when Googlebot goes to check it, that result does not exist. Our website gives it a 404 error , the robot gets angry and a little bit of SEO has gone down the drain. This is a very common problem and can be solved in several ways, such as: 1) keep the product on the website, marked as sold; 2) redirect the sold product to an identical or very similar one; 3) create fixed product or model sheets, which are always available and to which you only add or remove stock; 4) use canonical rules from the sheet to a similar and fixed content; or 5) not indexing product pages, and concentrating SEO on other content on the website. We personally like options 1 and 3, but they are not always possible to implement for business or technical reasons.
Duplicate content with platforms: in this type of business, our website normally connects to the client's ERP to obtain information about the products they buy and sell, and thus update the catalogue. But very often, this product that we display on our website is in turn sent to buying and selling platforms and marketplaces. And on these websites, which are huge and have very powerful SEO, a product sheet is published that is 99% identical in content to the one that is going to be published on our website. This clearly exposes us to the possibility that a large part of our content may be considered by Google as duplicate, even to the bot thinking that the original source is the portal and we are the copycats.
To overcome and solve this, we have several paths: 1) put no index on our product sheets (we know that the portals are not going to do it); 2) duplicate content, let's imagine that in the e-commerce and/or in the ERP we have some title and description fields for the portals, and another for our own website; and 3) look for some rule or pattern, from which the content generated for our website is slightly different from that which is going to be printed on the portals. Something like "Now you can buy your product name + second hand at the best market price. product category second hand of the brand brand name without shipping costs. Here again SEO experts are going to prefer option 2, but that is not always going to be viable because it is very expensive for the client.