How To Do SEO For Classified Website

Wondering how to do SEO for classified website? Are you an owner of a classified website? Or planning to launch a brand new classified ads website? And need SEO strategy to get maximum organic traffic to beat the competitors?

Here I have listed the most important SEO things you have to implement where most of the classified sites doing it wrong.

Unique Classified SEO Website

There are many classified websites around the world nowadays because it’s a win win situation for the website owner, the advertisers and the buyer.

In my country Sri Lanka the market leader is ikman.lk, there are dominating 90% of the classified market share in Sri Lanka and now it’s one of top brand in Sri Lanka currently and making big revenue.

Because of this lot of people want to get in to classified business but lot of these new comers forgetting that ikman.lk is became success because they got their SEO strategy correctly.

I get lot of SEO inquires to do SEO for classified websites, when I request their website to take a look the common things all the website have is they design and structure will 99% look like ikman.lk.

Because of it’s success, but many don’t know this is the basic first mistake there are doing.

You should have a proper plan of your website rather than planning like market leader, it make no sense since why a user should come to your new classified website rather the top website.

So you should have a unique website design, structure and features to dominate.

You can buy many custom designed WordPress classified website theme at Theme Forest for around $60 and host your website in a good WordPress hosting in Sri Lanka.

I can help you to design and develop a unique SEO friendly classified website, so you contact me here.

Also if you decide to design classified website by yourself you can read my article how to create a website in Sri Lanka.

Don’t Index Individual Ads – Most Important Part of SEO For Classified Website

This is the first mistake most of the classified websites do and this is the dead end for them because from the start you are confusing Google with duplicate content.

For example a advertiser called A is posting a ad on your classified website, and then he will be posting the same ad with a another classified website.

We will say both you and second classified site indexing these ads with Google, Once got indexed both sites will have same content ad and this is considered as duplicate content as per Google.

Google don’t know who is the original source since both website have same content.

So Google will simply devalue both your content and website and this will affect your rankings and also affect overall your whole website rankings too.

There is a another issue indexing individual ad pages is that as a classified website all the website have a expired date for each ads like most site will have 14 days.

So after 14 days this ad page will be removed and if we indexed this page after expire this URL will get 404 error, So this way you will be generating a lot of 404 pages which not good in SEO way.

So no-index all your individual ads from indexing to avoid duplicate content penalty. Here is a good guide on No-index by Google.

Optimize Category and Sub Category

So you will ask me after no-indexing the individual ad pages how can we get organic traffic, the answer is target, optimize and build links to category pages and sub category pages.

For example we say your classified website in Sri Lanka have mobile phone category where advertisers posting mobile phone ads, Optimize this category page for keyword like “mobile phones in Sri Lanka”, and we say the advertiser is posting a Samsung phone, you can optimize this is as sub category targeting like “Samsung phones in Sri Lanka” under main category.

Doing like this the category pages will do well in SEO because it’s relevant to users and Google and easy to do link building.

So your main organic traffic pages should be main category pages and sub category pages in your classified website.

Build Backlinks

You might be getting lot of backlinks for your classified sites automatically because the advertisers might be sharing their ads in various sites like forums, so since we have no-indexed individual pages we have to get backlinks to category pages.

Guest posting for category pages and sub category pages will be a good strategy for classified websites.

Blogging

Definitely you should do blog posts on your classified website, You can target various topics in your blog to get long tail keyword search traffic.

For example we say you have microscope sellers who have posted microscope ads in your classified site in Sri Lanka you can write on a topic like “Best Microscope Suppliers in Sri Lanka” and list the advertised sellers products and features according to their ad, so this might bring you extra organic traffic.

So I hope above tips will help to you solve your question for how to do SEO for classified websites, Have issues implementing above or need SEO services for classified websites as an SEO specialist in Sri Lanka I can help, contact me through this contact form.

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I am an Internet Marketing Expert in Sri Lanka Specialist in SEO & PPC.

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