You know it, you've spent hours putting the perfect boat ad on a reputable marketplace and you don't generate leads. What's wrong? Ask yourself. Does this make sense? To avoid losing time and money in the future, we have the following tips for you:
Tip 1: Sale on a niche marketplace for sailboats and sailing yachts
Generic online marketplaces such as eBay are underperforming. The growth of these mega marketplaces has slowed for the fifth consecutive quarter. At the same time, niche marketplaces such as Etsy.com are catching up.
For many product categories, more and more niche marketplaces have emerged. A niche marketplace focuses on one product type. In the past, second-hand sailboats used to go to Marktplaats, eBay, Botenbank, Yachtfocus, Boats.com,... Nowadays it is better to go to marketplaces that only offer sailboats and sailing yachts for sale.
Search engines such as Google like to index boat ads on niche marketplaces.
Sailors also have a different water sports experience than powerboat owners. Sailboats and sailing yachts belong in a dedicated marketplace that is not inundated with other boats such as sloops and powerboats.
The sailor who is looking specifically for "sailboats or sailing yachts for sale" will immediately find what he is looking for in niche marketplaces.
Tip 2: Promote individual boats and avoid ending up in a list between your competitors
Use marketplaces that focus on boats with their search engine optimization. Why should you undo all the efforts in your sailboat ad just to be found in search results among all your competitors?
Make sure your boat ad page qualifies for extensive search results so that Google, Bing and Yandex consider your boat ad as an individual product with price, location and availability. That way, the potential buyer is more likely to click through to your boat ad.
Using the Google search engine we do a test with the search query "X332 for sale" and Google gives us:
Well extended result:
No extended result and no individual result but focus on a boot list:
You can always test individual boat ad pages yourself with Google's Rich Result test: https://search.google.com/test/rich-results
Tip 3: Do not publish duplicate content
Do not use automated distribution of your boat ads to other marketplaces, place unique content for each marketplace. Yes, we know, this seems like a lot of work but we promise that your efforts will be rewarded.
Wrong:
- Transferring ads to international variants
- Transfer of advertisements to partner websites
- Transfer your own website listings to marketplaces without unique content
Placing unique content increases your fishing net to generate qualified leads. For each unique publication you have an extra chance of being found in the search results of search engines such as Google, Bing and Yandex.
An owner who sells his boat sees that his own boat takes up a complete search result page. Success guaranteed (and more Leads of course).
It always helps that the marketplace has done his on-site SEO and social media shareability homework.
We did the test with the Firefox browser and it gave us the following page info results:
Good on-page SEO and good divisible content:
Poor on-page SEO and not well divisible content/strong>
