The Challenge of Being the Middle Man

One of the hardest positions to be put in from an SEO standpoint is the role of the “middle man.” Whether you’re a distributor, reseller, or a retailer, you are the middle man between the manufacturer and the customer.

Why is this difficult? You all share the same product data! Sharing data is difficult at these downstream points due to the equity the manufacturer already has simply by being the manufacturer. In some cases, it helps if your manufacturer has a poor SEO strategy and/or implementation, but nowadays that’s not likely. But rest assured, there are ways to increase your overall SEO visibility and market share.

How to Increase Your SEO Visibility and Market Share

Ratings and reviews are great ways to induce additional user generated content to your site to accomplish numerous things. First and foremost, it shows the search engines that you are listening and responding to the algorithm changes they are making and trying to focus on driving as much user generated content as possible, rather than relying purely on marketing content that is typically supplied to you. Relying solely on manufacturer data will limit your page rank ability and, therefore, your overall ability to rank for related queries. In addition, ratings and reviews help the decision making process and overall user experience by providing unbiased opinions, good or bad, about a product or service. Amazon is the leader in product reviews and has superior market penetration and share when it comes to products they carry. Their user generated content efforts combined with their link building program allow them to consistently show up in search results.

As mentioned above in the Amazon example, link building is another way to add additional layers of equity to support your SEO efforts for shared data sets. Again, this tells the engines that you are listening to what is important to them currently in the algorithm. As a downstream partner, you have a certain following and fall into certain groups that allow you to attract credible, highly valuable links from a number of different sources. For example, a retailer whose focus is on local sales can acquire links from highly influential local sites/blogs in each market to tailor their strategy to long-tail, geo qualified keywords. This would be highly convertible users who would ideally become advocates moving away from an acquisition strategy into a retention strategy.

Rules of Thumb to Live by as the Middle Man

1. Do more than the manufacturer for product SKUs.
2. Create a content strategy around un-branded terms derived from your keyword and persona research.
3. Develop a highly effective internal linking strategy cross pollinating product content with un-branded content.
4. Identify influencers in your market space that can be credible for link building and syndicate your content through them.