An Authority-Led SEO Strategy for Two-Sided Platforms

Building a platform is usually one of the most demanding things you can take on when you open a website. On platforms that bring users and brands together, the beginning points to one fundamental problem.

Does the egg come from the chicken, or the chicken from the egg?

Because your new project has no brands, ordinary users are hard to sign up; because it has no ordinary users, brands are hard to sign up. That tangle makes direction and momentum difficult in the system. It makes the process harder, and moving step by step towards ideal growth figures is difficult.

Approaching the SEO Tangle

In situations like this you have to define the problem clearly. When the first members arrive, they do not want to meet empty content or a passive portal. Brands in particular want users, and users want brands.

Prove Your Expertise

You have to set out your expertise in the category of the platform you have opened, and do it carefully. Show the team behind it, your knowledge of the sector and where you stand. But saying “I am very experienced in this sector” is not enough. You have to produce quality, insightful content that touches people’s lives, raises the quality of those lives and answers the information they came for. You have to make that case through your content on the user side and on the brand side alike.

Every piece of quality, insightful content you write raises the value of your site in the “earned” ranking and adds to you on the road to becoming an authority. Every unique piece you create contributes to your platform’s digital presence and raises the quality of that presence at the same time.

Convince Them

What problem does your platform or portal solve? Be clear about the kind of partnerships it builds and the benefits it offers on both sides. While you set out your competence in the sector through your content, explain your approach to the problem you solve. If your project convinces users, they will sign up.

Here you have to be sure you are conveying the added value you produce accurately in your content.

Who Sells the Product

While you focus on users’ problems in your content, you also have to focus on the problems you solve for brands. Drawing on the experience we have built at Türk SEM since 1999, I think that in tangled situations like this it is sounder to target the people who “sell the product” as your first audience.

If the seller is a company, your first audience is companies; if it is something like a freelance portal where the payment goes out, and the user providing the product or service is the one receiving payment, then you should target the user. In other words, whoever provides the product or service should be your first target. Settling the platform’s range of products and services here will be healthier. Making moves suited to the “customer” role can come afterwards.

Build Campaigns (Hooks)

In platform SEO, reasons are what set things in motion. If you are not the first in the business model you have chosen, you are in competition with rivals. In that competition you have to build campaigns that put you at an advantage. Those campaigns could be:

A zero-risk start:

• The offer: 0% commission or service fee for the first 6 months.
• The benefit: Sellers can test the platform at zero financial risk and keep all the revenue themselves.

Early-registration authority:

• The offer: A permanent “Founding Partner” badge on the platform and priority visibility in the listings.
• The benefit: Gives the seller status and a competitive advantage, and guarantees they stand out even as the platform grows.

Guaranteed business:

• The offer: A guarantee of at least [X] leads or orders within the first 3 months. (A discount the following period if the target is not reached.)
• The benefit: Offers concrete assurance that the time they give the platform will pay off.

A premium support package:

• The offer: Free one-to-one setup support and training for listing products and services and optimizing the profile.
• The benefit: Removes the technical hurdles and lets sellers adapt to the platform quickly.

Reference acceleration:

• The offer: Service vouchers or credit distributed to new buyers so they can try the seller’s services.
• The benefit: Lets the seller win their first customers quickly and strengthen their profile with positive references.

Find Your Direction With Ads

In your Google Ads campaigns, gather a wide range of keywords and a large enough pool of users, then look at what they are worth. Make sure which search intent your platform actually satisfies. Your portal may be focused somewhere other than the question or problem you had in mind, or people may be using it at a point you did not expect. In that case the most accurate keyword for your portal may not be the phrase in your head. Google Ads will light the way to the right phrase.

Turning the Unwilling Into the Willing

People running for the door the moment they see a form is a dominant condition of the internet in 2025. Handing someone a pile of forms and waiting for them to fill them in is not a sound approach. Even the most famous social networks sign people up with an email and a name. Keeping that first moment of registration simple will give you higher conversion rates.

While you keep the sign-up simple, you have to keep your trustworthiness high.

People are reluctant to join new portals, and the best way to make them willing is to keep sign-up simple. Enabling Google sign-in through Google Console is the best method that comes to mind right now. A user can join the site with one click and log in with one click as well. Google rescued us from the login plugin Facebook shut down over trivial reasons.

Users registering quickly will spend more time on your site, and that adds value to your SEO.

Sustainability

What is written here is some of the critical data to watch at the entry stage. It is meant as inspiration, and the process will find its own direction from the data your site produces. In every piece of work you do, you have to analyze sustainability properly and build your systems accordingly.

Projects that move forward by absorbing what they learn, practical approaches and systems that produce value are the ones that will win. You should focus on value before financial gain. The value you produce will of course generate financial gain. But an aggressive revenue strategy will weaken your sustainability and make room for your rivals.

The Right Investment

About 15 years ago we started work on a wonderful project, part of a wider piece of work for a client of ours. It was a global effort and it was good. We thought it would be right to leave it to grow naturally through SEO, but a company based in India entered a similar effort with an advertising budget we estimated at a hundred times ours, became the global player in a project whose idea was ours, and took the founder’s seat for that idea.

In your projects you have to channel your budget correctly, and you should know it will not happen with SEO alone or advertising alone. Channelling every argument of digital marketing correctly will produce the healthiest result.

The Platform and the Future

Taking as our basis the data above from Doç. Dr. Kerim Eser Afşar on the financialisation of digital data, it is not hard to predict that in the years ahead all 100 of the world’s largest 100 companies will be digitally based. If you are planning to build a platform, you are standing in exactly the right place.

Conclusion

We sent this piece to Gemini and asked for the single most important addition, in one paragraph.

We sent this piece to ChatGPT and asked it to contribute a paragraph.