SEO for Collectors: How to Do It and How to Have It Done for You
This article is both for collectors and buyers who want to utilize Google and other search engines.
As a seller you can use SEO (search engine optimization) to make your collection more liquid and easier to sell, either piece by piece or as a whole.
As a buyer, you can use SEO to be top-of-mind when it comes to acquiring pieces or even entire collections. This way you have the first pick with sellers.
If you’re active in flipping collectibles, this will show you how to use SEO to make you both a popular seller and buyer.
Overall, we’ll break down the fundamentals of search engine optimization for collectors. You will learn the best way to up your collecting game with SEO.
And if you’re just looking for somebody to handle SEO for you – jump to the bottom of this article.
Jump Ahead
Types of collectibles covered
Nearly any collectible can be sold or purchased more easily through SEO.
Here are some top examples:
- Automobiles.
- Rare coins.
- Toys:
- Hot Wheels.
- Barbies.
- Beanie Babies.
- Board games.
- Action figures.
- Legos.
- Trading cards.
- Sports memorabilia.
- Stamps.
- Sneakers.
- Comic books.
- Vinyl records.
- Paintings.
- Sculptures.
- Jewelry.
- Watches.
- Antique furniture.
There are so many more. Anything that can be collected will benefit from being optimized for search engines.
The fundamentals of search engine optimization
Search engine optimization, or SEO, means to tell Google and other search engines – in a way that they understand – what you’re offering. Let’s break this down.
What you’re offering could be specific knowledge, expertise, or items. In the context of this article, what you’re offering is collectibles and/or buying of collectibles.
In a way search engines understand means that search engines need structured data and social signals to understand what a web page is about and if it is authoritative.
Search engines want to see a website that:
- Is easily accessible to crawling.
- Has plenty of text and images to make sense of.
- Has clear and descriptive metadata.
- Has positive social signals like age and other authoritative sites linking in.
The easiest way to do SEO is to make your page targeted towards a specific keyword, simply meaning a search term. A straightforward way to do this would be to put that specific keyword into your main metadata.
If you’re a collector reading this, you want to have a website where you can put your collectibles, or an invitation to buy collectibles, on.
You always want to ensure your website is connected to Google Search Console. Submit your main URL to the “URL Inspection” area and your sitemaps to the “Sitemaps” area.
How to make your collectibles discoverable on Google
If you have one or a few collectibles, or even an entire collection, here’s how to make it liquid with SEO.
Create a hub page for your entire collection. Make sure this page is linked to from your home page.
On this hub page, list all the items you have in your collection. If you have many, like thousands, then nest your items into categories. If this is too much work, you can also list only your most valuable pieces.
Use very descriptive text when listing your collectibles. You’re doing this so people searching for this collectible can find it. At the very least, you want to say the model and date of manufacture.
If you want to go the extra step, make each collectible on the hub page link to a dedicated page for that one piece. When doing this here are some things to keep in mind:
- Put the name of the item (model and date of manufacture) in the URL, page title, meta description, and H1.
- Put in as many photos as you can. 2-3 is a good start, but more is always welcome. Make sure to utilize the alt text tag to add details about what’s in the photos.
- Put in extra details about its condition, attributes, and parts, where relevant. For example, if you’re offering rare cars, you may want to include details like the distance traveled, the condition of the exterior and interior, and where the car is located. If you’re a collector of rare coins, you could write about mint errors or the history of the piece.
Depending on how competitive your niche is, you may be able to rank for broader, higher volume keywords, such as “Barbie collection for sale,” or “Buy rare comic books.”
To do this, make sure to include your specific keyword in the page’s URL, page title, meta description, and H1 – the same as if you were making a page for a specific collectible.
Finally, it’s absolutely critical that you have a big “Contact” button in your heading navigation and footer to field offers from buyers.
How to use Google to get the best offers from sellers of collectibles
You may be at a point in your life where you’re not quite ready to part with the items in your current collection and instead want to double down on acquisition. Or you’re flipping collectibles, and getting them at the lowest price allows you to maximize your profit margin.
If that’s the case, this section is for you.
Instead of making granular pages for specific items in a collection like you would do if you were selling, you now want to make pages for search terms (keywords) that sellers would search for.
For example, if you were a buyer of rare coins, you would make pages for “Sell rare coins” or “Rare coin collectors.”
Maybe you’re a collector of comic books – you could make a page for “Buy my vintage comic books.”
The list goes on. You can look for these keywords yourself, or use a keyword-finding tool like Moz’s Keyword Explorer, to find search terms with a known monthly search volume.
Remember, it’s alright if a search term has little to no search volume. This can happen if it’s bottom-of-funnel enough. As long as there’s a lot of descriptive and helpful text on your page, search engines will show it to qualified sellers of collectibles.
Once you know what keyword your page is about, you can make the page. Put the keyword in your URL, page title, meta description, and H1. Add plenty of text, and sections. Add photos and descriptive alt text for photos. Maybe even provide your location, so sellers know if you’re close to them (for higher-budget items, this may not matter).
Like what you would do with a collection, make a hub page for all your pages around buying collectibles and/or collections. Put this hub page in your footer. Call it “Acquisitions.” Have the page path read /acquisitions/. Then nest each of your individual buying pages in this Acquisitions page. People will click to the individual pages through this hub page.
Finally, you must have an easy and straightforward way for sellers to contact you. Put a “Contact” button on each SEO page, in your header navigation, and your footer.
How much qualified traffic can I get from this?
Some of these keywords get tens of thousands of searches every month, whereas others get only dozens, but are hyper-qualified.
Qualified means searchers are at the bottom of the funnel – they are ready to buy from you or sell to you. They know what they want and are just looking for the right person to give it to them.
Usually, the lower volume search terms are the higher converting – they tend to be longer in length because the searchers know exactly what they want.
If you’re getting hundreds or thousands of visits a month to these bottom-of-funnel SEO pages, and you’re giving searchers exactly what they want, you’ll get many conversions. As some of these collectibles go for a lot of money, every conversion counts.
At the end of the day, the amount of traffic you get will depend on the niche you’re in and how purchase-intent the keywords you’re targeting are.
What we do
We understand search engine optimization for collectibles.
We’ve done SEO for some of the biggest companies in the world, like Microsoft and P&G, and countless SMBs.
We’ve been doing SEO for over a decade and have appeared in top publications about it.
We also provide extra expertise, such as growing a brand on TikTok, or getting started on YouTube – these platforms are especially great for collectors looking to build top-of-mind awareness as buyers of collectibles. “I just spent 70,000 dollars on a Hot Wheels car…” would make an irresistible video hook.
Get in touch
Let’s talk. Please get in touch here.
