How Cardmarket SEO Dominates Trading Card Search

How Does Cardmarket’s SEO Strategy Work to Dominate Trading Card Search?

Cardmarket runs Europe’s largest trading card marketplace. Millions of buyers and sellers trade Pokémon, Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and One Piece cards across the platform every day.

When SEO Specialist Sallar Rabiei joined the team, Cardmarket already dominated its niche. But search had never been approached with the depth the platform’s scale and community deserved.

Building that depth changed everything. AI-referred sessions grew more than 200% in 12 months. Some top card pages now pull hundreds of thousands of sessions each. The Umbreon ex page alone generated 560,000 sessions in 2025.

The Cardmarket SEO strategy didn’t follow a generic playbook. The foundation was simpler: earn the community’s trust and create content that serves it.

Why Generic SEO Fails in Niche Communities Like Trading Cards

Before Sallar’s arrival, Cardmarket’s SEO was solid but not tailored to the trading card game community. Pokémon players search differently than Magic players. Someone deciding where to buy a card cares about different things than someone browsing general e-commerce sites.

Scale made the challenge harder. Cardmarket hosts millions of card pages updated daily by game specialists across multiple domains in multiple languages. Generic strategies don’t work at this scope in a niche, active community.

Tracy Rutkowski, Head of Marketing at Cardmarket, explained the problem: “It wasn’t tailored to us specifically in the TCG or hobby industry at all, which was definitely a challenge because we are a very niche community — and also very personal.”

Segment Your Data Before Drawing Conclusions About SEO Performance

Cardmarket’s catalog spans multiple games, domains, and page types. Sallar’s first move was to stop looking at total traffic and start tracking the pages that mattered to the business.

Each month, Sallar aligns with the games management team on the marketing plan. They identify priority areas: a new expansion launch, a specific game, or a product category. SEO reporting then focuses on whether those pages are growing, not whether the site as a whole is up.

This changes what the data reveals. A flat overall number might hide strong growth in Pokémon pages alongside a decline in Magic pages. A high-impression page with a poor bounce rate is a problem to fix, not a metric to celebrate.

Segmenting by game, domain, page type, and branded versus non-branded queries makes the data useful. For Cardmarket, with three separate domains to track, Sallar consolidates everything into a single Semrush dashboard.

Tracy put it plainly: “It’s not about growth month over month. It’s making sure that the growth is where we want it to be, and whether it’s aligned with our mission for the year.”

Build Trust Signals That AI Models and Humans Can Verify

Cardmarket operates as a marketplace. The platform never holds inventory, but it’s responsible for what happens between buyers and sellers. Trust is existential for this model.

The team reached a key insight: AI chatbots evaluate trust the same way a skeptical human buyer does.

When someone asks ChatGPT, “Is Cardmarket safe to use?” the answer gets assembled from reviews, help pages, forum discussions, and community posts. Those are the same sources a cautious first-time buyer would check manually.

The goal was to make existing trust signals concrete, documented, and findable.

Cardmarket’s Trustee Service holds payment until the buyer confirms their order arrived. This mechanism is documented in detail in the help center.

Professional sellers must provide a real address, VAT ID, phone number, business registration, and transparent shipping policies.

Every card shows a price history graph. Cardmarket positions itself as the price authority for trading cards in Europe, and the data makes that claim verifiable.

The platform sponsors real-world TCG tournaments, building credibility that extends beyond the website into the community itself.

Every major game on Cardmarket has its own dedicated channel, creating ongoing videos and content for the community.

Sallar explained the balance: “Success in this space is not solely about content and technical optimizations. It is a balance: roughly 50% optimization efforts and 50% the overall trustworthiness of the company.”

Ensure Your Trust Infrastructure Loads Fast Across All Devices

Building trust signals only works if users access them. A slow-loading help center page or a mobile-broken product page undermines every other trust signal you’ve built.

For a marketplace like Cardmarket with millions of card pages updated daily across multiple domains, technical SEO health isn’t a one-time audit. It’s ongoing infrastructure maintenance.

When Cardmarket prioritizes specific expansion pages around a new release, technical performance becomes part of the launch checklist alongside content quality and metadata optimization. A single product page might generate hundreds of thousands of sessions. Ensuring that page loads in under two seconds on mobile directly impacts whether AI models crawl it efficiently and whether users trust what they find.

For teams managing multiple domains and millions of pages, Screpy monitors the technical foundation at scale: page speed across different devices, mobile usability issues, SEO errors, and uptime monitoring. When a site goes down or a critical page slows to a crawl, Screpy catches the issue before it costs revenue or search visibility.

Write Content for Your Community, Not for Search Engines

One of the biggest changes in the Cardmarket SEO strategy was to its product pages. Instead of relying on generic descriptions, the team started using copy written by people who play the games.

Trading card games release new sets of cards regularly, called expansions. Each has its own lore, cards, and competitive relevance, making expansion pages high-traffic, high-intent landing pages.

For each major release, Cardmarket commissions content creators who know the game. These writers can explain which cards matter competitively, how a new set fits the current metagame, and why certain cards are worth collecting. Cardmarket verifies the content, translators who know the game translate it into five languages, and it gets published alongside the product listings.

Tracy described the approach: “We don’t write SEO text, we write for the community. It’s not ‘here’s the new expansion, it comes with X cards.’ We add: this is how you build around these cards, this is why this set is exciting, this is how it fits the current meta.”

Creating useful, descriptive content written by real players paid off. In 2025, Cardmarket’s top card pages generated hundreds of thousands of sessions each.

Match Your Metadata to How Your Audience Searches

With millions of card pages across various games, Cardmarket doesn’t optimize each page individually. Sallar works with the games management team to build metadata templates. They group pages by game and use language that reflects how each community talks about cards.

This requires real community knowledge. A Yu-Gi-Oh! player searching for a card uses different syntax, abbreviations, and set codes than a Pokémon player.

Working with people who know the game inside out and combining their knowledge with SEO data from Semrush helps the team achieve the right balance.

Use Keyword Gap Analysis to Spot High-Demand Moments Early

With millions of potential card pages, Sallar doesn’t monitor trending topics manually. Keyword and prompt gap analysis, performed daily using Semrush tools, identifies where to act before an opportunity peaks.

The Van Gogh Pikachu card is a clear example.

This card was available exclusively at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, making it highly collectible. It drove significant search volume well outside the usual TCG audience.

By seeing the card show up in Semrush Keyword Gap data as a high-demand term competitors weren’t covering, the team recognized early that this wasn’t another card. It was a cultural moment, and the page needed content to match the demand.

Manage Your Brand’s Narrative Where Your Community Talks

AI search pulls answers from across the internet: Reddit threads, review platforms, forums, and news coverage. What people say about your brand in those places shapes how AI models describe you, regardless of what your own website says.

To stay on top of this, Cardmarket employs a community specialist who monitors and responds to sentiment across Trustpilot and Google Reviews, a dedicated Cardmarket subreddit, community forums for each major game, and Cardmarket’s own news platform for policy updates and announcements.

When policy changes generate community concern, the community specialist responds with factual explanations before speculation fills the gap.

The goal is not to manipulate the narrative. It’s making sure the accurate version of the story is easy to find.

Tracy explained: “More likely than not, the discussions made by the community informally about your company are where the search results from AI will come from.”

Cardmarket has also pursued mainstream press coverage. A recent Forbes Austria and Switzerland feature on the financial dynamics of the trading card market reinforced Cardmarket’s authority on card pricing well beyond the TCG niche.

Results: Organic Growth and AI Sessions Up More Than 200%

The community-first approach paid off across both traditional search and AI.

Organic traffic has grown steadily over the past several years. According to Semrush estimates, cardmarket.com now pulls around 5.8 million monthly organic visits, with over 74,000 keywords ranking in the top three positions.

AI visibility followed a similar trajectory. Since October 2025, Cardmarket’s mentions across LLM outputs have grown from around 10,000 to 30,100, with 26,400 citations and 30,400 cited pages, according to data from Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit.

AI-referred sessions, tracked separately in Google Analytics, grew more than 200% over 12 months. AI traffic is a small share of total volume, but the team treats it as a priority signal because it converts at a significantly higher rate than any other source.

What Makes the Cardmarket SEO Strategy Work

The steps above share common logic. Search engines and AI models are designed to surface the most relevant, trustworthy answer for a specific query.

In a niche market like trading cards, that means knowing how each community searches, writing content worth reading, and building trust signals that are concrete and verifiable.

None of that is separable from good marketing. The SEO work at Cardmarket is effective because the product, the content, and the community management all pull in the same direction.

Sallar then uses Semrush to find opportunities and track where that work is landing: organic performance across four domains, visibility gaps against competitors, and AI visibility over time.

For teams managing complex content operations across multiple keyword clusters and audience segments, WriterZen automates the workflow from keyword discovery through content production. It consolidates topic clustering, content brief creation, and team collaboration in one platform, eliminating the spreadsheet chaos that bogs down SEO teams managing thousands of keywords.

The Cardmarket SEO strategy proves that search visibility in niche markets comes from understanding your community better than anyone else. When you combine that understanding with technical performance monitoring through tools like Screpy, you build a foundation that works across traditional search and AI. Learn more about how Screpy helps teams monitor technical SEO health at scale.