Cardmarket is Europe’s largest marketplace for trading card games (TCGs). Millions of buyers and sellers trade Pokémon, Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh!, One Piece and other TCGs around the world.
When Sallar Rabiei joined as an SEO expert, Cardmarket was already the leading platform in its space.
But search had never been achieved with the depth of scale of the platform and community it deserved. Building that depth with quality content, trust signals, and smart segmentation changed the trajectory.
Within a year, sessions to AI had increased by over 200%, and some of their top card pages were attracting hundreds of thousands of sessions each.
They didn’t get there by simply using the AI SEO playbook. The premise was simple and slow: earn the trust of the community and create content that really works for them.
Problem: SEO is designed for a general audience, in a very specific area
Before Sallar joined, Cardmarket’s SEO was strong but not yet aligned with the TCG community – such as different ways to search for Pokémon players versus Magic players, or what matters to someone deciding where to buy a card.
The scale made it difficult. Cardmarket hosts millions of card pages updated daily by game experts in multiple domains, in multiple languages. Standard SEO techniques are not enough to manage this space in a niche, active community.
“It wasn’t a direct fit for us in the TCG or hobby industry, which was quite a challenge because we’re a very passionate community – and we’re also very personal.”
The solution: a playbook built on trust and true expertise
Cardmarket’s approach includes data segmentation, social content, loyalty infrastructure, and off-site narrative management. Here’s how each piece fits together.
Step 1: Sort your data before making any conclusions
The Cardmarket catalog includes many games, domains, and page types. In the beginning, Sallar’s first step was to stop looking at the number of traffic and start tracking the pages that matter most to the business.
Each month, Sallar coordinates with a team of game executives in the marketing program to identify key areas — a new expansion launch, a specific game, or a product category. SEO reporting then focuses on whether those pages are growing, not just whether the site as a whole is ranking.
This changes what the data can tell you:
- The flat total number may have masked strong growth in Pokémon pages alongside a decline in magic.
- A high-view page with a low bounce rate is a problem to fix, not a metric to celebrate.
The breakdown by game, domain, page type, and branded vs. unbranded queries is what makes the data useful.
For Cardmarket, which has three different domains to track, Sallar brings everything together in one Semrush dashboard:
“It’s not just about month-on-month growth. It’s about making sure the growth is where we want it to be, and whether it’s in line with our actual work for the year.”
Step 2: Create verifiable trust signals
Cardmarket works as a marketplace: The platform never owns the property, but is responsible for what happens between buyers and sellers. Trust exists in this model.
The team reached an important insight: AI conversations evaluate trust in the same way as a skeptical human buyer.
When someone asks ChatGPT, “Is Cardmarket safe to use?” feedback is gathered from reviews, help pages, forum chats, and community posts — the same sources that a careful consumer would check in person.
With this in mind, the aim was to make the existing reliable signals concrete, documented and available:
- Ways to protect the buyer on the site: Cardmarket’s Trustee Service holds the payment until the buyer confirms that their order has arrived. It is written in detail in the help center
- Verified dealer requirements: Professional sellers must provide a physical address, VAT ID, phone number, business registration, and transparent shipping policies.
- The price is obvious: Each card shows a price history graph. Cardmarket positions itself as the pricing authority for TCGs in Europe, and the data backs that up.
- Sponsorship of the event: Sponsoring real-world TCG tournaments and building loyalty that extends beyond the platform into the community itself
- Channels: Every major game on Cardmarket has its own dedicated channel, creating continuous videos and content for the community as a whole
“Success in this space is not just about content and technical development. Balance: about 50% development efforts and 50% overall credibility of the company.”
Step 3: Create content for your community
One of the biggest changes Cardmarket made was to its product pages. Instead of relying on generic descriptions, they started using copy written by people who play games.
Trading card games release new sets of cards regularly, called expansions. Each has its own history, cards, and competitive relevance, making landing pages high-traffic, high-intent landing pages.
For each major release, Cardmarket commissions content creators who know the game: people who can explain which cards are competitively important, how the new set fits into the current metagame, and why certain cards should be collected. The content will be verified by Cardmarket, translated into five languages by translators who know the game, and published alongside the product list.
“We’re not writing SEO text, we’re writing for the community. It’s not just: here’s a new expansion, it’s coming with X cards. We’re adding: this is how you build around these cards, that’s why this set is fun, this is how it fits into the current meta.”
Creating useful, informative content written by real players is paid. In 2025, Cardmarket’s top card pages generated hundreds of thousands of hits each, with the Umbreon ex page alone pulling in 560K:
Step 4: Match your metadata to how your audience searches
With millions of card pages across various games, Cardmarket cannot optimize each page by itself. Instead, Sallar works with a team of game administrators to create metadata templates – grouping pages by game and using language that reflects how each community actually talks about the cards.
This requires real knowledge of the community. A Yu-Gi-Oh! a card seeking player uses different syntax, abbreviations, and code sets 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 perfect balance.
Step 5: Use keyword gap analysis to identify high signal periods early
With millions of potential card pages, Sallar can’t monitor what’s trending manually. Keyword and rapid gap analysis – done daily using Semrush tools – is how they identify what to do before an opportunity arises.
Van Gogh’s Pikachu card is a clear example.
This card was only available at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, making it highly collectible and driving significant search volume outside of the traditional TCG audience.
By seeing the card appear in the Semrush Keyword Gap data as the most sought-after competitors weren’t covering it, the team realized early on that this wasn’t just another card. It was a cultural moment, and the page needed content to keep up with the demand.
Step 6: Manage your brand narrative where your community is talking
AI search pulls answers from across the internet: Reddit threads, review forums, forums, and newscasts. What people say about your product in those places shapes how AI models interpret it, regardless of what your website says.
To stay on top of this, Cardmarket has hired a community expert who monitors and responds to sentiment across:
- Trustpilot and Google reviews
- A dedicated Cardmarket subreddit (Originally created live by users, later donated to the team and maintained by the team today.)
- Community forums for each major game
- Cardmarket’s news forum for policy updates and announcements
When policy changes create public concern, the public expert responds with factual explanations before speculation fills the gap.
The goal is not to try to manipulate the narrative, however. It ensures that an accurate version of the story is readily available.
“It’s very likely that legitimate public conversations about your company are where search results from AI will appear.”
Cardmarket has also pursued regular media coverage – including a recent Forbes Austria and Switzerland feature on the financial dynamics of the trading card market – strengthening its authority on card prices beyond the TCG niche.
Results: consistent organic growth + AI sessions up >200%
The first social approach paid for both traditional search and AI.
Organic traffic has grown steadily over the past few years. According to Semrush estimates, cardmarket.com now draws approximately 5.8M monthly organic visits, with more than 74K keywords ranked in the top three positions.
The appearance of AI has followed a similar trajectory. As of October 2025, Cardmarket’s mentions of all LLM results have grown from about 10K to 30.1K, with 26.4K citations and 30.4K cited pages, according to data from Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit.
AI-targeted sessions, tracked separately in Google Analytics, grew over 200% in 12 months. AI traffic is still a small share of the total volume, but the team considers it an important signal because it converts at a higher rate than any other source.
The takeaway
The six steps above share the same process. Search engines and AI models are designed to reveal the most relevant, reliable answer to a given query.
In a niche market like trading cards, that means knowing how each community searches, writing content worth reading, and creating tangible and verifiable trust signals.
None of this can be separated from good marketing. SEO work at Cardmarket works because the product, content, and community managers all pull in the same direction.
Sallar then uses Semrush to find opportunities and track where that work is going: organic performance across all four domains, visibility gaps against competitors, and AI visibility over time.