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 across the platform.
When Sallar Rabiei joined as an SEO Specialist, Cardmarket was already the dominant platform in its space.
But search had never been approached with the depth the platform’s scale and community deserved. Building that depth through quality content, trust signals, and smarter segmentation changed the trajectory.
Within a year, AI-referred sessions had grown more than 200%, and some of their top card pages were pulling hundreds of thousands of sessions each.
They didn’t get there by simply running an AI SEO playbook. The foundation was simpler and slower: earn the community’s trust and create content that truly serves it.
The problem: SEO built for a general audience, in a very specific niche
Before Sallar joined, Cardmarket’s SEO was solid but not yet tailored to the TCG community — like the different ways Pokémon players search compared to Magic players, or what really matters to someone deciding where to buy a card.
The scale made it harder. Cardmarket hosts millions of card pages updated daily by game specialists across multiple domains, in multiple languages. Generic SEO strategies are not enough to handle this scope in a niche, active community.
“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.”
The solution: a playbook built on trust and genuine expertise
Cardmarket’s approach combined data segmentation, community-native content, trust infrastructure, and off-platform narrative management. Here’s how each piece fits together.
Step 1: Segment your data before drawing any conclusions
Cardmarket’s catalog spans multiple games, domains, and page types. Early on, Sallar’s first move was to stop looking at total traffic and start tracking the pages that really mattered to the business.
Each month, Sallar aligns with the games management team on the marketing plan to identify the priority 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 up.
This changes what the data can tell you:
- A flat overall number might be hiding strong growth in Pokémon pages alongside a decline in Magic.
- 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 vs. non-branded queries is what makes the data useful.
For Cardmarket, with three separate domains to track, Sallar consolidates everything into a single Semrush dashboard:
“It’s not just about growth month over month. It’s making sure that the growth is where we actually want it to be, and whether it’s aligned with our actual mission for the year.”
Step 2: Build trust signals that can be verified
Cardmarket operates as a marketplace: The platform never holds inventory, but it is responsible for what happens between buyers and sellers. Trust is existential for this model.
The team reached a key insight: AI chatbots evaluate trust pretty much 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 — the same sources a cautious first-time buyer would check manually.
With this in mind, the goal was to make existing trust signals concrete, documented, and findable:
- Buyer protection mechanisms on the site: Cardmarket’s Trustee Service holds payment until the buyer confirms their order has arrived. It is documented in detail in the help center
- Verified seller requirements: Professional sellers must provide a real address, VAT ID, phone number, business registration, and transparent shipping policies
- Transparent pricing: Every card shows a price history graph. Cardmarket positions itself as the price authority for TCGs in Europe, and the data makes that verifiable.
- Event sponsorships: Sponsoring real-world TCG tournaments also builds credibility that extends beyond the platform into the community itself
- Channels: Every major game on Cardmarket has its own dedicated channel, creating ongoing videos and content for the overall community
“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.”
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 actually 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: people who can explain which cards matter competitively, how a new set fits the current metagame, and why certain cards are worth collecting. The content will be verified by Cardmarket, translated into five languages by translators who know the game, and published alongside the product listings.
“We don’t write SEO text, we write for the community. It’s not just: 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, with the Umbreon ex page alone pulling 560K:
Step 4: Match your metadata to how your audience searches
With millions of card pages across various games, Cardmarket can’t optimize each page individually. Instead, Sallar works with the games management team to build metadata templates — grouping pages by game and using language that reflects how each community actually 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 optimal balance.
Step 5: Use keyword gap analysis to spot high-signal moments early
With millions of potential card pages, Sallar cannot monitor what is trending manually. Keyword and prompt gap analysis — performed daily using Semrush tools — is how he 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, which made it highly collectible and 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 just another card. It was a cultural moment, and the page needed content to match the demand.
Step 6: 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 (Initially created organically by users, it was later handed over to the team and is maintained by the team today.)
- Community forums for each major game
- 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 trying to manipulate the narrative, though. It’s making sure the accurate version of the story is easy to find.
“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 — including a recent Forbes Austria and Switzerland feature on the financial dynamics of the trading card market — reinforcing its authority on card pricing well beyond the TCG niche
The results: consistent organic growth + AI sessions up >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 5.8M monthly organic visits, with over 74K 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 10K to 30.1K, with 26.4K citations and 30.4K 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 still 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.
The takeaway
The six steps above share a 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 are all pulling 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.
