Architecting Authority
A marketplace connecting clients with photography and creative professionals across India. No organic presence on day one. We built the SEO framework, city architecture and content SOPs from scratch. Six months in: 220K impressions, 8K clicks, top 7 average position, almost every targeted keyword ranked.
Createsco is a marketplace for creative professionals across India. Photography, videography, makeup, styling, event services. Clients browse verified professionals, check portfolios and book directly. The model made sense. The organic presence did not exist.
Createsco was built on a custom-coded website with pages for dozens of service categories and 25 cities across India. None of it was ranking. The URL structure was not optimised for search. There was no content framework. No internal linking logic. No structured data connecting professional profiles to the categories buyers were searching for. Every visitor had to be acquired directly. Nothing was compounding.
The size of the opportunity was also the size of the problem. A marketplace needs to rank for [service] + [city] combinations at scale. Wedding photographer in Delhi. Corporate videographer in Pune. Product photographer in Bangalore. Each combination is a real buyer query with commercial intent. If a competitor owns those queries, the marketplace does not get the enquiry regardless of how good the professionals listed on it are.
There were also tier 2 and tier 3 markets to consider. Buyers in Jaipur, Lucknow, Chandigarh, Coimbatore and Kochi were searching. Competitors in those cities were thin. The window to claim those positions early was open. The technical and content infrastructure to do it did not yet exist.
Marketplaces have a different SEO challenge from single-service businesses. They need to rank at category level, at location level, and at the intersection of both. That requires a system, not a page.
The approach for Createsco was infrastructure-first. Before any content was written, the architecture had to be correct. How the URLs were structured. How city pages related to category pages. How internal links passed authority. How structured data described the marketplace to search engines. Getting this wrong at the start means fixing it under a live ranking system later, which is significantly more expensive.
We designed the URL structure around how buyers actually search: service category first, then city. Tier 1 cities (Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkata, Pune) were prioritised for depth. Tier 2 cities got category-level pages optimised for the specific service mix with real search demand in that market. Tier 3 cities were mapped to the highest-intent single query per location to claim early positions while competition was low. The internal linking structure connected each level so authority built from the most-linked pages downward.
Photography, videography, makeup, styling, event services. Each category has different buyer questions, different search patterns and different trust signals. We built a content SOP for each: the exact headings buyers expected, the FAQ questions that matched real search queries, the proof signals that reduced friction at the point of booking. The SOP made it possible for the SEO team to execute consistently across every city page without individual briefing for each one. Every page produced from the SOP followed the same structural logic while remaining genuinely different in content.
A marketplace has entities that a standard business website does not: professional profiles, verified reviews, pricing ranges, booking availability, location service areas. We designed schema markup that communicated these clearly to search engines. Service schema, LocalBusiness schema for professional listings, AggregateRating schema from verified reviews. This structured signal layer made the pages more eligible for rich results and gave search engines a cleaner understanding of what the marketplace offered and where it served buyers.
Createsco runs on a custom-coded website, not a CMS. Changes to URL structure, internal linking and schema required direct coordination with the developer. We worked within the technical constraints of the existing architecture, identified where structural changes were worth the implementation cost, and prioritised changes by ranking impact per hour of development time. The SEO team executed content against the SOP framework. The development team handled technical implementation. The framework made both sets of work coherent and aligned.
The first three months were predominantly signal-building. The city architecture was in place. The category SOPs were being executed. Pages were being crawled and indexed. Impressions were low. This is normal for a new domain building topical depth. Search engines need to see a pattern of relevant, structured content before they begin distributing positions.
By month four, ranking positions began consolidating. By month six, nearly every targeted keyword had a position. Some were in the top three. Most were in the top seven. The impression curve accelerated in the final two months as more pages cleared the threshold to appear for broader related queries, not just the exact targets.
The SOP made scale possible. Without it, producing 25 city pages across five categories would have required individual briefing for every page. With it, the SEO team could work against a repeatable system. The framework also meant that when new professionals joined the marketplace in a city that had not been targeted yet, adding that city's pages was a known process, not a new project.
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The Createsco model creates an SEO problem most agencies handle badly. They write one good city page and then copy it 24 times. Search engines see that immediately. What worked here was treating each city as a real market with its own search patterns, not a template slot. The SOP kept execution consistent. The thinking behind each city stayed genuine. That combination is what produced top 7 positions across tier 2 and tier 3 cities where most competitors had not looked yet.
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