Search, browse and repeat, in that order of surprise

Marketplace bookings arrive by four routes - internal search, category browse, repeat and referral - and for most earners new buyers come mainly through search. Buyers rarely scroll a category and pick; they type a phrase into the search box, look at the first screen of results, and choose from that.

The distinction matters because the four routes reward completely different work, and effort spent on the wrong one produces nothing visible.

The four routes

Internal search. A buyer arrives knowing roughly what they want and types it. Your listing either contains the words they used or it does not, and the ranking decides whether they see you at all. This is the largest source of new buyers on most marketplaces and the least visible to the person being found. Attention on any results page is front-loaded: in a 2018 eyetracking study by Nielsen Norman Group, users spent about 57% of their page-viewing time above the fold and 74% in the first two screenfuls.

Category browse. A buyer with no specific phrase in mind, working down a filtered list. Volume here is lower and intent is weaker, and position is decided almost entirely by the platform's sort rather than by anything on your page.

Repeat. A buyer who has used you before, arriving directly. Highest conversion rate of anything on this list by a wide margin, and it costs nothing to acquire.

Referral. Someone told them, in a place you cannot see. Rare, slow to build, and the highest-value route per booking because the buyer arrives pre-persuaded. Referrals in a private trade covers why it works differently here than in most trades.

How to tell which is yours

You cannot, from platform analytics, on most marketplaces. What you can do is ask, in one sentence, at the point of delivery: how did you come across me.

Log the answer next to the job. Twenty answers is enough to see the shape, and the shape is frequently not what you expected. This is the same one-column discipline that makes take-home per format computable, and it costs the same nothing.

The second signal is the pattern of your enquiries. Enquiries that name your format precisely came from search. Enquiries that open with "I'm looking at a few people" came from browse. Enquiries with no preamble at all came from repeat or referral.

Optimising for search, which is the one that pays

Search rewards two things: matching the words a buyer uses, and ranking well enough to be on the first screen.

The words part is straightforward and gets done badly. Buyers do not use the vocabulary earners use. They describe the outcome they want in plain language, and a listing written in trade terms misses them entirely. The way to find the real phrases is to read the enquiries you already have and use their words, which is the practical half of writing a first line that gets read.

Do not repeat the phrase eight times. Modern marketplace search handles synonyms and penalises stuffing, and a listing that reads as written for a machine loses the buyer who does find it. Keywords without sounding like a robot is the longer version.

The ranking part is not a copywriting problem at all. It is completion rate, response time and recency, and it is covered in how marketplace ranking works. The important consequence is that being visible in search is mostly earned by behaviour rather than by editing your page, which is why rewriting the listing a fourth time changes nothing.

Browse is worth less effort than it feels like

Browse position is largely out of your hands, and browse traffic converts worse because the intent is weaker.

The one thing worth doing is making sure you appear in the right categories and filters at all, including the ones you think are marginal. A filter you are missing from is a segment of demand that cannot see you regardless of how good the listing is. Check this once, properly, and then stop thinking about browse.

Repeat is where the actual money is

A repeat buyer costs nothing to find, converts at a rate a new buyer never will, and often books larger.

The work is entirely in the delivery rather than in the marketing, which is why it is the route most under-invested in. What brings repeat buyers back is the substantive treatment; the relevant point here is that a booking from an existing buyer and a booking from search cost you wildly different amounts of effort and are frequently recorded as the same event.

If your repeat share is under a fifth after six months, you have a delivery problem rather than a discovery problem, and no amount of listing work will fix it.

What this implies for where to spend a week

Given a spare week and a functioning listing, the ranked order is: deliver well enough to generate repeats, respond fast enough to rank, write in your buyers' vocabulary, and then, distantly, worry about browse.

Most earners run that list backwards.

Buyers arriving from search have usually already tried the free instant options and found them insufficient, which changes what your first reply should say - the tools setting that baseline are worth knowing by name. The buyer-side account of how someone actually chooses between three profiles is written up from the commissioning end, and it corrects the assumption that they are comparing quality when mostly they are comparing risk. And the reason generic phrasing wins nothing in search is that the generic version of this work is already automated and free, as the account of what a model reliably produces sets out.

For how listing, search and category placement work on the platform itself rather than as a general pattern, Rate Cock's judges page is the current source.