"My keywords stopped working" is the sentence, and the answer inside it is that they were never keywords in the second sense. They were inputs to one company's internal ranking system for its own catalogue.
Here is what each system is actually doing, because once the difference is clear, most of the confusing advice sorts itself out.
What each one is ranking
A marketplace search engine ranks the marketplace's own listings against each other. It has a closed universe. Every candidate is a product for sale, every visitor is already on a shopping site, and the platform's own commercial interest, which is completing transactions, is the objective.
A general search engine ranks the entire web against a query. The candidates are product pages, articles, videos, forum threads, retailers, encyclopaedias and news. The visitor may want any of them, and the engine's objective is to satisfy the query rather than to sell anything.
Everything else follows from the size and shape of the candidate pool.
The two systems side by side
Everything below follows from that difference in candidate pool, so it is worth seeing it in one place before we work through it.
| What you are deciding on | Marketplace search | General search |
|---|---|---|
| What it ranks | The marketplace's own listings against each other, a closed universe | The entire web against a query: product pages, articles, videos, forum threads, retailers, news |
| Buyer intent | Assumed. Every visitor is already on a shopping site | Inferred. The engine works out whether you want to buy, learn, compare or fix, then shows a page type that matches |
| Who you compete with | Other sellers of similar things, a bounded field | Everyone who has written anything on the phrase, including large retailers, publishers and the marketplace you just left |
| What decides the ranking | The listing, the shop's performance, the platform's own quality measures | Signals off your page: links from other sites, how long the site has existed, brand recognition, the whole site rather than the one page |
| How fast it moves | Listings can move within days | Longer periods, and unevenly |
| The unit you control | The listing. It is the only unit there is | The page type is a choice: a collection page, a product page, a guide, or nothing at all |
The last row is the one that changes your daily work, and the fourth is the one that makes a new store feel broken when it is only new. What the table leaves out is everything the two systems have in common, which is more than this comparison makes it look, and that gets its own section further down.
Four differences that matter in practice
1. Intent is assumed in one and inferred in the other
A marketplace can assume you want to buy. A general engine has to work out whether you want to buy, learn, compare or fix something, and it will show a page type that matches.
Practical consequence: for many of the phrases you used as listing keywords, the general engine does not want to show a product page at all. Competing for those with a product page is competing for a slot that does not exist.
2. The competition is different in kind
On a marketplace you compete with other sellers of similar things, and the field is bounded.
On the open web you compete with everyone who has written anything about that phrase, including large retailers with decades of accumulated authority, publishers, and the marketplace you just left, which will frequently be on the first page for your own category terms.
Practical consequence: a query that was competitive but winnable on the platform may be entirely out of reach on the open web, and a query nobody bothered with on the platform may be reachable. The winnable set is a different set, not a harder version of the same one.
3. Signals outside the page count
Marketplace ranking is largely about the listing, the shop's performance and the platform's own quality measures.
General search weighs things that are not on your page at all: whether other sites link to you, how long the site has existed, whether people recognize the brand, and the overall picture of the site rather than the single page.
Practical consequence: a new store is genuinely disadvantaged in a way a new listing on an established marketplace was not, because the platform lent you its standing and your own domain has none. That is the honest cost of the move, and it is one of the things our article on what a marketplace was doing for you is about.
4. Speed
Marketplace listings can move within days. Open-web ranking moves over much longer periods and does so unevenly.
Practical consequence: the feedback loop you are used to does not exist. Changing a title and checking the next morning, which is a reasonable marketplace habit, tells you nothing here, and it encourages the constant tinkering that prevents anything from settling.
What is genuinely the same
Worth saying, because the differences above can make it sound like starting from nothing.
The language buyers use. Identical, and you already know it.
That specific beats generic. Long, specific queries are where a smaller player competes on both systems, for the same underlying reason.
That the page has to satisfy the person who arrives. Both systems, in different ways, respond to whether people who land are satisfied.
That images matter. Both surface them and both reward good ones.
The single biggest adjustment
On a marketplace, the listing was the only unit. On your own site, the page type is a choice you make.
That is the shift. You now decide whether a given query gets a collection page, a product page, a guide, or nothing at all, and matching the page type to the query is more decisive than anything you do inside the page.
A store that publishes only product pages is playing the general search game with one piece. That is the specific mistake this whole cluster exists to prevent, and it is covered in our companion articles on collection pages and on product pages.
Where the marketplace still wins
It is worth being straight about this, because a site arguing for leaving has an obvious incentive not to say it.
For a seller with no audience, no content and no links, marketplace search is a better distribution channel than open-web search, and it will be for a long time. That is not a defect of your own store; it is the service you were buying with the fees.
The argument for owning a store is not that its search is better. It is that the audience becomes yours, that nobody can suspend it, and that the asset accrues rather than resets. Whether that is worth the slower start is exactly the question our pillar on whether you should move at all is built around, and it has a real "no" available, set out in the honest case for staying.
The one-line version
Marketplace search picks between products for someone who has already decided to shop. General search picks between all page types for someone whose intent it has to infer. Your keyword knowledge transfers; your assumption that a keyword's job is to be typed into a listing does not.