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I am working with an e-commerce site that does mostly B2B sales in a very commoditized industrial product segment in which very few manufacturers sell direct. It's all done through distributors and resellers, like our site.

We don't often win on price, but we do win enough SERP battles to get the visitors and provide great customer service, so we have gained a following and we do compete well for some very large orders.

We list several thousand products and in a given month, visitors regularly hit over 1,000 different landing pages. While we make most money from relatively few items, most items are sold only once a year, maybe twice. It's a very longtail business, and therefore tough to do a great job optimizing all pages down the tail.

So, one thing I'm doing is building out a set of resource pages with common questions, terminology and other useful bits so the site gains more traffic and authority, in the hope of boosting product pages. e.g., an in-depth category definition in the glossary could link to all the items in a category.

In addition to adding content that augments product pages, I'd like to create basically a map of the whole industry, including brand name manufacturers, white label manufacturers, distributors, etc.

If it's going to be a truly comprehensive list, it should include my competitors. Given that I have never found such a list, it feels like this could be a good page and earn some links. Since it's unlikely much traffic will even find that page, compared to product pages, are there potential pitfalls I should be aware of?

I get the feeling if I create a page that others bookmark and visit when hunting for products in our market, we win, even if most visitors to that page won't buy from us. I've been in this industry for four years now, and it's amazing how hard it is to find some companies. Only a handful even think about SEO, since they sell through other channels.

Should I link to all my competitors (which is only about a dozen) among hundreds of other industry links?

@Kateparish Thank you for you answer, by the way. Helpful clarity.

@Tom-Capper Thanks for the thoughtful reply.

Most customers can't buy direct, so that's not a concern. Manufacturers limit who they sell to and those "master distributors" often only sell to lower level distributors.

So if you're an electrical contractor or an engineer in need of a relatively small purchase of some specialized thing that you need right away, but you can't find locally, it can be super-hard to get, except for through a relatively small batch of websites like ours.

Let me ask the question another way: If the "Big Industry List" I want to build is a useful website section that gets found, even if the traffic is unlikely to be my buyers in that moment, can that improve my SEO?

I'm trying to boost the visibility of thousands of product pages partially by creating helpful content that can't link to all of them. Whenever possible, it links to category pages, but not always.

Can the rising tide of some useful content pages help lift other pages in the same domain, even if the topics aren't specifically about those pages? Or do those content pages need external inbound links in order to be valuable for SEO because it would raise our DA?