What is Crypto SEO?
This guide will provide a comprehensive outline covering Crypto SEO, how SEO for crypto works, applications of SEO for different projects and how best to utilise SEO for your website or dApp. As a colloquial definition, Crypto here refers to any platform, dApp, or product that utilises any form of crypto, token, asset etc.
As more projects emerge, many forking previous protocols and tech, driving new users to your dApp and platforms in a cost-effective means will be a core way of building your DAUs. Crypto SEO ensures that your content reaches the right audience, drives organic traffic, and ultimately leads to more users, conversions and Proper SEO techniques help in building authority, trust, and visibility in search engines, which is vital for attracting investors, traders, and enthusiasts.
The Benefits of SEO for your Crypto Project
What are the benefits in optimising your SEO? Some key reasons to consider working with a Crypto SEO agency.
Cost-effective Revenue Generation
SEO can be framed in several ways depending on your approach, one of the simplest framings is ‘Owned’, ‘Earned’ & ‘Paid’. SEO contributes largely to owned and earned media, meaning you can drive acquisitions without actively spending on paid media, positioning SEO (or organic, owned, earned media) as the most ROI-positive channel.
Attract More Users
Data shows Organic Traffic (SEO) on average, can contribute to nearly a quarter, if not more of a project’s total traffic and users. Taking this into account for some leading projects in various spaces, we see millions of users discovering projects organically, outside of Social, Community etc.
Project % Organic Traffic Est. Organic Users
CoinGecko (Aggregator) 30% 56,100,000
Binance (CEX) 21% 50,820,000
Trader Joe (DEX) 17% 357,000
OpenSea (Marketplace) 28% 9,240,000
CoinBase (CEX/Wallet) 25% 36,450,000
Staking Rewards (Staking Agg.) 46% 685,400
CoinMarketCap (Aggregator) 28% 127,120,000
Source: SimilarWeb (March – May 2024)
Build your Brand.
Organic traffic often reflects your project’s brand penetration into the market, we can gather the Brand/Non-brand and Direct traffic to produce a model that associates a given proportion and figure associated to users that are already familiar with your project. and the proportion of users not familiar with your project. SEO aims to drive more net new users via unbranded demand and keywords.
Core Tactical Pillars for a Crypto SEO Strategy
First, let’s establish the core tenants of any SEO strategy, these all inherently apply to Crypto SEO and can belong to three main overarching sectors:
Content
Content production, content marketing, optimisation, localisation – you name it. Content is at the core of most SEO efforts, serving as a means to capture attention and users. As an overview and as a short-hand in this article, content can take several forms:
Landing Pages
Blog Posts (On-site, Medium, Mirror etc.)
Video (AMAs, Webinars, etc.) & Transcripts
eBooks
Whitepapers
Podcasts
How-to-guides
Docs & Developer Portals
Technical
Technical SEO ensures that a website meets the technical requirements of modern search engines. Key elements include website speed, mobile-friendliness, indexing, and security. Technical SEO has a direct impact of user experience, conversion and ability to rank, and contains:
Site Speed
Content Delivery (JavaScript, Dynamic Content, Single Page App)
Indexation
Sitemaps
Security
Backlinks
Backlinks play a significant role in SEO, providing authority, topical relevance, and strong ranking signals as per Google’s algorithm. They also serve as a means to inform search engines of your website’s relevance within a given space, more links from other web3 projects and outlets = more authority in web3.
Backlinks (number of individual links pointing from a website, i.e. 15 links from Hackermoon)
Referring Domains (the number of domains linking to you, Hackermoon = 1 domain.)
Link Attributes (follow or no-follow)
Domain Authority (Authority of a denoted domain pointing to your site)
Toxicity (what % of your backlinks are considered spam)
E-E-A-T
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. This is especially connected to crypto SEO given the YMYL (Your Money, Your Life) outlines presented by Google. As there is a financial element, Google’s content guidelines are much more particular and infer your Crypto SEO content must be trust worthy and an authority.
Having Established Core Tenants of SEO, How Can Crypto projects Benefit from Crypto SEO?
Exchanges (DEX/CEX)
Exchanges, centralised or otherwise, are dependant on heavy traffic and users to drive transactions and build their liquidity, etc. Scaling paid media can become costly, as such, utilising Programmatic SEO-based techniques to acquire users can maximise your ROI and allow for always-on acquisition efforts.
Wallets
The wallet market continues to grow and adopt UX-friendly upgrades post account abstraction and other updates. With that being said, many new users will search and research wallets, and likely discover ones on a search engine (Google or YouTube). Ensuring your wallet is discoverable and simply explained to end users can drive installs.
NFT Marketplaces
As with exchanges, marketplaces require DAUs, trades and transactions to drive their business model. New users will also often turn to search engines to discover marketplaces, collections and information around the best and most affordable marketplaces available.
Aggregators (Affiliates)
Affiliate models also require high volumes to generate transactions via their platform, merging content such as news, token information, and market movements, aggregators can drive huge SEO value.
What are the Top Crypto SEO Keywords Projects can Optimise For?
The top Crypto SEO keywords (Generic), and refined to align to tangible commercial or transactional keywords, show a growing and engaged market researching and looking for crypto-aligned news and products. The volume below highlights the number of searches per month in the United States alone.
‘Crypto’ as a single word on Google Globally, has approx. 847k searches monthly, meaning an approximate annual search (fluxing based on macro sentiment and market conditions) could reach, or exceed 10,170,000 searches per month – in other words, over 10 million potential users on Google interested in Crypto.
Keyword Intent Volume Keyword Difficulty CPC (USD)
crypto Informational, Commercial 165,000 100 5.59
crypto news Transactional 135,000 100 2.77
crypto prices Commercial 40,500 89 3.36
crypto wallet Commercial 18,100 94 7.15
crypto calculator Commercial 12,100 65 6.14
crypto market Informational 9,900 95 3.91
crypto news today Informational 9,900 100 2.72
what is crypto Informational 9,900 96 3.16
best crypto wallet Commercial 8,100 87 8.12
crypto etf Commercial 8,100 72 2.39
crypto exchange Commercial 8,100 100 7.27
crypto profit calculator Commercial 8,100 69 6.62
crypto trading Informational, Commercial 8,100 88 5.14
Some of the highest-searched Crypto keywords (Source: SEMrush)
How to do SEO for Crypto?
Now that we have established demand, potential applications and the fundamental elements of Crypto SEO, let’s look at potential tactics and opportunities your project can apply by working with a top crypto SEO agency like ColdChain, or undertaking a Crypto SEO strategy.
Content-Led SEO Opportunities for Crypto Projects:
Content is core to capturing more desired, high-value keywords and to appear in-front of potential users of your project. The first tactics to consider for content is to undertake focused keyword research and content journeys.
These journeys and will differ by product, though at its heart – content should simply look to provide useful information to a user, some examples:
SEO for a Crypto Wallet
Implement Keyword Research:
User-friendly guides go a long way for driving new users to your wallet, ‘how to install MetaMask’ is likely a familiar search for most in the space. While this is a simple observation, we can expound on this and deliver an optimised experience.
As we can see, a quick Google exposes several content ideas to help inform your content and ensure users can discover your wallet easy, have simple, clear and easily discoverable guides.
Consolidate Content for a Linear Journey
Often, projects will have multiple domains, subdomains and touch-points that users have to navigate which can be confusing and also minimises your domain authority.
Here we see a typical journey on a web3-associated website, multiple subdomains such as developer portals, docs, Medium blogs and so on. These all splinter journeys and tend to have content for different audiences (developer vs. retail by example).
Applying these amendments based on data-driven insights into user’s needs can drive an impact for your wallet, and secure more users, installs and transactions.
Technical SEO Opportunities for Crypto Projects:
Technical SEO spans several tactics, in this example we will look at using technical web elements in conjunction with content can lead to yuuuge potential SEO upside, namely, programmatic SEO.
SEO for a Crypto Exchange
Inform your Exchange with SEO
Factor in SEO from the start. To maximise the impact of programmatic SEO, having SEO inform your UX, hierarchy and taxonomy underpins its ability to rank and perform. Programmatic carries a host of considerations such as indexation, crawl budget, sitemaps and duplicate content, all of which require technical SEO know-how to navigate. AI can also be utilised, if structured and optimised.
For this example, let’s assume your exchange will offer 10,000 tokens and be available in 5 markets using 5 different currencies. We can quickly imagine the amount of cross-referencing we can do with a single token.
Let’s take a popular token like $TON, your exchange lists $TON and wants to drive users to purchase, knowing what and how users search is the base of your opportunity. From here, we benchmark modifiers to ‘TON’ such as ‘Toncoin’, ‘TON price’, ‘Buy TON’, and so on. This leads to an exponential amount of avenues your content can take, which cannot be done manually, enter programmatic SEO.
Starting from demand, understand associated search terms and available APIs and datapoints available and look to consolidate them in a structured, SEO-friendly way. As the chart above shows, a mix of static and dynamic elements can build a page with strong opportunities to rank.
Link-Building Tactics for Crypto Projects:
Content marketing is a tried and tested means for a website to earn backlinks and grow their domain authority, in the realm of web3 link-building is largely done through pay-to-play PR and partnerships, while these are beneficial, how can SEO-driven content marketing help secure links without the budget.
SEO for a Crypto Aggregator
Use Thought-leadership & Narratives to Earn Links
While earning links is a mix of art and science, it holds true to utilise techniques that are often see repeated in successful content marketing efforts, central to this is always using SEO-driven content and ideas.
Data-driven reports are often well received by Crypto outlets and other news sites, this gives opportunity for crypto projects to utilise their own data and market/macro data to provide shareable, informative content and guides.
As with these other examples, SEO can play a large role in informing this piece, from current trending topics, to macro narratives and themes. When new demands and narratives build, this can start at the product level and not yet have data points, however, pre-empting demand, or conducting due diligence to understand potential coming alpha can be valuable.
Let’s consider RWA, a huge narrative now, once nascent, your website could share thought-leadership in this trending space, align PR and comms efforts and build SEO-informed content that will be seen as the new macro, encouraging retail and news audiences to share.
Crypto SEO Example & Analysis: CoinMarketCap
Now that we understand the potential of SEO’s uses across ranges of crypto projects, we can announce that SEO is not dead. Some incredibly powerful elements of SEO include simple tools, countdowns, job listings, and much more.
As with good marketing, good SEO is when you don’t realised you are being SEO’d, and simply find a useful tool or piece of content that suits your current needs. Here’s some insight into SEO tactics utilised by CoinMarketCap:
Price Action & Programmatic SEO
CoinMarketCap utilises several SEO-centric tactics across an exponential amount of tokens and information. Utilising optimised formatting and architecture, they are able to generate a huge amount of content that is informative, timely and dynamic.
Price Focus: Token price to USD, live price & market cap are all heavily-searched terms that can act as a prefix to any token listing feature on CMC, this allows for rapid scaling of content and demand capture. The programmatic structure utilises dynamic elements and pre-determined keyword modifiers based on keyword research such as:
“PROJECT” Price Today “TOKEN’ Price Live, “TOKEN” Price to USD
This covers demand for both the project, i.e. Bitcoin and the token, i.e. BTC covering all demand related to the prefix, and modifying the known, static keywords of ‘price today’. Scaling this across the number of tokens listed on CMC and the potential explains the significant amount of traffic secured by CMC.
Informational Content:
Answering FAQs and related questions help to establish CMC as an expert in relation to said project and a token, providing answers to known queries drives new users to CMC and serves them valuable, useful information simultaneously.
Questions are a leading format informing SEO and content ideation, especially in the crypto and blockchain space, given its complexity. CMC mix user-based questions, with macro-narratives informed by press and media to piggy-back on PR and news to maintain momentum and relevance, such as ‘Who Are the Largest Corporate Holders of Bitcoin?’ and content around energy consumption. Answering questions concisely can help solidify CMC’s E-E-A-T and relevance.
Data-led Content:
Studies around featured snippets have shown that lists, and tables pertaining to data, and answering a question concisely can often trigger a featured snippet or PAA (People also ask) result. In this case, CMC utilises their data to format answers and utilise Schema mark up to present this information clearly to search engines.
Schema mark up is an element of technical SEO that overlays schema mark up on a webpage to allow search engines to easily digest and understand this information is a clear structure.
mainEntity
@context
https://schema.org/
@type
Question
name
How much Shiba Inu (SHIB) can I buy for ₹1?
This also follows a programmatic structure having the price of TOKEN against CURRENCY in this case, SHIB x INR:
Conclusion
Crypto SEO is still an untapped resource available to many projects, those who have embraced it so far are reaping the rewards, SEO can be a long-game, however, forward-thinking projects who are in it for the long-haul should seriously consider Crypto SEO as an effective tactic to support their growth.
