SEO Effectiveness for Promoting Cryptocurrency Exchanges
Brian Armstrong
In 2012, Brian Armstrong launched the Coinbase cryptocurrency exchange, and in April 2021, its capitalization was $61 billion. The demand for cryptocurrencies is growing, so now new exchanges will appear, but the question is which ones will be successful. Usually, cryptocurrency exchanges, at the initial stages of promotion, use forums, Discord servers and other social channels to attract the target audience (TA). At the moment, contextual advertising in the cryptocurrency niche works, but not in all countries; even if there is no specific ban officially by law, there still may be various restrictions.
SEO Effectiveness for Promoting Cryptocurrency Exchanges
Cryptocurrency exchanges experienced in SEO have traffic ranging from 15% up to 50%. It should be noted that SEO organic traffic in different topics can be the main source of TA, as well as a secondary one. But in the field of cryptocurrencies, there is a special situation: from time to time news (“hype”) about cryptocurrencies appears, and it leads to an instant growth of the exchange rate, as well as a rapid increase in SEO traffic. For example, at the end of February 2021, Bitcoin had already had a high rate for a long time, mining was super-profitable, and crypto exchangers received an influx of new customers across all TA channels. News about cryptocurrencies had already ceased to appear often, and was no longer trending in the media. However, when investors from Reddit were blocked on Robinhood, and Elon Musk wrote a couple of posts on Twitter about Dogecoin, we noticed an explosive growth of SEO traffic of cryptocurrency exchanges to the top in March again.
In times like these, cryptocurrency exchanges, which have better organized SEO optimization and promotion in advance, take the lead.
There is almost no risk of blocking organic search results in this niche in Google, so it is definitely worth to allocate a sufficient budget for SEO of the cryptocurrency exchange. Especially because during periods of media “hype“ about cryptocurrencies, it is mostly search engines that attract a new target audience.
Internal Optimization – Competitors’ Content Analysis
It is well understood that we can only very roughly calculate the price of content, because sometimes expert content is extremely expensive, while content ordered on the exchange is cheap. For SEO texts, it is enough to know its approximate cost, based, for example, on prices of “iWriter”.
The table represents very approximate figures, but we can see that traffic of a site containing 93 thousand pages is even less than traffic of a site containing about 2-2.5 thousand pages. However, in general, after analyzing, we concluded that for a full investigation of semantics on the topic of cryptocurrencies, more than 2000 pages are needed.
| Content analysis | Amount of pages and words | Ahrefs traffic | Content value |
| kraken.com | 2540 pages and 111 thousand words. | 1.7 million | 36850$ |
| luno.com | 2410 pages and 51 thousand words. | 314 thousand | 50279$ |
| remitano.com | 93200 pages and 11.5 thousand words. | 207 thousand | 1038667$ |
| anycoindirect.eu | 2190 pages and 17.2 thousand words. | 54.4 thousand. | 45757$ |
| coinsquare.com | 4290 pages and 20.2 thousand words. | 34.3 thousand | 29897$ |
As it is understood on the basis of our investigation of five sites, the site remitano.com, containing about 93 thousand pages, has less traffic than the site luno. com, containing 2.4 thousand pages. There are authoritative opinions that there is no need to create a large number of pages, as it is more important to focus on the quality of the content. But there is also a conclusion based on experience: the more pages and “growth points” – the more SEO traffic. Obviously, to get to the top, a site about cryptocurrencies needs about 2 thousand pages of unique content and the position in Google search results will largely depend on external links.
Growth points – searching for traffic
To get organic SEO traffic, you need growth points. They can be an FAQ section, comments, translated content (Google treats translations as new content, because the words in the text change).
We will allocate such prerogatives by growth points specifically for crypto exchanges.
- Language page diversification and geo-linking. If possible, it is advisable to create subdomains of the site for each country separately and also to create pages for major cities and capitals.
- Separate information pages for all cryptocurrencies.
- Pages with all possible options for cryptocurrency exchange.
- Blog about cryptocurrencies: current news, trends and so on. Keywords for SEO promotion are still important, and constantly updating content will allow you to supplement semantics by following news from the trends.
Do not be afraid of using automatic internal link generation, Google does not regard this as spam because such links are on most sites. It is noticeable that the global growth point for the leaders in the top search results of cryptocurrency exchanges is the creation of versions of the site in different languages, which allows you to attract TA from around the world.
External optimization – link building
To reach the top of Google search results, you need these types of links:
- PBN links: necessary to promote important key SEO queries (the price per link is about $15).
- Crowd marketing links: necessary for rarefying with non-anchor links and brand mentioning (an additional source of traffic). The price is about 1-2 dollars per piece.
- Outreach links, guest posts (trust links and publications in media) – the price ranges from 100 up to 500-700 dollars.
- GSA usage: should be applied carefully as tier 2 and tier 3, if needed (the price starts from $50).
The table below shows an approximate calculation of the reference mass cost of different cryptocurrency exchanges, based on Google top results.
*Data was not processed manually; it is based on the analysis of data taken from Ahrefs and Semrush
Having analyzed the link profiles of several sites, we observe that Kraken.com (the leader in PBN links and GSA usage) gets the main traffic for brand queries; it is popular. After all, the cryptocurrency exchange that was launched before the “hype” of Bitcoin in 2017-2018 and has already been on the market for more than 5 years will have a high level of trust, meaning that its organic traffic will continually grow.
A screenshot from Semrush, April 2021
In addition, Kraken.com probably gained more reference mass because of its experience on the market. There are almost the same number of outreach links, guest posts, as well as media publications, that is, links from trust sites, of all the top sites: 50-60 pieces, and sometimes less. At the same time, most of the sites in the table have approximately the same number of crowd links. However, in comparison, there are such sites as coinsquare.com or anycoindirect.eu, which have ten times less PBN and other links, their promotion started later, but they still get good SEO traffic.
A screenshot from Semrush, April 2021
Since it is virtually impossible to find enough thematic sites for a reasonable price to promote a commercial site in a short time, it is necessary to use links from PBN networks. When the usage of links on other sites is ordered, no one knows what will happen to the page on the donor site, because the structure may change and a page with an ordered link may appear deep within the site. Therefore, the ideal option is to order the creation of a Private Blog Network to get PBNs which have only thematic links at tier 2 level. Creating a single site for a PBN network costs about $150, but such a network of links will be immediately and forever adapted to the required semantics.
Interestingly, anycoindirect.eu has good organic results for key queries about cryptocurrencies, although the cost of links is less than that of competitors in the table above, who began to promote themselves 2-3 years earlier.
The top positions, with traffic. A screenshot from Semrush, April 2021
We also should pay attention to coinsquare.com. It is a relatively young site, but its link profile is comparable to anycoindirect.eu and it holds good positions for thematic key queries, such as top: btc cad, eth cad (exchange for Canadian dollar).
The top positions, taken from Ahrefs, April 2021
There are few top pages with a high volume of traffic and all the rest of the traffic is distributed across pages with other cryptocurrency exchange options or article pages. There is no doubt that an increase in traffic for top queries was due to the worldwide “hype” on the topic of cryptocurrencies at the beginning of 2021, that is, the world’s media advertised for free and traffic was immediately won by cryptocurrency exchanges that were ready for SEO optimization.
A moderate analysis of five different cryptocurrency exchanges shows that despite the abundance of competitors with a huge link profile, it is possible to take SEO positions in a cryptocurrency exchange niche, if you are ready to spend at least 75 thousand dollars within a period of 1-2 years on links.
SEO budget and prospects
Based on our analysis, we can roughly assume what budget will be required to gain a top position for the topic of cryptocurrency exchange.
| * On average, all data is rounded | Minimum budget | Optimal budget | Maximum budget |
| Content cost | From $30 thousand | $40 thousand | $50 thousand |
| External links | From $75 thousand | $100 thousand | $150 thousand |
| Total | From $100-105 thousand | $140-150 thousand | Up to $200 thousand |
Even if you round off all the figures, you will have to spend at least 100 thousand dollars within a period of 1-2 years to get to the top for cryptocurrency exchanges.
The approximate prognosis of SEO traffic in terms of an optimal budget will be analyzed, for example, according to the data given by anycoindirect.eu.
According to the charts, the cryptocurrency exchange is already well-known, most people know the brand, and it is probably promoted in the communities of miners and cryptocurrency investors. However, more than 19% of traffic comes from search queries. It should be understood that a certain number of this target audience then becomes regular visitors to the exchange, that is, the real benefit of SEO traffic is always substantially greater than the 19.5% shown here.
While this article was being written, over the past week, the Bitcoin exchange rate was about 55-60 thousand dollars, so if you have some extra Bitcoins: you can safely create and start promoting your cryptocurrency exchange to the top of Google search results for the whole world.
