SEO For Crypto: The Ultimate SEO Guide For Blockchain Organizations

July 28, 2022

A large percentage of cryptocurrency research begins with a search engine query by a prospective buyer or investor for a cryptocurrency, token, NFT, or any other web 3 project. When it comes to search engines, Google search is currently the most popular search engine, accounting for more than 85 percent of the market in the previous year. This was followed by Bing search, Yahoo, and other search engines.

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Source: StatCounter

In this ultimate SEO for crypto guide for web3 organizations, we'll discuss how to develop and implement a modern SEO plan designed to boost your search engine presence, communicate with your audience, and increase your website's conversion rate.

This SEO guide is intended for developers, entrepreneurs, and marketers who are developing and growing their own cryptocurrency, NFT, Metaverse, Defi, or dApp.

Table of content:

- What is search engine optimization, and why is it important for the crypto and blockchain industries?

- Important SEO elements to improve the search results of your crypto website

- Common crypto SEO misconceptions

What is search engine optimization, and why is it important for the crypto and blockchain industries?

You may have heard about search engine optimization previously, or you may be hearing about it for the first time and have no idea what it is. The purpose of a search engine is to give users access to the information that they are seeking in the most useful and timely manner possible. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a part of the digital marketing ecosystem that involves the practice of increasing a website's visibility in search engine result pages (SERP), resulting in increased traffic to the website.

A strong crypto SEO strategy for your web 3 project is the best approach to raise awareness of your cryptocurrency, NFT, DeFi app, or other blockchain project among your target audience. Cryptocurrency SEO can also help in the building of authority and trust for your site in the blockchain ecosystem.

A successful execution of an SEO strategy can:

- Increase organic traffic and conversions for your crypto website.

- Build your web 3 brand's reputation and authority.

- Build a compounding growth system for your blockchain and crypto business.

- Get your website to the top three results, as over 54% of searchers click on the first three results.

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Important SEO elements to improve the search results of your crypto website

Crypto is a new and fascinating market to build projects in, but getting your site ranked high in search engines can be tough. There are a few key strategies you can employ to increase your cryptocurrency SEO.

An effective crypto SEO strategy is generally divided into three categories:

Technical SEO

Search engines like Google want to display content to users that is most suited to their search query. You could be creating the most engaging and thoughtful content in the blockchain industry. However, if search engines can't browse your website properly, then all your efforts are wasted.

Technical SEO refers to SEO strategies involved in making it easier for search engine crawlers to crawl and index your website's content. Technical SEO doesn't deal with the content of your cryptocurrency website or with content optimization. The main objectives of technical SEO is to improve website structure and to help search engines with crawling, interpreting, and indexing your crypto website's content without any issues.

Below we have mentioned some of the most important aspects for improving your website's technical SEO:

1. Add SSL to improve your website's security

SSL certificates are a way of providing additional security for your website. When you install an SSL certificate on your website, your website URL starts with 'https://' rather than starting with 'http://'. Google also announced in 2014 that they'll give preference to websites with HTTPS tags over websites with HTTP tags, making it a crucial factor for SEO.

You can check whether HTTPS is present on your crypto website. Type in your website URL and press enter. If you see a lock icon on the left-hand side of the search bar, it means that an SSL certificate is installed for your website. However, if you see the words "not secure", you need to install SSL on your cryptocurrency website.

2. Include and optimize your Sitemap

A sitemap is the inventory of all the pages that are publicly available on your website. It is most commonly a .xml file that helps search engines understand your website structure. You can think of a sitemap as a map of your crypto website that helps crawlers in navigation.

A sitemap helps speed up the content discovery process. It includes information such as the title of your page, a link to that page, the date it was published, and the date it was last modified.

growthchain.io's XML sitemap

3. Optimize the website structure

An organized site structure should be the foundation of your cryptocurrency website's technical SEO. An organized structure means that your website visitors can access all pages of your website easily and find out what they want faster, and a search engine can interpret and index your content easily.

Google's John Muller also hinted at the importance of website structure and how it can help Google search by interpreting the pages on your crypto website.

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4. Reduce page load speed

Page speed is the time it takes for a web page to completely load. Speed is a very important SEO factor and has even been made an actual ranking factor by Google Search since 2010. You can improve your crypto website's loading speed by:

- Using compressed images

-Clean and optimize your website's code and use minified CSS and JavaScript files.

- Use browser caching

- Implement Content Delivery Network (CDN) to boost your site's loading speed.

- Use Pagespeed insights to analyze and improve your site speed.

5. Make your website mobile friendly

Smartphones account for more than 50% of website traffic globally. What this means is that if you have a poorly designed and optimized website for mobile, your target audience might not like it, which will lead to an increase in your bounce rate, and the average time spent by users on your website will decrease. This sends a bad signal to Google.

Source: Statista

6. Optimize Robots.txt file

Robots.txt is a text file that instructs and gives directions to crawlers on how to use your website and which pages of your site are publicly available for indexing. Robots.txt is an important file and should be handled carefully, as adding a wrong instruction can prevent crawlers from accessing important parts of your website.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO is the strategy of optimizing your website's content, tags, and internal links for your target audience. On-page SEO helps you with building your website's authority and online presence. It is one of the most crucial SEO strategies to increase visibility and your cryptocurrency website's organic traffic.

Now that you've understood the importance of on-page SEO for your crypto website, let's look at the on-page crypto SEO strategies:

1. Your crypto keyword research

Keywords are single words or phrases that define the topic and idea of your page. In SEO terms, keywords are the words and phrases that a user enters in a search, also known as search queries. As a crypto project owner, you would want to rank your site for relevant keywords that your target audience is searching for.

Keyword research is the process of finding relevant keywords your target audience is searching for and is often the first step in a cryptocurrency SEO campaign. By optimizing your website content for the appropriate crypto-related keywords and optimizing for long-tail keywords, you increase your chances of ranking well for relevant topics.

When you start ranking for relevant keywords, it enables you to drive organic traffic to your crypto site and promote your cryptocurrency or NFT.

Useful keyword research tools:

There are several good keyword research tools available that can help you with your keyword research. Here are some of our favourite tools:

- SEMrush

- Google Keyword planner

- Ahrefs

- Google Trends

- Surfer SEO

2. Content optimization

Marketers often consider SEO and content marketing to be different spectrums of digital marketing strategies. However, quality content and SEO, albeit different marketing strategies, are interconnected with each other, as without a solid content strategy, you can't unlock the full potential of your cryptocurrency SEO strategies.

You can improve your website's ranking in search engines by creating quality content, which will increase the number of users visiting your website, which ultimately signals to the search engines that your website has a good user experience.

3. Link building

Link building is an effective SEO strategy in which you interlink web pages with each other by getting hyperlinks from other websites as well as internally linking your website's content to build content authority.

Links have been considered an important SEO ranking factor for a very long time, as they help users navigate between multiple pages on your website and help search engines determine the domain authority and relevancy of your web pages in the crypto space.

When you combine link building with technical SEO and great content with other on-page optimization strategies, you can increase your website's organic traffic and drive conversions directly from your website.

4. Optimize your cryptocurrency website for Google E-A-T

E-A-T is short for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. E-A-T is an important search quality evaluation guideline published by Google in 2013 that determines the quality and value of your content for its readers and where it should rank in Google SERP.

SEO specialists often get confused that E-A-T is a ranking factor, but technically it is not a direct ranking factor. It can have an impact on your SERP rankings indirectly. So now that you know what exactly E-A-T is, here's how you can make your site more authoritative and trustworthy in cryptocurrency niche according to E-A-T:

1. Tell your visitors who you are.

2. Work with crypto industry experts to create content.

3. Update your content regularly.

4. Link to high authority sources.

5. Pay close attention to your brand reputation online.

Common crypto SEO misconceptions

1. SEO for web3 projects is highly competitive

Targeting general crypto keywords is highly competitive with major websites writing generic articles. However, niche topics give a better opportunity for better results. For example, our DAO marketing article ranks above major brands because we are focused on providing marketing insights to web 3 projects and have authority in this crypto niche.

2. More search traffic to your site = More conversions

Most SEO specialists focus on increasing their website's traffic as much as possible. Usually, it means targeting high search volume keywords that are competitive and hard to rank for, which usually are top-funnel content with low conversion intent. Focusing on top-funnel content makes sense for crypto companies that generate revenue through page views and ad revenue.

However, for crypto brands looking for conversions through SEO, they should target lower search volume keywords that have conversion intent.

3. It's difficult to outrank major search engine players

You may think it is difficult to rank your website for a keyword when a big website with high domain authority ranks for your target keywords. Your assumption, however, is incorrect. While ranking for that specific term will be difficult, it is not impossible. With appropriate SEO strategies and consistency, you can outrank the big players.

Conclusion

Currently, SEO is heavily underutilized by most blockchain brands, except for web 3 media brands. However, as more and more crypto businesses are launching, it will be important for web 3 founders and marketers to keep themselves updated about best crypto SEO strategies if they want to rank higher for their crypto niche-related content.

We highly advise blockchain and crypto marketing teams to spend some time and resources on SEO activities. In this guide, we have shared a quick starter guide to help kick off SEO campaigns. If you are interested in learning more advanced SEO strategies or looking for SEO consultancy, you can reach out to us at info@growthchain.io.