SEO for Blockchains & Cryptocurrencies

Part 1 Common Mistakes & Keyword Research for Blockchain

Blockchain SEO can help users discover your blockchain’s marketing site and help to inform and educate them about your project. SEO is an effective way to engage relevant traffic, organically reach potential customers and help with the accessibility, performance and awareness of your website and content.

How can SEO help a Blockchain/Cryptocurrency?

Early-stage projects may not have as many financial means as the leading blockchains currently in the space. In this case, and even in the case of well-established projects, SEO is incredibly useful channel.

It’s very cost-effective for blockchain and crypto projects at the early stages (ICO, IDO, etc.) and the initial phases of an exchange or blockchain.

SEO can provide insight into your potential user’s needs, concerns, journeys and behaviours, as such, whatever the mission of your blockchain may be – energy-efficient transactions, GameFi, etc. SEO can shine a light of users interested and actively searching for a blockchain that facilitates to their needs and offers them the utility they seek.

This article will outline the main tactics SEO can employ for your blockchain and common mistakes seen in the space.

Common Mistakes for Blockchain and Cryptocurrency SEO

Overdependency on third-party websites:

Many blockchain projects tend to use sites such as Medium to share information, whitepapers, blog posts and other forms of content. However, from an SEO standpoint, Medium and other formats tend to use ‘nofollow’ attributes on their links, this means that little-to-no-value is passed to your site from Medium.

As a result, it’s best to utilise your marketing site with robust and useful content, Medium etc. can of course still be used, but SEO can help build your site’s authority through good use of internal links and useful content.

Use of Subdomains over Subfolders:

While subdomains can be useful tools for campaigns, short-notice content and other scenarios, they split the value from the core domain and as such aren’t the most optimal way to utilise your marketing site. Subfolders on the other hand, can maintain the ‘authority’ of your core domain, help to build topical relevance, links and so on. They also are typically easier to utilise and lend themselves to a strong taxonomy.

Product-led Language & Content

As much of blockchain and cryptocurrency terminology is either nascent, or yet-to-exist, many blockchain projects tend to speak fairly exclusively about the product. While this is very useful and informative to many, we can also utilise any analogous and relevant keywords that may speak to the product’s utility and/or technology.

Not enough Focus on On-Page Content

As with product marketing and ‘decentralised’ content, the marketing site should where-possible be a source of truth for your blockchain or crypto project, both from the point of a search engine and a user. Google and other search engines rely on topical relevance and links to help understand the value within your site.

Having strong, relevant content helps provide that topical relevance, develop your E-A-T (expertise, authority and trust), and ultimately provide a frictionless experience for your audience.

Content Behind Authentication & Cold Channels

As with a strong use of Medium, much content associated with a blockchain or crypto project will live on social communities or behind a wallet, authentication and so on. While it is useful to provide exclusive content via these methods, we can utilise the marketing site and discoverable content to help with lead generation, improved visibility and so on. Bing recently announced it can crawl paywall and gated content without leaking it to help with indexation and discoverability. As Duck Duck Go uses Bing, this is a big step to help your subscription-based content be discovered.

Keyword Research for Blockchain & Cryptocurrencies

Keyword research unearths relevant queries, topics, questions and propositions from your audience. Across search engines and many formats, keyword research is at the heart of an effective, and ultimately useful content strategy. Successful keyword research for blockchain helps to answer: Web3 Keyword research is crucial, some questions to ask yourself:

• What are our audience interested in?
• What are the needs of our audience?
• What topics and subject matter is useful?
• Is there currently search demand for a given topic?
• How can our content best serve our audience?
• Do our competitors currently rank for a target keyword?

Overall, we can garner knowledge and insights from interested parties across a wide-variety of platforms and mediums, below, we see a ‘PPA’ (People Also Ask) result after search for ‘eco friendly blockchain’.

From this result we can see what questions are being asked, which blockchains/cryptocurrencies are in the conversation and how their content is positioned.

Expanding on this, keyword research can also look at multiple relevant channels specifically for blockchain:

Google & Search Engines: How are potential new users searching, the search volume and contextual results.

Featured Snippets & Rich Results: A featured snippet is essentially a ‘position 0’ result that Google deems to be the most useful and succinct result for a given search. Through a mix of keyword research and content placement, SEO can provide a ‘rich result’ and help to maximise your visibility.

Reddit, Quora, Forums: What are audiences on Reddit searching for, are there many questions asked around your project? Using search operators, we can drill into how users discuss a given keyword, project or cryptocurrency on Social Channels. Social community is at the heart of most blockchain projects, as such, we expand our SEO beyond just search engines.

Telegram, Discord: As with community websites, messaging platforms are crucial in the blockchain and crypto space. We are also able to track keywords used in Telegram and Discord, this helps to shed light on your project and to keep track on FAQs by your users, this enables you to create useful and helpful content in return.

Frequently Asked Questions for: What is SEO for Blockchain & Cryptocurrencies?

In Summary

This concludes part 1 of our SEO for Blockchain series, in the following sessions we will look at technical SEO for blockchain.