SEO for blockchain companies - Top tips & strategies
Blockchain companies can offer promising solutions that can revolutionize current systems. Although awareness of blockchain has skyrocketed in recent years, there are still a lot of people, especially executive-level decision makers, who lack awareness or knowledge on the value or usage of blockchain technologies.
The main challenge of blockchain companies in generating more traffic and sales, is that a majority of their target audiences do not fully understand the technology and its benefits, and therefore require more nurturing or a longer sales cycle to convert them into customers. Most of their existing customers either come from referrals, or from communities that are already familiar with blockchain or related topics. Unfortunately, this only represents a tiny minority of their potential market share. How can blockchain companies reach beyond these people and market their products to the general majority?
In addition to their audiences requiring more warm up, competition in the blockchain space is also very rampant. As with many emerging technologies, people are scrambling to create and scale new blockchain-related businesses in hopes of capitalizing on this new frontier. The number of blockchain companies has grown exponentially in recent years, diluting the market share and making it a lot harder for blockchain companies to rise above competition. How can blockchain companies attract organic traffic and sales amidst such high competition?
Here, we provide a full SEO playbook for blockchain companies in order to maximize your online visibility and significantly grow your online traffic. But before jumping into SEO, let's you'll need to first clarify your value prop, target customer, and competitive edge, in order to have impactful results.
Clearly define your value prop and ideal customer profile.
Blockchain companies need to clearly state their value prop so that even the average Joe can understand the business within a minute. What are the quantifiable benefits, deliverables, or ROI that your company offers? How can you convey this concisely so that even people who are unfamiliar with blockchain can understand? This part of your messaging is key to attracting and retaining the prospects who are unfamiliar with your technology.
Next, clearly define your ideal customer profile.
You should have a set criteria for age, demographics, position, company size, industry, etc. A common problem for many startups is that they focus on too many different industries or verticals at once. If you're just starting out, it's recommended to niche down on one industry first, and focus all your marketing and sales efforts on that industry before branching out. Companies that specialize instead of generalize tend to have higher conversion rates and profit margins, at least initially. Become an expert on pitching to a particular type of customer, fully understand their painpoints, and adjust your messaging accordingly.
Inspect the competitive landscape.
Do thorough research on your competitors. Who are they targeting? What's their branding and messaging? You can inspect their organic and paid traffic via tools such as SEM Rush or Ahrefs. If your competitors have pages on social media, you can also inspect their follow and stats using tools such as Socialblade. Understand their products or services from the back of your head, and be able to convey why your company is better. In other words, what's your competitive edge? Why should users buy from you vs. competitors?
Clarifying the above points allows us to set the stage for an impactful organic marketing strategy. In terms of SEO, the ultimate goal is to get your website to the top of Google's search results for relevant keywords. This can attract tens of thousands of users or more to your site every month passively. There are multiple facets of SEO that you'd need to address in order to get your website to the top as quickly as possible, and overtake your competitors. This includes content, technical SEO, and off page SEO. Let's go over each component.
Content
Content is king, and is the most important factor in SEO. If your website only has the standard pages (ie. home, platform, about, contact us), it is not going to rank well on Google. You need to be consistently producing relevant, valuable content, such as blogs, whitepapers, and press releases, to gain more 'real estate' in Google search listings and attract more organic traffic. We cannot stress enough the importance of pumping out new content regularly; if you don't, your Google rankings and organic traffic will remain stagnant.
What exactly is high SEO content? First and foremost, the content that you write has to be engaging, valuable, or informative. Users actually take time to read it and are inclined to check out your other pages as well. Time on site and pages per session are huge factors in the Google algorithm, so make sure your content attracts users to stay on your site for as long as possible.
Next, your content needs to have all the elements of our golden triad: high relevance, low difficulty, high volume. The content has to be highly relevant to your product or service, it has to be relatively easy for you to rank on Google (ie. There's relatively low competition for that topic or keyword), and there has to be a decent amount of people searching for this topic on Google. Read more about selecting topics and keywords here: How to do keyword research for SaaS and Tech companies?
Here are some ideas to increase the amount of content on your website. If your product is relevant to multiple different industries or verticals, create a page specific to each one and insert relevant, long tail keywords on each page. Create plenty of blogs, articles, and white papers on high volume topics.
Here are some popular topic ideas:
How to...
Top 5....
A complete guide to...
A full tutorial on...
Use cases or case studies on....
If you create webinars or podcasts, make sure to add the text transcript to the page as well in order to increase your SEO. Finally, adding an FAQ section is not only another opportunity to add more content to your site, but it also increases your chances of showing up in Google's featured snippet section, which automatically places your site at the top of search results.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is basically all the technical bits and pieces of your website that can impact your Google rankings. Technical SEO can be further broken down into three main aspects: page speed, metadata, and crawlability.
Page speed
Make sure your page speed is lightning fast. If it takes 2 seconds to load, that's already too slow and equates to a poor user experience from Google's point of view. Usually, the main element that causes a slow load time in most websites is bulky 3rd party scripts, such as tracking pixels, popup apps, or chatbots. Deferring the load time of non-essential scripts can speed up your site's initial load speed by a few seconds.
Next, enable browser caching for the website. This basically allows users to save a snapshot of your website in their browser's memory so that when they visit again in the future, it can load faster. For WordPress, there are many free plugins that offer caching, and for Wix, caching is built in.
Additionally, minify your JS and CSS scripts, where applicable. Wordpress has many free minifying plugins, and Webflow has a built-in option to minify these scripts. Fininally, instead of using the traditional jpeg images, convert them to NextGen formats such as WebP, which Google favors.
Metadata
Metadata is additional info in your HTML code that tells search engines more information about your page. This includes tags, meta descriptions, alt attributes, etc. Make sure all of these are optimized for Google standards. For example, make sure all your pages have meta descriptions and title tags. On Wordpress, you can install the free Yoast SEO plugin to edit and optimize the metadata of your pages. For Wix and Webflow, there are built-in capabilities to edit the metadata of pages.
Crawlability
Crawlability is basically how easy it is for Google to crawl through your site and index the information it needs. Make sure there are no broken links or images, 4xx errors, 5xx errors, broken JS/CSS scripts, and infinite redirects - these are the most common crawlability issues we've seen. Also, make sure your site is using https, as http is less secure and will be penalized by Google. Tools such as Ahrefs and SEMrush can scan and identify all the crawlability issues of your site. You can also use the free Google Search Console to see which pages are indexed, and which have crawlability issues.
Off-page SEO
Last but not least we have to focus on off-page SEO. This is basically Google's score of your authority or reputation online. In general, the more links from high quality sites that link back to your site, the higher your score - these links are called backlinks. In the past, you could pay marketing agencies to generate tons of backlinks for you. In today's age, this does not work. We repeat: this does not work, and you will get heavily penalized by Google for forcefully creating backlinks to your site. Here are some healthy ways to generate backlinks that positively impact SEO.
List in directories
The quickest way to increase your backlinks is to first list your company in reputable directories. High quality directories for tech and SaaS companies include Crunchbase, Capterra, and g2. Listing in local directories and incubators is also an easy way to increase your backlinks. Often, you can list your company on these directories for free.
Promote on social media
Another easy way to increase your backlinks is by sharing your content, such as blogs, whitepapers, and webinars, on social media. In terms of which social media platform to use, generally LinkedIn and Twitter work best for tech and B2B, whereas Facebook, Instagram, and Tiktok work better for B2C. This is not set in stone though, so feel free to try out all the platforms and determine which ones drive the most results for your business. Additionally, whenever you post a link, ask your team and your connections to reshare or retweet the post as soon as possible. This especially works for the LinkedIn and Twitter algorithm - the more shares and engagement your post gets in the first 24 hour window, the more likely the algorithm will promote your content in people's news feed.
Be a guest
The best way to generate the highest quality backlinks is to collaborate with other platforms. For example, you can write a guest post on a popular blog, or be a guest speaker on a podcast or webinar. Remember to request adding a link to your site in the published content, hence creating a backlink. Not only is this a good way to significantly bump up your off page SEO, but if the platform has a large and relevant audience, it's also a nice growth hack that leverages an existing audience to 'advertise' your business.
Out of all of the industries we've worked with, blockchain is one of the hardest topics to rank well for on Google. Many blockchain-related keywords have a full difficulty score of 100, which means it's super competitive and nearly impossible for your site to show up on Google for those keywords. However, by following the steps outlined above - clearly defining your value prop and competitive edge, and focusing on all aspects of SEO, especially keyboard research - you will see results. Depending on how well your ranking right now, it may take as little as one month to over a year for your website to get to the top page. The key is to be consistent and persistent - keep publishing high-value, engaging content with low difficulty keywords, and slowly but surely you will grow your rankings on Google.
SEO can be an overwhelming amount of steps, so if your team doesn't have the time or capacity to fulfill it, we do all of this for you via our organic growth package at ASATA. We specialize in organic marketing and SEO for blockchain companies. Book a discovery call today to learn more!