SEO Basics for Cryptocurrency Brands - Episode 5

Ty Smith0:06

Hey guys, welcome back to the Coinbound podcast. My name is Ty Daniel Smith. I'm the founder of cryptocurrency marketing agency Coinbound. And today I want to discuss SEO. SEO is something that I feel like a lot of people, especially in the cryptocurrency industry, are not really paying attention to, especially not as much as they should be. And it's a really powerful way of getting some really cost-effective results that honestly is not too difficult if you know what to look for and how to do it. So we're going to discuss what SEO is, sort of the basics of how it works, and some quick tips and tools you can use to get the most out of it.

Ty Smith0:45

So let's get right into it. SEO is search engine optimization. It is what it sounds like. It's just optimizing your website to perform as good as possible on Google. So when people search on Google, they enter a keyword. If it's a relevant keyword, you obviously want it to be something that your site is coming up for and people are finding it. Organic traffic is highly underrated. Coinbound's specialty has always been influencer and PR marketing. That's sort of where we got our start. But lately, we've been making big, big moves in terms of SEO. That's actually what my background was in before I was even involved in the cryptocurrency industry. So it's something I'm really, really passionate about.

Ty Smith1:26

So the basics of SEO, because SEO, I'm not going to give you the full explanation of SEO because it's massively complicated, and honestly, even the experts don't fully understand it because Google is very cryptic with how they rank websites. But here's the basic gist. Everyone understands how Google works. You enter something, results come up relevant to what it is. Google is incredibly, incredibly good at that. And the way it does that is through something called crawling and indexing.

Ty Smith2:05

Google has programs that are basically just scripts that know to run through every web page possible on the internet, read the text and the content, and index it, meaning store it in Google's cache. And based on that, they're kind of able to see what a website is about, and they know to recommend it based on what someone enters. Again, that's a super, super abbreviated version of how it works, but it's enough for the purposes of this podcast.

Ty Smith2:44

So some tips. The best way, sort of the first step in SEO, is content. Like I said, Google is reading all the text and content on your website. If you even if you have a really well-converting landing page, it's probably not full of text, and Google is not really great at reading images. You can assign something called alt tags to images, which basically is just a text explanation of what the image is, but that's about as good as you can do in terms of images. Again, it's not a manual process. It's a bot that's reading this website.

Ty Smith3:21

So the best way to get Google to start sort of referring Google users to your site is just creating a ton of content, but creating content that's relevant. If you're not creating content that's relevant, you're going to get organic traffic, but you're not going to get organic traffic that is relevant to what you do, that is actually convertible into paying customers. So creating a ton of content that is relevant. If you don't have a blog, you need to have a blog. A lot of people I talk to, they don't understand the value of a blog. They think it's time-consuming, and they don't want to hire a writer to fill it out, and then it's just going to stay stale because they're not populating it enough. And these are sometimes the same people that are going to go pay $50,000 on other marketing terms when they really could be getting better use of that budget with just a little bit of SEO strategy.

Ty Smith4:17

So first step, definitely have a blog. Definitely have a blog that has relevant content. The next step is planning keywords. There's a lot of ways to do it. Google actually has a free tool that is able to do it, that will sort of give you a basic overview of keywords you should be mentioning and bringing up in your text, in your content. But we use something called Ahrefs, which is ahrefs.com, which is a really powerful tool that basically does the same thing that Google does. It crawls your website, and it identifies problems.

Ty Smith5:11

The difference between Google and Ahrefs is that you pay for Ahrefs, and that it identifies more information and gives it to you, whereas Google will just move on. Google doesn't care about your website. Google cares about what's relevant to the user. So I would definitely check out that tool. You can enter your domain name, you can enter keywords, and it spits out, it calls it a KD, which is just keyword difficulty. And basically, it's a number one through, I actually don't know what the top number is, but it's the number, it's an approximation of the number of websites that would have to link to this web page to rank in the top 10 on Google for that keyword. So let's say, let's say you have a retirement account. You have a crypto retirement account service. You would type in Bitcoin IRA, let's say.

Ty Smith6:18

It will spit out like hundreds and hundreds of keywords that are relevant to that. Some will be Bitcoin retirement, some will be Ethereum IRA, some will be crypto retirement accounts, all things that someone might search looking for the same thing that the original keyword that you entered in. But it's also going to give you a KD, the keyword difficulty, and the approximate monthly traffic that is searching for that term. So that gives you kind of a better way of identifying the importance of using that keyword. So we do something kind of proprietary at Coinbound, where we have an algorithm that runs sort of as a function of the KD and the monthly traffic so that we can recommend to our clients what keywords they should be using.

Ty Smith7:09

But, obviously, if it's going to take you 100 websites to link to this page to get in the top 10 on Google results, and there's only 50 people per month searching for that, it's definitely not worthwhile to target that. What we kind of do, and we're good at, I can say, is identifying sort of the low-hanging fruit, sort of keywords that no one's really targeting, no one's really talking about, that have a high monthly traffic. And we're only able to do that because of the tools that we have access to, Ahrefs being a huge part of that. So definitely check out Ahrefs, and then you're able to sort of build content around that. A third sort of step is, as I sort of alluded to before, is backlink building.

Ty Smith8:14

So the way Google works on a more slightly complex level is that, yes, it crawls every website, but it crawls every website not on an even ratio. So sites that are very, very frequently linked to get crawled a lot more frequently and get ranked a lot higher because Google is sort of, they don't publicly talk about like the actual specifics of the algorithm because then everyone would build around that and then it would be kind of pointless. But they're basically looking for authority. They want to say, 'All right, if a million websites are linking to this one page with this keyword as the anchor tag,' anchor tag being the text of the link, 'it's probably pretty relevant to that topic.' And that's how, and I would bet if a million websites are linking to one page, I bet it's the first result on Google.

Ty Smith9:00

So get backlinks to your site. Easier said than done, to put it lightly. There's people that specialize in backlink outreach. There's definitely varying levels of backlink outreach. Some people will just, the less expensive ones will definitely just sign you up for sort of a click farm kind of thing where you'll get linked from a thousand pages that really have a super low domain ranking, which is just sort of the authority, again, of the entire domain. And that's not helpful at all. If Google sees that you're getting linked from all over the place from these low-quality sites, they're going to identify you as probably a low-quality site also, and it's going to actually hurt you in terms of SEO.

Ty Smith9:59

But the manual way and the more of a grind kind of way is actually just reaching out to people that might be talking about you. So, again, using this tool Ahrefs, you can enter a competitor's domain, this is kind of a sneaky way of doing it, enter a competitor's domain, see the organic traffic, see what keywords they're ranking for. And then if it's one that also is sort of this low-hanging fruit we discussed, you can write about that and then reach out, you can actually see in Ahrefs what sites are linking to the page. So reach out to those people. Say, 'Hey, I see you,' you can do this by email, 'Hey, I saw you link to this person's site talking about this. I just want to make you aware of this post that we have. We think it's pretty relevant. We think your readers will find value.'

Ty Smith10:47

And honestly, it's a time-consuming process, and you're probably not going to get, you're going to get more rejections or non-responses than people that will do it. But that's sort of the high-quality way to ensure that it's being done in the correct way. And not all backlinks are the same. There's two sort of types of backlinks. One are dofollow, and one is nofollow. Basically, like I said before, Google is always browsing these websites, and it goes from one website to the next. And it depends on, obviously, to go from one website to the next, there has to be a link. And if it's dofollow, it will pass through. It passes through something called link juice, which is basically just the power that it assigns, saying like, 'Oh, well, this is a really high-quality website, and it's linking to this one.' So some of the link juice, again, it's a slang term, it's not something Google ever actually uses, goes to your site, and then that will make you a higher domain ranking over time. The next type, nofollow, is it's not useless, but it's way less effective in terms of building a backlink profile because you don't get that link juice. Google will identify the link and store that information, but it's not going to actually go from that site to yours.

Ty Smith11:08

So, again, that's just a very, very brief overview of SEO. I'm going to do another episode where we actually go into the details of each part because, honestly, each part is a very complex topic. But I hope you found that useful. If you did, I hope you will share this, like this. I don't know what platforms we're on these days, but like it, review it, rate it, whatever it is, share it. Just tell someone about it. It would be very much appreciated. And stay tuned because we have a lot more interesting content coming up about this stuff. Thanks, guys.