SEO Best Practices for Cryptocurrency Blogs and News Sites

Intro

Cryptocurrency has long been a hot topic and one that has become increasingly difficult to rank for. Every day, more people take to Google to find out the latest blockchain news and are met with a long list of crypto news sites and blogs offering updates, forecasts, and predictions. This long list of crypto sites can make it difficult for new blogs and news sites to rank - unless effective SEO tactics are implemented.

Here are some SEO best practices that can help crypto websites reach the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs):

Keep your content up-to-date and trustworthy

To compete with the high-ranking crypto sites, you need to deliver premium, up-to-date, and credible content. Cryptocurrency is a YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) topic. This refers to any topic that can directly impact the reader’s life - i.e., content that has to do with money and finance. Being an investment type, it makes sense that crypto falls into this category.

Google demands that all websites feature credible information, which is especially true for crypto sites. Your readers will likely make an important action based on what they read on your site, so you need to ensure you’re supplying them with good and reliable information. Failure to do so could impact your reader’s well-being. For this reason, search engines scrutinize YMYL sites more intensely than they do other sites.

To ensure that you’re providing accurate information, make sure to refer to credible sources, like Ichi Kawanaka’s list of 仮想通貨 1000倍. This article highlights 8 recently introduced crypto investment options that will likely increase in value in 2024. It also details how to buy the crypto type, what blockchain they can be found on, and what special features they come with, such as crypto gambling.

By using the information provided by such trustworthy accounts, you can meet Google’s accuracy standards.

It’s also important that you regularly update your content to keep it relevant. Content that is fresh ranks - out-of-date content loses its rankings. By keeping on top of trending cryptocurrencies and other blockchain topics, you can get your website to the top of the SERPs and keep it there.

Prove your credibility with E-E-A-T

To prove your trustworthiness, you’ll also need to meet Google’s Search Quality Guidelines, which judge webpages on E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). It was formally ‘E-A-T’, but Google added an extra ‘E’ for Experience in 2022.

Google uses each of these components to evaluate the credibility of your website.

For example, if your site features contributions from known crypto experts, your site will satisfy the ‘Expertise’ component. Or, if you gain backlinks from authoritative crypto websites, you’ll satisfy the ‘Authoritativeness’ component.

By providing E-E-A-T and giving your readership with information that can be relied upon, your site will likely be boosted by Google.

Keyword research

By conducting regular and thorough keyword research you can discover the type of content your target audience is looking for and also ensure that your website features the latest trending topics.

Use keyword research tools to identify not only the names of cryptos that people are looking for but also the specific terminology they’re using to find crypto information. Specifically, look for long-tail keywords (featuring 3-5 words) that feature a high search volume by a low competition level. This way, you can target hot topics that your competitors haven’t yet written about.

You should also categorize your keywords based on search intent, which will dictate the type of content you need to create to effectively target each keyword. For example, the keyword “what are altcoins” is informational, so demands an informative article. “Buy Bitcoin”, on the other hand, has a transactional search intent, so needs content that will convert the reader into a customer.

Once you’ve conducted keyword research and analysis, you should write content based on each search term. These content pieces should include the primary keyword, as well as variations of it and secondary keywords, evenly and naturally throughout the article.

Maintain site structure

Not only does creating site structure allow site visitors to more easily navigate their way around your crypto site, but it also helps search engines to more quickly understand and index new webpages.

Site structure can be introduced by establishing pillar pages. These are the four to five main topics that you categorize your individual web pages under. For a crypto website, your pillar pages may include ‘Cryptocurrencies’, ‘Exchanges’, ‘Wallet’, ‘Community’, and so on.

Under each of these topics, you’ll have sub-topics. For example, under ‘Cryptocurrencies’, you may have sub-topics such as ‘Global Charts’, ‘NFTs’, ‘Recently Added’, ‘Most Visited’, and so on.

These pillars and subcategories can easily be created by implementing navigation menus. They can also be reinforced through well-placed and relevant internal links.

Overall, the easier your crypto site is to navigate, the more likely Google and other search engines are to rank it highly.

Site speed optimization

Crypto investors are fast-moving and they need their crypto websites to be equally as speedy. As is the case with all websites, users tend to abandon websites that take far too long to load. Crypto web developers sometimes make the mistake of spending too long on creating a flashy website at the cost of poor page loading times.

Since 2018, page speed has been one of Google’s ranking factors. Crypto sites that take too long to load won’t only be abandoned by users of the web, but Google will also rank the sites lower.

Ideally, pages should take between 1-2 seconds to load. Anything more than that is noticeable and the wait time ruins the user experience of the page.

There are several online tools you can use to check your site speed, such as PageSpeed Insights. If you find that your website load times are particularly high, there are several ways you can optimize your web pages.

Mainly, you should compress your images and media, reduce redirect chains and loops, remove unnecessary widgets, and minify HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files.

Link building

As aforementioned, receiving backlinks from authoritative sources is one way to get your crypto website to rank highly. In the eyes of Google, receiving a backlink from an authoritative source basically proves that your site has authority and trustworthiness. Authoritative backlinks encourage Google to rank your web pages higher. So, how do you link build?

Besides writing quality content and gaining backlinks naturally, there are several link-building methods you can employ to boost your site’s authority. Guest posting is probably one of the most straightforward means of collecting links. This is when you write an article for another website as a ‘guest’ and insert hyperlinks throughout the content that point toward your website.

Another popular method is broken link building. This is when you look for broken external links on authoritative websites - i.e., links that lead to 404 pages - and offer your own content as a replacement.

Final thoughts

There is already a wide range of cryptocurrency blogs and news sites out there. However, given how much crypto changes from day to day, there is always a gap in the market for new sites. Plus, given that crypto is predicted to reach a market size of $13 billion by 2034, now is as good a time as ever to start optimizing your crypto site.