CoinMarketCap SEO Deep Dive

CoinMarketCap is a website with a simple purpose: to provide real-time data on cryptocurrency markets. Over the years, it has become the go-to tool for professionals and enthusiasts alike, offering up to the minute updates on prices, market capitalisations, and trading volumes for thousands of cryptocurrencies.

As a trusted source of information, CoinMarketCap aggregates data from numerous exchanges around the world, ensuring that users have access to reliable and comprehensive market insights.

CoinMarketCap’s rise to the top as a central hub for cryptocurrency data is not just down to its technical excellence and comprehensive market coverage. It’s also the result of an expert digital marketing strategy. Particularly through the use of SEO, over 90% of CoinMarketCap’s traffic comes through search. Let’s take a closer look at how they’ve used SEO to accelerate their brand!

Top Level SEO Metrics

Domain:	coinmarketcap.com
Monthly Organic Traffic:	34M
Domain Rating:	91/100
Referring Domains:	78.7K
Total keywords ranking:	571K

Engaging a Global Audience (International SEO)

CoinMarketCap’s impressive reach extends far beyond any single country, catering to a diverse, global audience. Each month, the site attracts over 34 million visitors from 45 different countries, demonstrating its global dominance and significance in the crypto market. The top five countries contributing to its traffic are:

United States:	8.3 million monthly visits
Turkey:	3.5 million monthly visits
India:	3.2 million monthly visits
United Kingdom:	1.9 million monthly visits
Germany:	1.6 million monthly visits

To accommodate this diverse user base, CoinMarketCap offers its website in 36 different languages, enhancing usability for non-English speakers. This multilingual support has been a cornerstone of CoinMarketCap’s SEO strategy, helping to improve its global visibility and search engine rankings. By providing localised content, CoinMarketCap ensures that users from almost every country can easily access and benefit from the site’s comprehensive crypto data and insights.

CoinMarketCaps’s Traffic Breakdown

CoinMarketCap attracts 34.8 million users every month. Understanding the sources of this traffic is key to dissecting their impressive SEO strategy.

The majority of these users, about 24.9 million (71.5%), visit the “currencies” pages, which are the primary drivers of traffic.

Out of the remaining 9.9 million users:

• Approximately 6.1 million arrive directly at the English homepage, demonstrating the massive brand reputation and trust that CoinMarketCap has built.
• Around 2 million visit the translated homepages, further showcasing the site’s global reach and its success in localising content for different audiences.

This leaves about 1.8 million monthly visitors who are distributed fairly evenly across the rest of the site, including the “exchanges” pages and various lists and comparison pages for coins.

The “Currencies” Pages (Programmatic SEO)

As mentioned above, the “currencies” pages are the powerhouse of CoinMarketCap, drawing in 24.9 million visitors each month. This section of the website is crucial not only for its volume of visitors but also for how it serves those interested in detailed and real-time information about various cryptocurrencies.

CoinMarkeCap currently has a huge collection of these pages, with over 249,000 dedicated to every cryptocurrency from major players like Bitcoin and Ethereum to lesser known altcoins such as Holo and Jasmy. This vast range ensures that CoinMarketCap appears in search results for virtually every cryptocurrency name.

Key Features of the “Currencies” Pages

Here’s some clear examples of the page features I put together in a Figma File.

Strategic Importance of SEO

These pages are likely the result of sophisticated programmatic SEO strategies. By automating the creation of these pages for each cryptocurrency, CoinMarketCap ensures consistent quality and a seamless user experience.

Here’s why these pages are so effective for SEO:

• Live Price and Interactive Graphs: These features directly match the search intent for terms like “(cryptocurrency) price.” Users looking for real time price updates find exactly what they need. This also demonstrates CoinMarkeCap’s focus on the customer and giving them what they want.

• Comprehensive Market Overview: This section establishes CoinMarketCap’s authority by providing detailed price information across multiple exchanges. It not only shows that CoinMarketCap has the most current data but also demonstrates its capability to aggregate complex data into user-friendly formats. This enhances its credibility and search engine rankings.

• Latest News and Updates: By including recent news related to each cryptocurrency, CoinMarketCap ensures that users receive a holistic view of the market. This increases the time users spend on each page and adds depth to the content, both of which are positive signals to search engines about the value and richness of CoinMarketCap’s content.

• In-Depth ‘About’ Section: This part of the page positions CoinMarketCap as an industry authority and captures additional long tail keyword traffic. By answering common questions and providing detailed analysis, this section helps to extend the content’s reach and improve its ranking for a broader set of search queries.

• User-Generated Content (UGC) Section: The inclusion of a UGC sidebar where users can participate in discussions adds a dynamic layer to the content. This interaction not only enriches the user experience but also contributes to the site’s content freshness with users adding insights and personal experience, a factor that can positively influence search rankings.

Overall Impact on SEO

The combination of these features ensures that CoinMarketCap’s “Currencies” pages are highly optimised for search engines. The structure and content of these pages make them:

• Highly relevant for specific queries, improving targeted traffic.

• Rich in content, which enhances the site’s authority and relevance.

• Interactive and fresh due to user contributions, which keeps the content dynamic and improves search engine rankings over time.

These strategies help CoinMarketCap maintain its dominance in the cryptocurrency information space, ensuring it remains the go to source for users and maintains its top rankings in search results.

Consistency Through Volatility

One area where CoinMarketCap excels is in maintaining a consistent content strategy that effectively capitalises on the inherent volatility of the cryptocurrency market:

The Impact of Market Dynamics

The cryptocurrency industry is notorious for its volatility, with market sentiments causing dramatic fluctuations in user search behaviour. When the crypto market trends upwards and dominates news headlines, CoinMarketCap experiences significant surges in traffic. Conversely, during downturns when the market quietens, there’s a noticeable dip in visitor numbers. This pattern shows the direct impact of market volatility on traffic to all crypto related platforms.

Strategic Content Consistency

Despite the rollercoaster nature of the crypto market, CoinMarketCap has demonstrated remarkable consistency in its content strategy. Over the past five years, they have steadily published thousands of new pages each month. This proactive approach ensures that CoinMarketCap is well prepared to capture increased interest during each new wave of crypto enthusiasm, effectively capitalising on these trends.

Building Trust and Authority

This consistent effort in publishing has not only kept CoinMarketCap at the top during market booms but has also significantly enhanced their industry authority. As of this writing, CoinMarketCap has an impressive 19.3 million backlinks, from 78.7K websites!

This speaks volumes about the trust and credibility they’ve established within the industry. This impressive network of backlinks has led to an exceptional domain rating of 91, reinforcing their authority and reliability in the eyes of both users and search engines.

Here’s a thread from Shaun Heng who worked as VP of Growth at CoinMarketCap while they where building out this awesome SEO strategy!

0/ Gm! As promised in my last 🧵, I’ll be sharing my learnings from my tenure at @CoinMarketCap as VP, Growth & Operations.https://t.co/PLKFNhdEYL

This is part 1 of my personal learnings on SEO and tips on how we 50x-ed @CoinMarketCap's traffic growth in 20 months.

— Shaun Heng 🟣 (@shaunhengcj) March 7, 2022

Final Thoughts And Potential Opportunities 

CoinMarketCap has established itself as the go-to resource for crypto investors and crypto enthusiasts, building huge industry trust in the process. I have no doubt that they will continue to work on and develop the programmatic currency pages and keep winning in the SERPs.

With the huge authority they have built there is an abundance of opportunities to choose from:

• Expanding Educational Content: As the interest in cryptocurrency continues to grow globally, CoinMarketCap can further capitalise on its position by expanding its range of educational content. This could include manually created articles designed to educate potential users. 

• Explore More Programmatic Angles: This could include creating or optimising pages for trading pairs, cryptocurrency comparison and more.

• Double Down on ETFs: CoinMarketCap already features a section for Bitcoin ETFs. Enhancing this area and staying ahead of the curve on new ETFs, including those for other cryptocurrencies and mixed asset portfolios, will further establish CoinMarketCap as the leading source of comprehensive information and analysis in the cryptocurrency space.

That’s it for our deep dive into CoinMarketCap’s SEO strategy. If you are working at a crypto or fintech startup and want to explore what SEO could do for your business, don’t hesitate to reach out below!