Increased organic traffic by 8 times. SEO for a Ukrainian crypto exchange: Obmenat24 case study

Who is our client?

Obmenat24 is a modern online platform for exchanging cryptocurrencies and fiats. The service offers exchanges at a favorable rate of popular cryptocurrencies, for example, Bitcoin, Tether, and Ethereum.

For fiat currencies, the exchanger works with AdvCash, Capitalist, Perfect Money, Payeer, Payoneer, PrivatBank, MonoBank, Raiffeisen Bank Aval, and UkrSibBank. Cash currency exchange (UAH, USD) is also possible in large cities of Ukraine and even in some cities abroad (Budapest, Vancouver, Warsaw, Yerevan, Istanbul, Dubai, Tel Aviv, Prague, and Toronto).

The online service guarantees high speed of transactions, security of processing applications, and favorable rates. The technical support team is ready to help you 24/7 with any questions.

We met the owners of the project at the exhibition. After our presentation, the customer approached us and offered cooperation.

Client’s Goals:

Team for project implementation

For this project, we assembled the following in-house team:

Cooperation Results

The organic traffic of the exchanger has grown 8 times during the cooperation.

During the working timeline, we brought 34 keywords into the TOP 10.

What did our team do to achieve the goal?

Before starting SEO promotion, it is important to understand that the cryptocurrency niche is considered one of the most competitive business areas. If you look at competitors, you immediately understand that new websites with poor coverage cannot move to the TOP. Websites that rank in the first positions have well-known brands, large link profiles, and huge traffic.

The problem is that the cryptocurrency market is in constant motion. If today’s requests like “buy Monero” are relevant, then tomorrow this currency may not interest the audience at all and bring little traffic and, accordingly, conversions.

Therefore, in the process of SEO promotion, it is necessary to constantly monitor market trends, explore semantics, and be prepared for frequent changes in priorities and strategy in general.

The client wanted to reach the top by the keyword “buy bitcoin”. But after analyzing the niche, we concluded that this approach would be very expensive for the client. For more effective promotion with a smaller budget, we provided a cluster-by-cluster calculation and proposed to promote with less competitive but sufficiently frequent keys.

This promotion strategy interested the client and showed good results.

Setting goals for SEO promotion

Firstly, we analyzed the website. Having obtained a complete picture of the resource’s state, we gave some recommendations for its improvement.

We identified 4 priority areas:

Competitor analysis

Considering an integrated approach to website promotion in crypto topics, it is worth paying special attention to competitor analysis. For detailed analysis, we identified competitors for each priority keyword and compared them by the main link parameters.

The cryptocurrency market is quite wide, so we split the data into clusters and focused on the median indicators for each.

Compiling a list of competitors by cluster, having analyzed each of them in detail, we chose the three most relevant: 

• coin24.com.ua 
• exchangesumo.com 
• casherbox.com

We studied these websites in more detail to understand their strategies, link profiles, structure, and on-page of service pages.

Website technical audit

We created a technical specification describing in detail what improvements needed to be made to the website. Let’s consider some of them.

• Slow page loading speed, especially in the mobile version. For the full promotion of the website, the speed of all pages should be in the green zone (90-100 points).

Page	Mobile result	Desktop result
Home	35	61
Buy Bitcoin	41	83
Blog page	27	57

• Problems with incorrectly implemented generation (filling) of meta tags “title”, “description”, and “h1”. They were duplicated and lacked the natural occurrence of keywords necessary for promotion. It was corrected during the work.
• Empty and uninformative website pages. They were revised and filled with unique and relevant content. If any page was not important, we removed it.
• Issues with the breadcrumb markup: the names of sections and subsections were displayed incorrectly.
• Many errors were found in the HTML and CSS code of the website.
• Improvements were also proposed to remove page duplicates, recommendations for setting up robots.txt and sitemap.xml, and much more.

In the process of further work, we created a document in which we described the problem, set priorities, and the client changed the status after the correction. It helped us to organize the work effectively.

Collecting semantics

The next step in our work was the collection of semantics.

After analyzing the key queries, it was proposed to the client to focus on keywords like “cryptocurrency exchange in _city_”. This approach was selected because promoting with the keywords “buy BTC” or “buy ETH” with the existing competition was very difficult and costly.

We made an assessment based on the client’s priorities, competitiveness, and traffic potential.

When collecting semantics, the following types of pages were identified, which make it possible to expand the website structure and attract additional traffic:

1. Pages of exchangers in specific cities.
2. Pages to buy/sell Bitcoin in cities.
3. Pages of pairs of exchanges (“Exchange Bitcoin (BTC) to Visa/MasterCard”, “Exchange (withdrawal) Bitcoin (BTC) to PrivatBank”, Exchange (withdrawal) Bitcoin (BTC) to AdvCash”, etc.)

After several months of work, the client decided to expand the website by creating its Ukrainian version. In addition to technical recommendations, we also completed the semantics for the Ukrainian version.

The cryptocurrency market is in constant motion. Therefore, we changed priorities from promoting Bitcoin pages to pages with USDT. In this regard, the semantics were revised and finalized.

Link building strategy

When developing a link-building strategy, we analyzed links needed to advance through priority clusters.

We also calculated how many links were needed to promote the “buy Bitcoin” key.

After that, we found an overall solution that suited our strategy and the client’s budget.

After the calculation, we discovered that it was necessary to purchase about 539 article links per year. The link budget did not fully cover the need, so we decided to buy links with monthly adjustments. Links were purchased based on the growth of positions. Thus, we maintained a balance between link growth and budget spending.

We always approach the selection of websites responsibly. We studied the backlinks of competitors’ websites in the TOP and confidently held their positions. Also, we excluded websites that were irrelevant to us, websites with no traffic or with poor performance. This way, we got the right resources. We also monitored link exchanges and found many good websites suitable as donors for our resource.

For a quality result in link building, you need to maintain the correct ratio of links. After the analysis, we determined the required percentage of anchor/non-anchor, dofollow/nofollow links in the niche to avoid falling under the Google filter. To save the budget, we often place non-anchor links on inexpensive resources. Anchor links are placed on quality websites that accept guest articles. Thus, we raise the domain’s authority, increase its awareness, and bring new users to the website.

Landing page optimization

According to the promotion plan, we had to fill many pages of the same type with content. We filled pages that had a high potential for traffic with unique content by writing technical specifications of this kind:

For the remaining pages, we proposed to write spin texts and accordingly developed spin templates for page types.

We developed a task for copywriters to write texts.

The client always responded quickly to our recommendations and promptly implemented our improvements. But with spin texts, we needed the help of our project manager to communicate with developers and find copywriters with expertise in this industry.

Working with the blog

Our practical experience shows that proper blogging can bring a lot of targeted traffic. Therefore, we always help clients prepare a content plan for a blog and develop recommendations to improve user demand.

After analyzing the Obmenat24 blog, we decided to post 3-5 expert articles per month.

After analyzing the blog, we revised the articles, changing/inserting keywords with a high frequency of requests.

The client had a bilingual website, so the blog should also be in two languages. Therefore, when preparing technical specifications, we provided recommendations for both language versions.

When selecting topics and compiling technical specifications, we choose TOP websites and analyze keywords and LSI.

The results of the SEO work done

As a result of the amount of work done, we got a decent result.

Comparing the traffic at the beginning and the end of the calendar year, after the work was done, we noticed that the number of website visitors increased from 581 to 4639 (8 times). 

On the website, we collected extensive semantics and a huge number of clusters and queries in them.

During the work, we brought 7 key requests of the client to the TOP 3, 21 to the TOP 5, 34 to the TOP 10, and 73 to the TOP 30.

In the work process, the semantics expanded, and we actively worked on increasing the positions of all new keys.

Now we are changing priorities due to the internal changes in the cryptocurrency market. This practice is actively used for the successful promotion of crypto exchangers. We revised the semantics and added new keywords.

Conclusion

With a properly designed SEO strategy, we managed to increase organic traffic 8 times and bring to the TOP more than 140 priority key queries. And all this was the result of the well-coordinated work of the Luxeo team and the Obmenat24 client. But we do not stop there. We are still generating and implementing new ideas to benefit the client’s business.