The Ultimate Web3 SEO Strategy Guide

Image courtesy of Pixabay.

Traffic from search engines converts up to 50% higher and offers a return on investment (ROI) more than 20 times what you get from other sources, especially ad campaigns.

This guide gives you the Web3 SEO strategy you can use to elevate your blockchain project’s rankings and take advantage of the opportunities that are found on search engines.

So, what is the Web3 SEO strategy?

The Web3 SEO strategy has the following components as covered in this guide:

• Building a Rock-Solid Foundation for Your SEO Strategy.
• Knowing the Buyer’s Persona Inside Out
• Understanding in Detail The Buyer’s Journey
• Crafting a Strategic Framework for Content Creation
• Finding Winning Keyword Ideas
• Strategically Mapping Out Your Content Ideas
• Writing and Optimizing the Content
• Publishing and Finding Backlinks
• Promoting The Content
• Measuring and Managing the Published Content

Building a Rock-Solid Foundation for Your SEO Strategy

It is important that you implement the SEO strategy for your Web3 project on a strong foundation. There are three critical parts of that foundation that you need to take care of: (1) the buyer’s persona, (2) the buyer’s journey, and (3) the content creation framework.

Often, these three are overlooked, which leads to the failure of the campaign before it even starts.

Know the Buyer’s Persona Inside Out

A buyer’s persona is a profile of the potential primary target user of your solution, product, application, or project. This is also the profile you should target with your SEO marketing.

Even before you decide that SEO is the method of lead acquisition that is going to work best for your project, it is important that you understand in detail the person you want to target.

You create a buyer’s persona by focusing on who the solution you have built is designed to serve. You need to look at the particular problem the targeted user of your platform, application, or service faces and how your project improves their current situation.

If, for example, your project is a layer 2 protocol that scales the bitcoin network, then your buyer’s persona is likely a developer who would prefer to launch an application on top of the most secure blockchain but is limited by its lack of smart contract capability or a trader who is frustrated by slow confirmation times and high transaction fees.

You should get as many details about your target as possible.

By understanding the buyer’s persona, you will be more accurate, for example, in figuring out their search intent in many of the queries that you will be creating content around.

Understand the Buyer’s Journey

The buyer’s journey is the path the buyer’s persona takes from being completely unaware of your project to being an active user, customer, or member of your community.

Generally, there are three critical phases in that journey:

• Awareness phase
• Consideration phase
• Decision phase

The concept of the buyer’s journey is based on the understanding that, generally speaking, a potential buyer doesn’t buy from you the very first time they hear about your brand, application, or project.

Usually, you need to make the user aware of your project and then build trust over time before they can buy. This means they will move from the awareness phase through the consideration phase to the decision phase.

It is important to understand that the buyer persona will need different types of marketing content at different stages of their journey.

For example, at the awareness stage, the content needed doesn’t focus mostly on the project but on the industry and the challenges the searcher faces. At this stage, you publish content that offers free advice and tips they can use.

It is at the consideration stage where you have content that pitches about the solution your project offers.

At the decision stage, you provide content that guides or helps the prospect on how to use the solution you offer.

Craft a Strategic Framework for Content Creation

A content creation framework is a collection of organized processes that guide content production, publishing, and management. This is the structure that guides how the content is produced and used.

Content is the primary component of SEO marketing. However, just going straight to creating content could result in huge misses. It is important that you create and distribute the content through an established framework.

The framework will not only help focus the content and, therefore, make it more effective but also make the team more efficient and cost-effective in its efforts.

In particular, the content creation framework needs to define how and who does the following:

• Creating and overseeing strategy, including calendar and style guides.
• Coming up with ideas and mapping out the content
• Writing the content
• Reviewing, editing, and publishing the content
• Sourcing backlinks for the published content
• Managing published content

A spreadsheet can serve as a primary tool for creating a framework. It could be used to chart the journey of an article from the keyword researcher to the writer, the editor, the graphics team, and the publisher.

There are other tools you can use to efficiently manage your content production, and one that I have used and found to be very helpful in this regard is Trello.

The content creation framework you create ideally should align with your roadmap. It can plan as far ahead as a year but should be flexible enough to accommodate unforeseen needs down the road.

Finding Winning Keyword Ideas

With the framework established, it is time to find the ideas to write about and use to rank on Google and other search engines.

Ideally, the ideas you pick will give you content that will not only rank on Google but also resonate with searchers enough that they will be interested in continuing the conversation.

Both these goals are not easy to achieve. They need a lot of research, planning, and careful execution.

The ideas that you are looking for should be in three broad categories, all based on the buyer’s journeys.

Awareness Phase Ideas

These ideas will result in content that the target will find by querying search engines, in particular Google, without ever knowing about the existence of your project.

Most importantly, these are ideas that lean towards providing tips and answering questions about the problem that you solve with the project.

If there is a category that needs to be highly optimized for search engines, it is this category. If you get this right, then you have little to worry about the other two as far as being found online is concerned.

This first category of content should ideally be used as a lead magnet to entice the searchers to start building a relationship with your project. The other goal of the content created at this stage is to establish yourself as a trusted authority within the industry.

The primary Call to Action ( CTA) in the content created for this stage should have a request for searchers to sign up for your email list or join your social channels so that they do not miss the more tips you plan to share with them.

Consideration Phase Ideas

These are ideas that more specifically talk about your project and the problems that it solves. It is this category of ideas that differentiates your projects from others that are similar out there.

The content from these ideas is best distributed through your channels that the readers have already subscribed to, such as email lists and social media accounts. They can also be hyperlinked from the published awareness phase content.

You can also find general questions about the problem your project solves or the industry and find ways to mention your project in the content.

For example, someone might search ‘Top 5 Bitcoin layer 2 projects in 2024.’ You can create a listicle and include your project if it is a layer 2.

The call to action on this type of content is to have the reader try some aspect of your project. It could start with simple steps such as asking them to download and read your white paper or check your tokenomics.

Decision Phase Ideas

This content is designed to guide users in exploring aspects of your project. The content is distributed primarily to those who have been persuaded that your project is what they need.

In particular, this is content targeted at those who have taken the initial step of actively getting involved with your project, such as downloading your white paper, installing your wallet, or buying your tokens.

You should be keen to catch questions that members of your growing community ask about the project on platforms like Telegram or X. Take these questions and turn them into blog posts or videos that provide step-by-step answers or detailed explanations.

Despite being mostly about your project, the content in this category should still be highly optimized for search engines, especially if your project is anticipated to see massive growth with time.

If the project is well known, more and more users will ask Google questions about it. Capture these questions and answer them in detail so that you can rank on questions about your project.

How Do You Find Ideas?

The success of your SEO marketing hugely depends on the ideas you choose to write on.

If you choose ideas that nobody is interested in, nobody will find the content and read it.

On the other hand, if you choose ideas that more established projects and platforms have tackled exhaustively already, the search engines are basically going to ignore you.

So it is important that content created, especially for the awareness stage, answers questions that people are asking search engines and that other projects or platforms have not yet provided the most accurate or comprehensive answers.

In the early days of the internet, people used to look for keywords to write about, and that was enough to rank.

Today, you need to forget about keywords. Instead, focus on the queries (long tail questions) that people ask Google and other search engines. Take these questions and answer them in blog or video form.

The following is the step-by-step way to find these questions to write answers for:

First Step: Create a Spreadsheet

Create a spreadsheet with four columns: questions, search volume, number of forums, keyword difficulty, and Keyword Golden Ratio (KGR).

Second Step: Generate Ideas

The Google search box is a valuable source of ideas you can use to rank.

Start by typing any query relevant to your industry or project and have the cursor stay at the end of the sentence. For example, if you are a layer 2 project, type ‘What is a layer 2 blockchain?’

Google will suggest further questions, such as:

• Layer 2 blockchain examples
• What is layer 3 blockchain
• What is layer 1 blockchain

The Google autocomplete feature is the other way to get more ideas. This is where you input a seed phrase and then see what Google fills.

For example, if you type ‘layer 2 blockchain,’ Google might complete it for you to be any of the following:

• Layer 2 blockchain list
• Layer 2 blockchain explained
• Layer 2 blockchain solutions

For even more ideas, you can add a letter at the end of the seed phrase, and see what Google suggests. For example, add ‘a’ at the end of a seed phrase like this, ‘layer 2 blockchain a,’ Google provides:

• Layer 2 blockchain scaling a survey
• How many layer 2 blockchains are there
• Layer 2 AI crypto

You can add more alphabet letters from A up to Z, and you will get tons of ideas.

And you can repeat this process with as many seed phrases as possible.

You can also find more ideas by looking at the ‘People also ask’ and ‘People also search for’ sections of the search engine result pages (SERPs) of each query you ask Google.

Add all the queries (ideas) you get into your spreadsheet.

Third Step: Find Forums on SERP

The next step is to search each of the queries on your spreadsheet and indicate the number of forums that appear on its first page of results.

The forums to watch out for include Quora, Reddit, and Bitcoin Talk.

A forum appearing means that Google is struggling to find articles to return. Google adds forums to SERPs when there are no other relevant and good enough articles to show.

But don’t be excited yet. The reason there are not many articles answering a query could be that there are not many people asking Google that query, and therefore, content marketers have not been incentivized to create content for it.

However, we will figure that out in the next step

Fourth Step: Find Search Volumes and Difficulty

The next step is to figure out the number of people who ask Google each of the questions on our spreadsheet (search volumes) per month. At this step, you should also determine the keyword difficulty of each query.

This is where you need a tool like Ahrefs, Semrush, or Keyword Everywhere.

Put each query into the tool and find out its search volumes and the keyword difficulty. Indicate these metrics for each query on the spreadsheet.

Of course, the higher the volume, the better, but do not make the mistake of dismissing queries with volumes in the hundreds. In particular, queries with monthly search volumes under 250 can be very useful in boosting a brand-new website early.

It is important to point out that you will likely find more ideas from the keyword tool while getting the monthly search volumes. Add these ideas to the spreadsheet and also find out the number of forums that appear in their first search result pages.

Sixth Step: Calculate the KGR

The Keyword Golden Ratio (KGR) is a formula that was first explained by Doug Cunnington, an Internet Marketing Consultant, in the early 2010s. I have used it on new websites, and it has worked. The idea behind the KGR formula is to help your website shorten the time spent in the Google sandbox.

To succeed with this formula, you need to take only queries with monthly search volumes below 250 and use them to create the first batch of articles you will publish.

A query can bring you traffic in the shortest time if it has a KGR score of below 0.25.

But how is the KGR calculated?

You divide the number of all posts Google has indexed that have the entire query in the title with the search volume.

KGR = (allintitle results) divided by (search volume).

And how do you find the allintitle number?

Search the phrase using the format allintitle: query phrase. For example, allintitle:layer 2 blockchain explained.

Strategically Mapping Out Your Content Ideas

First Step

Create a new list of ideas from your spreadsheet that will likely rank high. The criteria you use to add ideas to your list of the ideas you will create content for doesn’t need to be rigid

Just give priority to ideas with:

• High number of forums appearing in the SERP
• A low KGR score (lower than 0.25 if the site is new).
• Relatively low keyword difficulty
• Relatively high search volumes (except for new websites)

Second Step

Take all the ideas or queries that can be tackled in a single article or blog post and put them together. Often, you can create an outline for an article using different queries from your list.

Third Step

Take closely related article ideas and group them. This is now creating a topic cluster of articles.

Why are topic clusters important?

Topic clusters are important because they force you to create interlinking content. This is good for both the human readers as well as the Google machine.

Clustering shows Google that your content is organized but also helps create another significant feature for Google: users spend more time on your website as they move from one post to another.

Fourth Step

For each cluster, find the overall idea and make it the topic of the cluster. Each cluster, in the end, needs to have a pillar page or post.

This is going to be a long and comprehensive post that will cover all the ideas in the topic cluster. It will also have the critical aspects of internal linking. All the smaller articles in the cluster are going to link to the pillar page.

Writing and Optimizing the Content

Two critical things to do when you get to writing the content:

First, do not start with the pillar pages. Start writing the smaller articles in the cluster that cover the most basic questions regarding the space in which you operate.

The pillar page of that cluster will only be written after at least most of the ideas in a cluster have been covered. Of course, more ideas can be added to a cluster later.

Second, start with queries with low monthly searches and Keyword Golden Ratio scores. With these, you can easily give your website credibility with Google before you move to tackle phrases with high competition.

When writing, have the question that was asked by the reader guide you. Make the effort to understand the searcher’s intent. That means you should think about what probably made the searcher ask that question.

The general rule of thumb is to avoid tackling ambiguous answers, which means the question can be interpreted differently.

Ideally, start with creating the outline and have at least as many subheads as possible, which could be further questions that searchers ask Google.

Don’t forget to optimize for snippets, voice search, and AI.

How you optimize for featured snippets is to make sure that immediately after the question, which could be the title or the subhead, you provide a short version of the answer in the first paragraph. Also, use lists in the content.

With voice search optimization, just make sure you write just as humans speak. That means writing conversationally, using simple words, shorter sentences, and paragraphs.

With time, thinking about AI as you create the content is becoming necessary. In November 2024, ChatGPT launched a browser component. A few months earlier, Google started returning AI-generated answers.

Some steps you can take to optimize your content for AI include writing with clarity, using subheadings, and using lists.

Publishing and Finding Backlinks

Backlinks are critical in your SEO strategy. It is how Google knows that your content is valuable. Besides how long people stay reading your content and how many return visits you get, the more sites link to your content, the better.

You can wait for it to happen organically. Just create high-value content, sit back, and wait for other websites to discover and link to it. That hardly works, though, especially for new websites that have not built any authority. In the early days, you need to go out and look for those links.

The best way to get backlinks is to guest post on more established websites.

Create a Guest Blogging Strategy

Unfortunately, not many established websites will accept links to your content just like that. Before you reach out, make sure that your content is of very high quality.

Also, reach out to sites whose readers you believe will benefit from the content you publish.

But How Do You Find Sites That Can Backlink to Yours?

The easiest place to start is to find websites within the industry that are accepting guest blogs. There are numerous websites online that have announced that they accept guest blogs, and many of these will likely not charge you anything.

You can find them through a Google search with this formula:

• Industry + “guest post”
• Industry + “submit content”
• Industry + “submit article”
• Industry + “Contributing writer”

The ‘industry’ here can be web3, crypto, blockchain, NFTs, etc.

However, do not limit yourself to sites within the crypto space. Search for sites in other industries that can easily have a topic that can easily be linked to your official project website.

For example, if you have built an ecosystem that allows teams to mint assets that supporters of sports teams can own, reach out to sports blogs.

The second way is to cold pitch to specific sites that you identify. Find a contact on their website or LinkedIn and reach out. This, for the most part, is going to be a numbers game. The more website admins you reach out to, the more successful you are likely to be.

In both approaches, target sites with reasonable domain authority and sizable traffic. You can determine these metrics using tools like AHReFs, Semrush, or Moz.

Promoting The Content

Besides creating optimized content and getting backlinks, you can increase the potential of your content ranking by doing other things.

For example, share the content on social media using relevant hashtags. Engage others on social media regarding topics relevant to your project, not necessarily about your project.

Also, reach out to opinion leaders in the space to help spread the content. The best way to do this is by first asking for quotes from them when writing the content and then letting them know when the article is published.

Most people, when quoted in an article, are more likely to share it through their social media accounts. The shares and the traffic they generate can signal to Google that the content is valuable.

You can also supplement organic efforts with paid promotion. You can use Google ads to have the content appear at the top of relevant SERPs. This can generate traffic that can influence factors that google considers to have rank organically.

You can run similar ad campaigns on social media platforms like Facebook and X.

Measuring and Managing the Published Content

Measuring the effectiveness of the content you generate for SEO is important. You can use the Google Analytics tool for this.

But why is this important?

When you track the performance, you can identify what works and does not. Also, through a tool like Google Analytics, you might discover more valuable ideas you can take and create content around and have more traffic to your website.

Meanwhile, publishing the content is not the end of the journey. Remember that the content you have created is a valuable asset. This asset needs to be managed well and leveraged for even better results.

For example, develop a routine or policy of having someone in your team go back to improve and optimize your old content. That includes making it more relevant in terms of facts as well as how it is positioned.

Repurposing your content for new uses is another important step to take past publishing. For example, you can turn some of your pillar pages into infographics. You can also turn some of the articles into video scripts.

In short, make your old content an asset that can benefit you in many ways.

Takeaway

For SEO marketing to work, you need to put a lot of planning into it. You should create a framework, find appropriate content ideas, map it out, and optimize it appropriately for humans and the machine.

The Ultimate Web3 SEO Strategy Guide was originally published in The Capital on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.