by Yuval Halevi
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How Binance Became The Largest Crypto Exchange: Binance SEO Analysis

The crypto industry is a place where companies rise and fall like tides. In 2017, Deloitte released a report showing that a crypto company’s average lifespan is slightly more than one year. Ironically, Binance was established in 2017 and has since then marketed itself as the leading exchange in the crypto industry. 

Exchanges trading volume Coinmarketcap

Becoming a market leader amidst such competition is not a matter of luck. It’s about strategy, execution and dedication. In this analysis, we will analyze Binance from an SEO perspective. 

What made Binance become the largest and most popular crypto exchange? Where is most of their traffic coming from? What are they doing that sets them apart from their competitors? 

Let’s dive in!

Overview:

As of October 2022, Binance has close to 72 million monthly visitors. 

Binance traffic from similarweb

Most of Binance’s traffic is direct while 15.34% of the traffic comes from organic search. 
Binance traffic different channels data from similarweb
Binance’s direct traffic is extremely high due to its existing exchange users. These people use the platform and just type the URL directly into their browser. 
Binance’s organic traffic is its growth engine. That’s what keeps driving new people to their site and many of these eventually become new users.
Using Ahrefs, we analyzed Binance.com.
Binance stats on Ahrefs
Binance’s organic traffic stands at 17.8 million users per month. A large portion of this is branded search.
People who Google search for ‘Binance’ or Binance + [Keyword]
People who Google search for ‘Binance’ or Binance + [Keyword]
To clean the data, let’s exclude the word ‘Binance’ from the results.
Analyzing binance traffic on Ahrefs screenshoot
The total traffic is 9.3 million

This means that:

About 52% of all of Binance’s organic traffic comes from non-branded searches.

But how and why is Binance getting so much organic traffic?

Our research shows that Binance uses two simple yet effective SEO methods:

  • Strategic SEO-optimized sections.
  • International SEO.

Strategic SEO-optimized sections:

We analyzed Binance’s non-branded search traffic and found that most of it was from mainly six sections. 

Binance organic traffic sources illustration

Blog [Traffic: 343K]

Binance Blog screenshoot

Although Binance is getting great organic traffic to its blog, it isn’t their primary traffic driver. Unlike other strategic sections on their site, the Binance blog’s primary purpose is not to drive massive organic traffic but to help Binance gain authority in their niche by releasing product updates, publishing stories by CZ, and bringing popular influencers to partner with their brand.

Binance organic traffic to different sections research by GuerrillaBuzz

 

Prices [Traffic: 3 Million]

Binance pricing sections

The Binance prices section is a traffic generator like no other. When looking for [Coin Name] + Price on Google, Binance is usually among the top results.

The URL structure of this section is:
binance.com/en/price/[COIN-NAME]

This section drives Binance 3 million visitors per month.

traffic to 'prices' pages on Binance
Binance understands how important this section is and it seems as if they are doing a great job with their on-page SEO:
How binance SEO optimize the 'price' pages

How to buy [Traffic: 1.1 Million]

This section drives Binance 1.1 million visitors per month. Besides generating insane amounts of traffic, the search intent for this type of page is high, and the organic traffic from these keywords is more likely to become exchange users than other sections on the site. 
Binance traffic from How to Buy pages
Binance did a great job with their On-page optimization, here’s why:
How to page format Binance - SEO Analysis GuerrillaBuzz
Binance understands its users’ search intent. They ranked pretty well for thousands of different search terms with this URL structure:
Binance.com/en/buy[COIN-NAME]

But decided to change it to a new one:

binance.com/en/how-to-buy/[COIN-NAME]

Binance updated URL structure for how to buy pages

It’s not common to see such a large website making URL structure changes, but we believe that Binance is constantly analyzing the search intent and the competition in their niche, and they found out the new URL structure is a wise move. 

Search terms like ‘Buy [COIN-NAME]’ are more likely to be competitive. Take a look at the search term ‘Buy Algorand’

buy algorand search on ahrefs

The keyword difficulty score is 37 which consider slightly competitive. The global search volume for this search term is 1,100 per month.

‘How to buy Algorand’ search term is a lot less competitive while the global volume remain the same.

How to buy algorand organic search

The example above is just one of thousands of different pages Binance ranks for.

Trade [Traffic: 1.4 Million]

With 1.4 million visitors per month, the ‘Trade’ section is an excellent organic traffic generator for Binance.
Traffic to trade section on Binance
People who look for coin pairs want to find a chart right away. Binance seems to understand that and open its trading chart for everyone (not only signedup members).
Binance trading dashboard screenshoot
Binance doesn’t optimize these pages with content filling (like they do in other sections). They do it by creating an awesome interface that keeps people on their page. Since time on the page is an important Google ranking factor, it gives Binance an advantage over many competitors who require visitors to sign up to use the charts or give just limited information. 
As a comparison, here’s the page Yahoo Finance rank for the term ‘NEO/BTC’.
Yahoo finance example
Binance seems to have greater functionality which increases users’ time on the page.
Another important factor that boosts Binance’s rankings in the entire Trade section is Dwell time. 
Dwell time is how long the visitor interacts with a site before clicking back to the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). 
Dwell time explanation
 

Binance not only provides a chart view for thousand of different cryptocurrencies, but they are also a trading platform. This gives them a great advantage over competitors such as Yahoo Finance, ADVFN and other popular sites.

NFT [Traffic: 219K]

Binance launched its NFT marketplace in June 2021. Back then, it might have looked like they were late to jump on the train, but Binance had a long-term vision for this section. 

We analyzed the traffic of dozens of popular NFT marketplaces and found that Binance outranked most of them in a matter of months. Since it takes time for SEO to take effect, we can only imagine the niche dominance Binance will have among the NFT marketplaces in the next bull run. We list here the top four NFT marketplaces in our research:

NFT marketplace comparison

It’s important to mention that we run our analysis to all the URLs in Binance that contain /nft/ 

Binance traffic to NFT pages

In our comparison, we found out that, unlike most NFT marketplaces, Binance’s organic reach has been growing in the last six months despite the bear market.

 

Binance’s organic monthly traffic to NFT-related pages has increased by 26% from 173,000 to 218,000. 

Academy [Traffic: 887K]

With 887,900 monthly visitors, the Binance Academy section is a crucial part of Binance’s marketing strategy

academy traffic binance

 

Our analysis shows that Binance Academy traffic is very diverse. Its diversity makes Binance’s organic traffic resilient to market changes. 

To understand the traffic flow we filtered Binance Academy articles by Topic and URL type. Here’s Binance Academy traffic analysis:

Binance Academy traffic to different sections

Each cluster in the illustration above represents a different type of content. Binance academy’s content strategy is pretty straightforward. Their content mainly comes from one of the 8 clusters we listed in the illustration. Once they found the right content type, they could produce more content and scale faster.

Here’s an example for each one of the articles type:

 

– ‘What is‘ articles
– ‘Explained‘ articles
– ‘Guides
– ‘How to‘ articles
– ‘Introduction‘ articles
– ‘Glossary‘ pages
– ‘Connecting [Focus Keyword]‘ articles
– Others

There are several reasons why Binance gets massive traffic to its site:

Content strategy:

By creating a solid SEO strategy, Binance can ensure it not only writes content that will get views once shared on their social media but they also write content that drives organic traffic over time and makes them less vulnerable to market changes. 

Smart categories:

Binance’s category system is very efficient. It helps their visitors and search engines better understand their academy structure and find related articles to the article they read. This keeps people on their site for longer and makes each visitor potentially read more articles. 

Binance academy smart category

 

Internal linking:

One of the best ways to improve the On-page SEO of a site is to create smart internal linking. It helps search engines to reach different pages on the site faster and can help to improve the ranking of certain pages. For example, a page on a site with many internal links will indicate to search engines that this page is more important than others. 

For example, Binance add hundreds of internal links to the three pages we marked below by just adding them to their menu. Since every page in Binance academy have a menu, the pages under the ‘popular articles’ section will get a link from thousand of pages which will signal search engines ‘this pages are important!’

Smart internal linking Binance

International SEO:

Moz defines International SEO as “the process of optimizing your website so that search engines can easily identify which countries you want to target and which languages you use for business.”

To make it simple let’s use this example:

if people from Australia search for Bitcoin price, International SEO means that they will see the price in AUD.

International SEO example Binance SEO report

Binance optimizes its site for 44 different languages and regions and 50 currencies. As a comparison, Coinbase optimized its site for 13 languages and regions. 

Binance different languages and regions options

Binance’s international SEO gives them a great advantage over most of their competitors. For example, when people in Turkey search in Turkish for information about how to buy different coins, Google prioritize search results in Turkish.

Our analysis revealed that Binance gets 1,100,000 visitors per month to their pages in turkish. In our analysis below, we show most of the languages that Binance is targeting and how much traffic it’s driving to its site per month:

Binance traffic by different language

Conclusion

Understanding the value of SEO, allocating the right resources, and constantly improving are some of the main reasons Binance has become a leader in its niche. There are many other contributing factors, but Binance has played its cards right when it comes to SEO.

Author Yuval Halevi

Yuval is a savvy SEO and marketing expert with over a decade of experience. Specializing in the blockchain industry, he's the go-to guy for crypto companies looking to simplify their digital marketing strategies and achieve explosive growth. As a digital nomad and successful company builder, Yuval brings a fresh, creative perspective to every project he tackles.

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