Case study: Promotion of IT project in the Blockchain niche

In this case study, Aweb team will share its experience in promoting an IT project in a highly competitive niche – Web3 cybersecurity. We are talking about the company specializing in Blockchain Security Audit – checking and protecting crypto projects from hacker attacks.

Client

B2B company providing security for platforms and websites, one-time or regular code security audits, as well as protecting Web3 innovations and cryptocurrencies from hacker attacks.

These services are available to all websites using electronic payment systems; however, cryptocurrency exchanges are the company’s regular clients, considering that both personal data and large sums of money are always at risk of being stolen there.

The work can be carried out both at the stage of project deployment on the server and for the projects that are currently in progress

Our objective

Promote the project to the top 10 of Google by priority queries

Geo-dependence of the project

Mainly Europe (all English-speaking countries)

Period of work

May 2021 — February 2022

Project-Related Issues

The client had prior experience working with a SEO contractor but was not happy with the results, as the work did not deliver the expected outcomes:

• lack of progress in rankings;
• irrelevant backlinks (as noted by the client, links to the website were occasionally placed in articles unrelated to its content — e.g. those about furniture)
• no response from the contractor to the client’s feedback

Key areas of work:

• Penetration Test
• Audit Smart Contract

Competitor analysis

Our experts analyzed competitors to better understand the market and identify the key promotion strategies used by the competitors:

The analysis was carried out with geo-alignment to the UK.

Based on the analysis results, our specialists determined a promotion strategy for the client’s website:

• increase the number of relevant informational articles in the blog to attract potential users;
• the majority of competitors are not really focused on SEO-promotion of their resources – which is an advantage for us, as due to the general optimization of the website we can outperform them in the client’s priority directions;
• competitors’ link building varies between 100 to 150 links per month. We decided to build up to 100 donors per month, with the focus on quality rather than quantity, given that we had already analyzed the client’s link profile and started rejecting a large number of low-quality links;
• focus on the anchor links with higher frequency keywords when purchasing, paying attention to the anchor list of competitors;
• in order to gain a competitive edge over competitors, it is crucial to increase the loading speed of the website’s mobile version;
• competitors are ranked in the top based on the strong brand and website’s trust in general – we set this task as a separate priority.

In addition to competitors’ analysis, our specialists carried out a thorough technical audit of the website, and detected 10 critical issues that required immediate attention.

Key issues on the website included the following:

• 404 pages that had some traffic — redirects to related content were not set following the removal of pages. Accordingly, the traffic that had previously come to these pages was not redirected, meaning it was lost.
• Security issues — pages or sites with security issues are marked with a warning icon in search results. When trying to access such resources, users will see a message explaining the reasons they should avoid doing so. This, of course, adversely affects the site’s rankings in search results.

Our team also prepared recommendations for improving the site, guided by the requirements of Google’s Assessor Guidelines and the requirements for E-E-A-T factors:

1. Create a Contact page.
2. Create a separate “Our Team” page and display cards with the company’s key employees.
3. Key employees’ cards should be displayed on the landing page.
4. Key employees’ cards should be displayed on the “Services” page, right under the text.
5. Add 3-4 audit cards on “About Us” page and on each page of “Services” section. Place “View all audits” button below the cards that will redirect you to “Our Audits” page.
6. Display a video about the company or key employees (if any) on “About Us” page, .
7. Create a “Featured in” page.
8. Add “Case Studies” to the main menu with a link.
9. Create a separate “Our approach” page, providing a general overview of the audit process.
10. On each “Study” page, add the article’s author. When clicking on the full name, user will be redirected to the employee’s page.
11. Create “Certificates and Licenses” page.
12. Create “Our Awards” page.
13. Create “Our Gratitudes” page.
14. Create “Our Videos” page.

Working on the content

• Our experts reviewed the semantic core and created it from scratch, taking into account the client’s new goals.
• We updated meta tags for the website pages to comply with the client’s unique selling offer.
• Our team revised the texts for commercial pages.

Result after the revision of texts:

Working on an external optimization

We diversified the link profile as much as we could and used different types of purchases. The key focus was made on the quality of donor domain and the value it can bring to our website.

Interim feedback received from the client 3 months after the work started:

We achieved the following performance metrics following the objectives we set for the project:

1. Top 10 in the following directions:

• Penetration Test;
• Audit Smart Contract

2. We changed the priority promotion region to United States and all English-speaking European countries and tracked rankings for the following search engines in our internal system:

• http://google.com/ (for the US)
• http://google.uk/ (for the UK, we targeted this country due to the highest competition in search results).

Tasks that were successfully completed during the course of project

• duplication of the main content was removed

The client has a number of websites on similar topics where they published entirely duplicate articles. We implemented redirect map to avoid any duplication:

• Cleaned up a spammy link profile

Once we analyzed the profile, we identified that around 1000 out of 2700 purchased domains were actually spam, and rejected them in a number of iterations.

Conclusions:

Despite the complexity of the topic and many issues faced by the project team, we still managed to achieve solid results within 9 months of work:

• increased rankings for the client’s priority semantic groups in the highly competitive geo – UK;
• analysis and cleaning of the website’s link profile to further improve its quality and mitigate the impact of spammy links on the domain;
• identifying and fixing critical issues that affected Google rankings.

It became possible not only due to the well-coordinated work of the Aweb team, but also due to the close cooperation with the client, who promptly approved our revisions and was deeply involved and interested in the promotion process.

Unfortunately, the client decided to stop working with us after 9 months of cooperation, as he established some sub-brands for different directions and decided to build up his own team of SEO specialists.

However, the client highly appreciated our work and expertise, leaving a positive feedback on Clutch:

Project team

Project manager: Kateryna Tymoshenko

Optimizer: Yurii Oshchapovsky

Linker: Yevhen Fedchenko