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Case study: Promotion of IT project in the Blockchain niche

Author
Author: Nataliia Pronina
Optimizer
Reviewer
Reviewer: Oleg Gavrilyuk
Head of Optimizers
2026-07-27
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.
Program implementation Audit result Priority Contractor
1. IP website analysis fix high software engineer
2. Checking the website for viruses, malicious scripts, and blacklisting ОК high software engineer
3. Domain history analysis on WhoIs and web.archive ОК high software engineer
4. Checking for the elements that may negatively impact user's interaction with the website ОК medium software engineer
5. Checking for availability and correctness of forming SEO-Friendly URLs (human-readable URL) ОК high software engineer
6. Checking for the gluing of mirrors and complete duplications ОК high software engineer
7. Checking for a complete duplication of content ОК high software engineer
8. Checking for technical pages, pages with duplicate content, or with no content in the index ОК high software engineer
9. Check correctness of the server's responses to the page request ОК high software engineer
10. Check the page code for any errors in HTML and CSS ОК medium software engineer
11. Check the page code for HTML and CSS errors fix high software engineer
12. Checking for availability and errors in SSL certificate fix high software engineer
13. Checking for the correctness of robots.txt file set up ОК high software engineer/content manager
14. Connect GSC ОК high software engineer
15. Connect GA ОК high optimizer
17. Check Sitemap.xml ОК medium software engineer
18. Checking for CSS and JS availability ОК medium software engineer
19. Checking microformats fix medium software engineer
20. Checking social media buttons fix low software engineer
21. Checking website loading speed fix high software engineer
22. Checking for the availability and optimization of multilingualism ОК medium software engineer
23. Checking for mobile version of the website ОК medium software engineer
24. Checking for the website customization on other devices fix medium software engineer
25. Checking for the correct output of the text content ОК high software engineer
26. Tracking Stat.Aweb content in SEO monitor fix low software engineer
27. Checking for the elements (commercial factors) on the pages required for ranking in this topic ОК medium software engineer
28. Checking for the partial content duplication ОК medium software engineer
29. Enable the removal of irrelevant and out-of-stock products ОК high software engineer
30. Check the indexing of reviews on the website ОК medium software engineer
31. Checking for the content pages in the code, which is not displayed on the site pages ОК high software engineer
32. Is the content visible with the JavaScript turned off ОК medium software engineer
 
Content Audit result Priority Contractor
33. Checking for affiliates ОК high
34. Checking GSC geo-settings fix high optimizer
35. Checking for the correctness of forming meta tags fix high content manager/software engineer
36. Checking for availability and uniqueness of web content on the site fix high content manager
37. Checking for availability of landing pages for semantic core ОК low content manager
38. Checking the optimization of text content ОК medium software engineer
39. Checking for availability of content formatting ОК medium software engineer
 
Structure and linking Audit result Priority Contractor
40. Checking for "bread crumbs" menu fix high software engineer
41. Checking for linking on the website fix medium software engineer
43. Checking for the broken links fix medium software engineer
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:

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