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The In Search SEO Podcast
How different is SEO for NFT companies?
That’s what we’re discussing today with a Singaporean Digital Marketing Manager and blogger, often based in Cambodia. He is the founder and chief blogger at brendanaw.com. A warm welcome to the In Search SEO podcast, Brendan Aw.
In this episode, Brendan shares five SEO tips for NFT companies, including:
- Optimizing title tags and meta description URLs
- Have good UI/UX
- Use searchable platforms for content distribution
- Keyword research
- Building E-A-T
Brendan: Hi, guys.
D: Hey, Brendan, great to have you here. You can find Brendan over at brendanaw.com. So Brendan, how different is SEO for NFT companies?
B: For a start, the barrier to entry for SEO for NFT companies in terms of SEO isn’t very high at all for the simple fact that the majority of them don’t even do it. This was the problem I have with a lot of NFT and Web-3 companies. Those Web-3 companies who actually offer a service like FinTech or anything, usually do a little bit because they have their own company block. But the problem with NFT companies is they are so involved with social media marketing, generating hype, and being so focused on the community that they don’t do any at all. In that sense, that’s how different it is. Because a lot of times they just focus solely on social media.
D: So it’s a low bar. Perhaps it’s almost like SEO from 10 years ago with far more competitive industries. But we’ll see.
Today, you’re sharing five things to know about SEO for an NFT company. Let’s find out if it’s different, and if so, how. Starting off with number one, optimizing title tags and meta description URLs.
1. Optimizing Title Tags and Meta Description URLs
B: Traditionally, when you do any on-page SEO, you would optimize a particular page, even the homepage, for one single keyword. So most of the time NFT companies do not do that. All they do is put their brand name as the keyword. And nobody’s going to search that because they only come to know about your NFT project through social media. That’s one thing they don’t even do, they don’t even optimize their title tags. Let’s say the NFT company name, and then followed by a dash, and then a particular topic such as the function of the NFT. They don’t even do that.
This is something that I feel that a lot of NFT companies can do, even for the meta description. What is the project about? Nobody knows. A lot of them try to be fancy about it and come up with some cliche catchphrase that nobody’s going to be searching for anyway. In that sense, they are not even optimizing the basic and the simplest SEO practices.
D: Where do people really discover NFTs? Is it still search engines like Google and people searching for that? Are there big directories that people go to instead?
B: One big NFT directory is OpenSea, have you heard about it?
D: No, I haven’t dived into that market much.
B: Basically, it’s one of the biggest NFT marketplaces for people or companies. All they have to do is post a picture of the NFT and then they can sell it. But most high-level NFT companies usually create their own front end and then they connect it through some code and then it appears on the marketplace. That’s where people mostly come to know about NFTs on the marketplace homepage, once it gets listed.
Alternatively, the other sources will come from social media, most predominantly Twitter and Reddit. That’s where people start to hear about a lot of different big names starting to buy or invest in certain projects. That’s where you see all the NFT brand names popping out across all these forums and social media platforms.
And another very good tool that people use is called Nansen. It allows you to see the on-chain analytics i.e., the activity on the blockchain. Because like for anything Web-3 or crypto-related, you can see all the activity on the blockchain. Nansen pretty much aggregates all the data and puts it in a beautiful UI so you can see the information. Some of the features that Nansen allows you to do is see the activity on certain projects or track certain wallets. So when you see big whales (in terms of finance, they use the same term) buying or making very big purchases on the chain, they can come to see that if this guy’s buying this particular project, it must be good, as the price is going to go up soon, and I better get in. That’s one of the ways that people will do it.
D: And is it obvious to a search engine like Google that your website is offering or selling NFTs? Or do you have to use an additional script or schema, for example, to mark up certain aspects of your page to demonstrate to Google what it is that you do?
B: That’s the thing. I think Google doesn’t really like NFTs or anything Web-3, crypto-related, because the YMYL thing plays a lot of importance, especially in traditional finance. There’s no black and white for NFTs and crypto at this particular stage. There’s no regulatory clarity at all. So I don’t think Google promotes on search any of these. So that’s the issue. And a lot of them don’t use proper SEO techniques to try to tell people what their project is about, aside from the fact that it’s an NFT project and that you might be able to make money from it, it’s all very financially incentivized. But then on the utility side, they don’t tell how it’s valuable for people, other than making money.
D: I think it was worthwhile taking a bit of a sidetrack there getting you to explain a little bit more about other forms of marketing for NFTs and what people generally do.
And your number two tip is to have good UI/UX.
2. Have Good UI/UX
B: Yes, normally for content creators, bloggers, or any sort of website, you run your URL through the Google PageSpeed tests and GTMetrix and then you get to see your speed. And I think PageSpeed is one of the big factors for ranking, especially for mobile. But the thing with NFT companies, a lot of them try to be so fancy about it with the UI and the UX being so hard to navigate. It looks nice, and they use a lot of fancy animations and graphics but it slows the website down a lot. I’m not going to say the name but one of the big NFTs out there, when I go to their website, it takes a good five to ten seconds to get everything started, and I don’t think that’s good for ranking on Google. The FCP, the First Contentful Paint, it’s always a big hero image and it’s very hard to load. When it takes so long for the first interaction, that doesn’t help.
My advice is don’t try to get fancy about it. Give people the information they need to know. You don’t have to put fancy graphics or fancy animations. I think people are more interested in what the project is, the roadmap, and what utility it can provide. All that can be done through information, not just graphics. All the fancy stuff can be left on social media.
D: And number three, use searchable platforms for content distribution. Is that largely what you were sharing earlier on?
3. Use Searchable Platforms for Content Distribution
B: Yes. For searchable platforms, I identify as YouTube and Google specifically, not even any of the social media platforms, none of that. First of all, a lot of people in NFTs like to hold AMAs, ask me anything, a Q&A with the community. And they usually do it on Twitter spaces or on Discord. The thing is it’s like me and you doing this podcast right now. Once it’s done, that’s it. You can’t search for it. The one hour spent creating the content, all that value inside the content, is gone to waste. They don’t even clip it up. They don’t even distribute it anywhere.
My first advice is to hold all these long-form podcasts on YouTube. And then afterward you can extract the audio and put it on podcast websites like Spotify, Apple, or whatever. And then you can still hold all this like mini-AMAs and Q&As on Twitter and on Discord at another time. Ask the committee if they have any other questions as a bonus rather than the main core strategy.
D: Absolutely. Great tip there as well. That’s what we do on the Rank Ranger podcast. The show is published on YouTube as well as popular podcast platforms. It’s also moved into a blog post as well. But as you were saying, I like to try and identify longtail questions beforehand. And then there are opportunities of potential there to take that section of the show and to create a specific answer that can perhaps be an article by itself.
B: Correct. All of these strategies are not implemented by most NFT companies. Even for the companies that I work for, even when I propose the idea to do this, I’ll get shut down. They will say, “If we do it on Twitter, all the big names or the Twitter crypto influencers will come in, and then they’ll share our clips, and then we’ll get more traction.” Even for the big names, most podcasts get a few hundred concurrent viewers. But if you put that whole thing on YouTube as evergreen content it gets much more value.
D: And number four is keyword research. How is keyword research for NFT companies any different?
4. Keyword Research
When you use a keyword research tool, you can find a lot of keywords in terms of the utility that they’re offering, because most of the time, the utility features that these NFT projects are offering, you don’t really know what it is. That’s the whole problem with it. But there are a lot of viable keywords around what an NFT is and on NFT education. And but a lot of these companies don’t try to do it with NFT projects. A lot of their budget is spent heavily on marketing. And the most alarming, unfortunately, is most of it goes back to the founders, even though they say they’re going to set aside only a little bit for the founders, a lot of it goes back to them. In terms of crypto, that’s why people are so untrustworthy now, about this industry.
D: That’s a great point. What you’re saying is that people don’t necessarily know that whatever these companies are trying to promote actually exists in terms of the category of content. It’s like going back 10-plus years ago, before the iPad existed, and trying to market the iPad by using terminology around iPad. People aren’t going to search for that. But they might search for tablets, other phraseology, or other challenges that they have that may be able to be solved by that kind of device.
B: Correct. Going back to the iPad example, you will be searching for keywords around that and building a topical cluster but you can’t do that with NFTs. Because at the top of the funnel, people don’t even know what the project is about. And a lot of these founders try to push out their message on social media. And they just come up with a utility that no one else finds valuable. So there’s the problem.
D: I’m trying to dive into a specific example for NFTs. If it was NFT art, you would talk about newer types of art or opportunities to invest in different areas and keywords in relation to that. Is that the kind of route that you’d recommend?
B: Let’s say a company is doing NFT art. You could write articles around AI art generators, even though you’re not trying to do that, build a topical cluster around it, and build some authority around it, but none of them are doing that. All of these projects are focused on selling the NFT itself. They’re not concerned about trying to build education around their own project, which I find very stupid.
D: And number five, building E-A-T.
5. Building E-A-T
B: E-A-T I think it was implemented about three or four years ago. Yeah. I was listening to Kyle Roof from High Voltage SEO and he was explaining what E-A-T is. In terms of expertise, one of the things that he recommended was to address if the authors are identifiable. Is there an author bio? Firstly, they don’t even write articles, and they don’t do any blog posts, so I don’t think there are even any authors, not even an About Us page.
The whole thing about NFTs in Web-3 itself, everyone is so concerned about anonymity, so they are always hiding behind an avatar. They have the NFT as their profile picture and nobody knows who they are. If you’re lucky, you get a LinkedIn profile and some social media profiles. So in that sense, it is not very good even for E-A-T for an NFT project. So for authoritativeness. If you don’t write any articles Google won’t know what your authority is. That’s the problem. You don’t get backlinks. You’re not collaborating with anyone to get backlinks back to your website. That’s one thing that’s not very good for E-A-T.
And then for trustworthiness, Google wants to see that your company is a legit company. That means having a phone number, a local address, and all of that. You are not going to find that on an NFT website. If you’re lucky, there are multiple VCs invested in it, and they may have an office, but for the most part, a lot of NFT projects are run by individual people, a group of friends coming together, and they’re not going to be bothered by setting up an office or doing any of this to build E-A-T. Ultimately, that’s not going to be good for Google, because Google’s not going to like that point.
The Pareto Pickle – Create Content and focus on content marketing
D: Let’s finish off with Parito Pickle. So Parito says that you can get 80% of your results from 20% of your efforts. What’s one SEO activity you’d recommend that provides incredible results for modest levels of effort?
B: I would recommend doing blog posts. Creating content and focusing on content marketing. It’s not going to be easy. It’s not going to be the 20% effort but doing that is going to put you leaps ahead of a lot of vanity projects because they just don’t do it. I would focus a lot of my efforts and recommend a lot of NFT companies focus a lot on education and content marketing.
D: The challenge is that it’s hard to get a quick win doing that. I’m not saying it’s wrong at all. I’m just saying that nowadays there’s so much content out there. It’s like you’re building the foundations below the water before anyone can see what you’re doing. So if you’re getting that knockback from the business founder saying, “Look, we’re not getting any instant impact from that so here’s no point in doing it.” How do you justify it? How do you answer that?
B: I think I would say that if you prioritize growing and building a solid foundation, you would prioritize this. You wouldn’t be trying to look for quick wins, because as NFT companies you are already under so much scrutiny. It’s your responsibility as the project founder to show people and Google that you are an authority, and you’re trustworthy. And that takes work.
D: I’ve been your host, David Bane, you can find Brendan over at brendanaw.com. Brendan, thank you so much for being on The In Search SEO podcast.
B: Thank you so much, David.
D: And thank you for listening. Check out all the previous episodes and sign up for a free trial of the Rank Ranger platform over at rankranger.com.
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