Hey, I’m Surdeep Singh, and I’ve led growth at top Indian early stage startups. Today, we dive deep into the landscape of Product led SEO within the fintech companies of India.
This analysis is interesting, specially at a time when Groww has recently dethroned Zerodha to emerge as the leading brokerage service based on the number of active investors.
How did this happen? The secret lies in their robust Product led SEO strategies, and that’s what we’re going to unpack today.
Why This Matters?
What makes this intriguing is the change in the organic traffic trends for both companies. According to data from Ahrefs, Groww’s organic traffic is on a steady rise, while Zerodha’s is slipping away. Ahrefs reveals a closely matched Domain Rating (DR) between the two: Zerodha sits at a DR of 77 while Groww is close behind with a DR of 74.
How to Analyze Industry for Product led SEO?
You don’t want to jump into Product led SEO without a game plan. So, here’s how you can systematically analyze the industry:
Step 1: Employ GPT4 for Image Analysis
The first step I took was to identify the who’s who of fintech industry in India. I used GPT4’s advanced image analysis capabilities to find the top players in the fintech startups landscape.
I often read Inc42 articles to stay up to date for startup news and they shared a beautiful infographic which I asked GPT4 to analyse.
Here’s what the response from ChatGPT looked like:
Step 2: Utilize Ahrefs for Batch Analysis
Once you’ve got your list of top fintech startups, plug their URLs into Ahrefs for a batch analysis. This will give you an extensive data set comprising each site’s Domain Rating (DR) and traffic statistics.
Step 3: Spot Your Match
After your data is ready, sift through it to find the companies with a DR that’s close to yours. From that filtered list, further sort by who’s garnering the highest organic traffic.
Insights from Top Players
After running through this analysis, I unearthed some critical insights about the industry’s leading brands. For the analysis, I am picking Groww, Bankbazaar and PolicyBazaar. Let’s delve into the key findings:
Groww
Core Focus: Stocks, Calculators, Indices
Traffic Impact: Pages in the ‘stocks’ category contribute to 40% of the total traffic, coming from just 12% of their total web pages. Their calculators are another goldmine, accounting for 18% of the traffic.
BankBazaar
Core Focus: Bank Loans, Interest Rates, Calculators, Gold Rates
Traffic Impact: A limited 500 pages focused on gold rates draw 14% of total site traffic. However, their extensive range of calculators, which amounts to 2000 pages, surprisingly pulls in just 3% of the traffic.
Policy Bazaar
Core Focus: Insurance, RTO, Gold Rates
Traffic Impact: Their insurance-focused pages (10,000+) make up a massive 50% of the total traffic. Meanwhile, the RTO pages, which are around 1,000 in number, contribute to 15% of the traffic.
Takeaways
After this detailed dive, it’s clear that both Groww and PolicyBazaar offer valuable lessons in effective Product led SEO. They concentrate on fewer SEO product stories and still manage to achieve high traffic relevance. On the flip side, BankBazaar, despite doing well in SEO overall, has a strategy that demands higher costs and offers less scalability.
| Groww | BankBazaar | PolicyBazaar | |
| Total Traffic | 20M | 13M | 5M |
| Product led SEO Traffic estimated | 60% | 30% | 60% |
| # of SEO Product Stories contributing majority of traffic | 2 | 5+ | 2 |
| SEO first Products | Stocks Calculators Indices | Interest Rates Gold Rate Calculators | Insurance RTO Gold Rate |
| Traffic Relevance | High | Medium | High |
So, if you’re a challenger brand or one of the few established fintech startups, Product led SEO could be your untapped goldmine. It has the potential to dictate the pace of your growth, as evident from the real-world examples discussed.
Here’s another easy way to understand Product led SEO:
FAQs
Q1: What are the key metrics one should focus on when analyzing organic growth of fintech startups?
When analyzing competitors or your own organic growth in the fintech industry, focus on these key metrics:
- Non- Branded Organic Traffic: How many people are finding the you or your competitor via search engines, but were not directly searching for the brand? This indicates the strength of their SEO better than looking at overall organic traffic.
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): The money spent to acquire a new customer from a specific product or tool built for SEO, tells you how well your strategy is working.
- Active Users: The number of people actually using your products, as opposed to those who have merely signed up or visited a page, provides insight into product quality as well as conversion rate optimisation quality.
- Conversion Rates: How many site visitors turn into customers, split into different themes? E.g. Comparing Gold Rate Today to Bank Loan Interest Rates, generally Bank Loan Interest Rate tool would have higher conversion as the audience arriving to those pages are likely to be higher intent.
- Churn Rate: How many customers are leaving the service? A high churn rate could indicate dissatisfaction in finding what they were looking for in the page. Bounce rate is the first indicator of churn.
- Revenue Per User (RPU): This metric sheds light on the value each customer brings, helping you understand if a website or a tool within, is monetizing users effectively. The more understanding you have of LTV in fintech startups within your domain (which can be complex), the easier it is to map it to the source of acquisition.
Q2: How can existing fintech startups pivot their SEO strategy to a Product led SEO approach?
Pivoting to a Product led SEO approach involves several steps:
- Identify User Needs: Start by understanding deeply what your target audience is searching for in relation to your industry. Finding patterns in search queries during keyword research is one way to begin.
- Align With Product: Adjust your product features or offerings based on these user needs. Could you build pages programmatically if there are patterns in search queries, where you could add variables within the query and the pages?
- Keyword Research to find High Value Opportunities: Conduct comprehensive keyword research focusing on terms that not only relate to your product but also have high search volumes.
- Create New Content: Develop new articles, tools, or features that directly answer the user’s needs and queries, but avoid cannibalization of your current content.
- Technical SEO: Ensure that the website is optimized for speed, mobile usage, and frequent improvements.
- Monitor and Update: Use analytics tools like GA4 or Amplitude to track the performance of your changes. Make updates as necessary.
Q3: What is the role of Domain Rating (DR) in assessing the efficacy of a Product led SEO strategy?
Domain Rating (DR) is a metric that measures the strength and credibility of a website’s backlink profile on a logarithmic scale of 0-100. In the context of Product led SEO, DR plays a dual role:
- Competitive Analysis: A higher DR often correlates with better search rankings. By comparing your DR to competitors, you get a quick gauge of where you stand in the digital landscape.
- Trust and Credibility: A higher DR usually means your site appears more trustworthy to users (via Google’s understanding of authority), potentially increasing the effectiveness of your Product led SEO strategies by attracting more quality organic traffic.
Understanding your DR can help you refine your Product led SEO tactics and aim for links from high-DR websites to boost your own DR.
Before You Go
Product led SEO is a very powerful growth channel, but make sure you don’t get stuck in analysis paralysis. Strike the right balance of building and learning to make meaningful strides in getting results.
I’m still learning daily, and I certainly don’t know everything. But I can give you my perspective on any questions you have on organic user growth via Product led SEO.
You can contact me on my LinkedIn profile.
You May Like
- SEO Case Study: Product led SEO at Groww
- Programmatic SEO x ChatGPT FREE guide to 10x Traffic in 6 Months
- Product led SEO Roadmap – Access it here.
About Me
I’m a growth marketing professional and I’ve worked on various 0-1 and 1-100x growth projects with early and growth stage businesses.
Connect with me on LinkedIn here or read my story here.