In September 2023, ET Prime published, “Groww likely to pip Zerodha in active investor count this month”. This would mean that the world of stockbroking could see a new Indian leader soon.
This prompted me to dive deep into how Groww made it happen. Zerodha had been the industry’s leading poster boy with most active investors since a while.
As of April 2024, Groww has a 19.9% market share, whereas Zerodha has 19.4%.
In this Product led SEO Case Study, we will learn how to build and rank valuable online tech products on Google that drive paying customers organically.
Context: Groww vs Zerodha SEO Growth
A contrast exists between strategy Groww and Zerodha. This trickles down from their founders’ business philosophy and source of funds.
Zerodha CEO Nithin Kamath gave an interesting interview to Business Standard in June 2021. He indicated that the brokerage does not want to aggressively take more investors on board.
“As an ideology, we don’t offer any cashback or free stuff. Trading is serious business. Cashback isn’t something that should lure people into trading or investing.”
Nithin Kamath, Zerodha CEO
This strategy is understandable. But it’s interesting that Groww has seen an uptick in organic traffic, while Zerodha faces a downtrend.
The data showcases a stronger influx of organic, non-branded traffic for Groww at 95% compared to Zerodha’s 25%, evidencing a well-executed SEO blueprint.
@similar Domain Rating. Source: Ahrefs
Zerodha has only 25% non branded.
Here’s the last 10 years’ picture of India’s top online stock brokers organic traffic. Around May 2020 is when Groww overtook Zerodha for the top spot.
Groww has 7M+ active clients in 2023 as opposed to 6.6M+ of Zerodha. Groww now holds a market share of ~20%, while 3 years ago it was just 4%.
It is insane how Groww and the online stock broking market has changed in the last 5 years as can also be seen in the above bar chart race.
Groww’s SEO Metrics Snapshot – Oct 2023
- Domain Rating (DR): 74
- Traffic: 20M
- Pages: 60k+
- Keywords: 1.9M
- Backlinks: 124K
- Traffic Value: $3.4M
Case in Point: Product led SEO at Groww
Conventional SEO primarily hinges on long-form content and linear link building, Product led SEO pivots towards a customer-centric, non-linear approach.
It entails tweaking digital products to enhance content ranking, thereby driving sales in a non-linear fashion. Essentially, Groww embraced this model by programmatically publishing online tools and relevant pages, which in turn, catalyzed link acquisition non-linearly.
The Triad of Velocity
The SEO strategy has three core pillars:
- Content Velocity: Rate of content generation.
- Tech Velocity: The pace of online product pages’ improvement.
- Link Velocity: The speed of bolstering domain authority.
Content Velocity
There are patterns you will find as you deep dive into Groww’s top pages on Ahrefs. You will find that a significant chunk of traffic is driven by specific page categories such as stocks, calculators, and indices.
Here’s an example of how programmatic SEO is used to publish pages based on a template:
If you check the top pages of Groww, you can find patterns – 3 templates of pages:
For instance, 12% of their 60,000+ pages of form “/stock/*” are raking in 40% of the traffic (8M+).
While 227 of their pages that have calculators (pages of form “/calculators/*”) account for 18% of the traffic (3.6M).
Now there are 3 parts to content velocity which Groww has worked on.
1. Templates for Programmatic Page Generation:
Stock page components are crafted programmatically based on a template, encompassing elements like Price Chart, Performance, Market Depth, Analyst Estimates, About the Company, and Shareholding Pattern.
Or you could learn from my other SEO case studies. Links at the end of the post.
2. EEAT Signals:
These emphasize Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness through
- In-depth analysis like Analyst Estimates, Shareholding Pattern of the stock
Source: groww.in
- Engagement features like News, Events related to the stock
- Transparency about the business e.g. adding disclaimers and most important terms and conditions upfront
It might be easy to forget to include the ones that make each page unique, with templatised content generated at a high velocity. However, without these, programmatic SEO is simply spam at scale.
3. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO):
There’s use of tempting CTAs, at the right place and right time…
That push the visitor to join the Groww platform as soon as a CTA is clicked…
But couldn’t anyone create this easily?
Yes, that is why CONTENT VELOCITY is just 1 part of the equation.
2nd part is TECH VELOCITY i.e. how fast are their online products improving
And 3rd part is LINK VELOCITY i.e. how fast is their domain authority improving
Tech Velocity
There are 2 parts of measuring tech velocity I’ve found most important
- Highest traffic pages performance scores / load speed
- Speed at which pages are being updated (detected via sitemap)
Tracking Page Speed & Performance
Track top 5 pages performance on a tool like GTMetrix. If these lines are trending downwards (performance getting better), figure out what your competitor is doing right.
Why?
Because Page Load Speed directly impacts Conversion.
Track updates in sitemap for meaningful releases
Use a tool like visualping.io to track changes on any page, including the sitemap of your competitor.
Why?
Because Daily Improvements directly impact Growth. Case in point – Groww published 24k+ pages in the last quarter of 2022:
Link Velocity
Use Ahrefs to monitor Domain Rating
We can see Groww has grown 10x+ in traffic and referring domains
Why?
Because # of Referring Domains directly impacts Organic Traffic (based on a study of ~920 million web pages in Ahrefs content explorer index)
Link Velocity Bonus Hack
Use this unique hack to estimate the financial requisites of matching Groww’s link acquisition pace.
Find how much you might need to spend to acquire links same as them –
- Go to Ahrefs
- Download backlinks with DR > 30 and Domain Traffic > 5k and Do Follow = TRUE
- Export data
- Upload to linkdetective.pro
Of their top 300 referring domains, 87 are known to sell links, at an avg price of $498.
And that’s a short summary of how Groww has used Product led SEO to capture demand at scale.
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.
You can check out some more SEO Case Studies:
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