Groww vs BankBazaar vs PolicyBazaar: A Product-Led SEO Teardown

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, especially at a time when Groww recently dethroned Zerodha to emerge as the leading brokerage service by number of active investors.

Source: Moneycontrol

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 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.

Source: Ahrefs

How to Analyze an Industry for Product-Led SEO

You don’t want to jump into product-led SEO without a game plan. Here’s how to systematically analyze the industry:

Step 1: Employ GPT-4 for Image Analysis

The first step was identifying the who’s who of the fintech industry in India. I used GPT-4’s image analysis to find the top players in the fintech startup landscape — starting from an Inc42 infographic of the space.

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 gives you an extensive data set comprising each site’s Domain Rating (DR) and traffic statistics.

Ahrefs Quick Batch Analysis

Step 3: Spot Your Match

After your data is ready, sift through it to find companies with a DR close to yours. From that filtered list, sort further by who’s garnering the highest organic traffic.

Look for Higher DR + Lower Traffic

Insights from Top Players

For this analysis, I picked Groww, BankBazaar, and PolicyBazaar. Here’s what stood out:

Groww

Core Focus: Stocks, Calculators, Indices

Traffic Impact: Pages in the “stocks” category contribute 40% of total traffic, from just 12% of total web pages. Calculators are another goldmine, accounting for 18% of 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. Their extensive range of calculators — 2,000 pages — surprisingly pulls in just 3% of traffic.

PolicyBazaar

Core Focus: Insurance, RTO, Gold Rates

Traffic Impact: Insurance-focused pages (10,000+) make up a massive 50% of total traffic. RTO pages — around 1,000 — contribute 15%.

Takeaways

Both Groww and PolicyBazaar offer valuable lessons in effective product-led SEO — they concentrate on fewer SEO product stories and still achieve high traffic relevance. BankBazaar, despite doing well in SEO overall, runs a strategy that demands higher cost and offers less scalability.

	Groww	BankBazaar	PolicyBazaar
Total Traffic	20M	13M	5M
Product-Led SEO Traffic (est.)	60%	30%	60%
# of SEO product stories driving 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

Top Indian fintech startups: product-led SEO comparison

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 the examples above show.

Here’s another way to understand product-led SEO:

FAQs

What are the key metrics to focus on when analyzing organic growth at fintech startups?

When analyzing your own or a competitor’s organic growth in fintech, focus on:

1. Non-branded organic traffic — how many people find you (or a competitor) via search without directly searching for the brand. This is a better signal of SEO strength than overall organic traffic.
2. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) — what it costs to acquire a customer from a specific SEO-built product or tool tells you how well the strategy is working.
3. Active users — people actually using the product, not just signing up or visiting a page, is a better signal of product and CRO quality.
4. Conversion rates — split by theme. A “bank loan interest rate” tool will typically convert higher than “gold rate today,” since that intent is higher.
5. Churn rate — customers leaving the service. A high churn rate can indicate people aren’t finding what they came for; bounce rate is the first indicator.
6. Revenue Per User (RPU) — how effectively a site or tool is monetizing users, and by extension, how it maps to LTV by acquisition source.

How can existing fintech startups pivot their SEO strategy to product-led SEO?

1. Identify user needs — understand what your audience is actually searching for in your space; keyword-research patterns are a good starting point.
2. Align with product — adjust product features based on those needs; look for query patterns you could serve programmatically.
3. Keyword research for high-value opportunities — target terms related to your product with meaningful search volume.
4. Create new content — build content, tools, or features that answer real user needs without cannibalizing what you already have.
5. Technical SEO — keep the site fast, mobile-friendly, and continuously improved.
6. Monitor and update — track changes with GA4 or Amplitude and iterate.

What role does Domain Rating (DR) play in assessing a product-led SEO strategy?

DR measures the strength and credibility of a site’s backlink profile on a 0–100 logarithmic scale. In product-led SEO, it plays a dual role: a higher DR often correlates with better rankings, giving you a quick competitive read; and it signals trust to users, which can compound the effectiveness of the SEO strategy itself by attracting more qualified organic traffic.

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
• Fintech Case Study: Diagnosing a Traffic Drop