A Look into The Cost of (Not Doing) SEO.

While this is not to disparage the project of this study (no names will be used), this serves to help projects understand the potential value of considering SEO for your Web3 project.

The site in question launched several months ago, at this point of writing their organic traffic is 100% reliant on their project’s name. While appearing for your name is key is outlines a very real ceiling of potential customers you can reach.

The Leaky Bucket

The leaky bucket concept suggests that companies constantly lose customers, therefore, to maintain their customer base, they must acquire the same number of new customers to compensate for the loss and maintain a stable customer count.

When your only (or predominant) means of capturing customers is delivered by your brand name, your traffic and new customer acquisition becomes dependant on your brand (project name).

This is a direct issue for Web3 projects – why? The bear market.

Over the bear market, more-than-likely your project’s marketing will see a downturn which is to be expected. However, many projects build during a bear market and savvy investors, VCs and others keep tabs and conduct research on potential projects to invest in during the down trend.

While this is not a direct correlation, we can infer that positive price action will drive search demand for a project. With that being said, token price is subject to many factors, macro and otherwise. We don’t typically look to directly drive price or shill a token in our marketing.

As such, growing your ability to draw new users to your technology, token, solutions, NFTs or whatever it may be, is key.

Undivided & Conquered.

As a nod to decentralisation, it’s important to appear everywhere, this stems beyond SEO, however, organically alone there are many places to be found. Firstly, being available when someone searches for your solution, let’s say you’re a DeFi project that offers various products and solutions within the space.

There are several terms you may want to appear for, by example:

1. Decentralized lending
2. Stablecoins
3. Yield farming
4. Tokenization of assets
5. Predictive markets
6. Token swaps and exchanges
7. Automated market makers
8. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs)
9. Tokenized real estate
10. Insurance protocols

As interest exercise to undertake, is to ask how someone online who find your project without using the project’s name – by example, how would you find Bitcoin with typing Bitcoin?

This leads to expanding the potential gateways to your project while allowing you to address end user needs at the same time. This then helps to combat the aforementioned leaky bucket.

A Missing Link

Often, we can see an early project has a heavy ratio of ‘spam’ links compared to their earned, or more natural links. While there is a grey area around buying links, having a clear ration of spam/natural links can be a harmful practice that can come back to metaphorically bite you.

SEO can help inform a (hopefully) white-hat means of earning and establishing a link earning strategy.

With the onset of AI-produced copy, it may well be the case that search engines have to place more emphasis on links, domain age and so on. Given the recent Yandex leak, we can confirm there are many other ranking factors that your project should consider – above and beyond content.

In summary, yes SEO matters for Web3.