Crypto has had a massive year in 2021, which naturally leads us to the question of what does everyone do come tax season? Well, in today’s video, I’m going to be detailing what the company Koinly has been doing in terms of their digital marketing to start preparing themselves for a massive inflow of traffic in the months ahead.
By the end of this article, you’re going to be able to take some of the tactics that Koinly’s using to think about how you can apply it for your own digital marketing.
What is Koinly?
The first thing we need to go over is what is Koinly? I didn’t know much about them either, but in doing some digging around the crypto space, what I learned is that they essentially provide crypto tax reports in under 20 minutes.
So as I scroll through their website, I can see that they’re probably going to want to be ranking for terms like cryptocurrency taxes, reducing taxes. If I just scroll through their landing page, I can see some of the terms they’re probably targeting like how they want to simplify taxes by making it easy to import, preview capital gains, download tax documents.
And so I’m getting a general sense just by visiting their website, what they might want to be creating content marketing for. The next thing that I’m going to do, though is I’m going to look at their Ahrefs profile to see exactly what they might be doing on their content side to really give Google the relevancy of, “hey, we are a crypto tax company that helps people solve this problem.”
What they do do on this homepage before I jump into that Ahrefs profile though, is that they clearly start to tackle some of the common questions that people have around crypto taxes. So this really speaks to that principle that I’ve spoken to in other videos on my channel where it’s all about answering those 80% of questions that people always ask you because naturally people are going to go to Google search for that particular question.
And if your site can be one of the top ranking results, then you can get some free organic traffic that way. So you can see here, how Koinly has essentially created different quick answers to questions, like how do cryptocurrency taxes work, how our mining, staking and hard forks taxed and so on.
Digging into Koinly’s Ahrefs Profile
So now that we understand what Koinly actually does, let’s take a look at their Ahrefs profile to see exactly what they’re doing in a digital marketing lens.
Digging right in, I’m going to type in Koinly’s site into Ahrefs, and I can clearly see from the very top that their target is to go after the keyword phrase of crypto tax software. But what I’ll also notice is that when I hover into the organic search section, Koinly is actually getting around 21,000 monthly visits just from their organic traffic efforts. So this is interesting to me, and as I can tell, this has all happened in the last two years alone. So clearly Koinly is doing something right in their digital marketing strategy.
And what we want to figure out is exactly what are they doing? If you’ve watched my Ahrefs tutorials, you can see that one of the best ways to do this is to go into the top pages section.
So that’s what I’m going to do here, is I’m going to click into the top pages section and I’m going to do a deep dive into some of the top pages that might be coming up. And if I start to zoom in here, what you can see is the phrases that are coming up for Koinly as some top pages are things like crypto taxes in Australia, in Germany, calculating them, coin tracker alternative as well as integration pages.
So if we just go ahead and actually open up some of these posts, we can start to do a deep dive as to what exactly the Koinly team might be doing to start to rank well for these particular phrases.
Content Marketing Tactic 1: In-Depth Content Guides
So let’s take a deep dive into one of these pages and I’ll try to break down for you exactly why Koinly is doing so well for these particular long tail phrases. The first page we’re going to look at is Koinly’s Australia cryptocurrency tax page. So when I navigate to this page, I see that this is a tax guide for 2021.
And what you can see right off the bat is that they have a really nice visual layout in terms of what this post is all about, as well as it’s branded with Koinly and then you can also see how they are following some basic on-page principles here. What they have is a detailed guide in which on the right-hand side, there are a ton of long tail phrases related to crypto taxes in Australia and Koinly is essentially answering all of the key questions that someone might have for their taxes in Australia related to crypto.
And what you’ll also see is that right off the bat, they are signaling that this guide is regularly updated. It is always really great if you have the bandwidth to do so to update your evergreen posts, because it signals to Google as well, that you are a regular contributor to this particular topic.
So in this case, you can see how Koinly originally published this in 2019, which matches the timeline in terms of what Ahrefs recording they had no organic traffic and that they’ve updated since that time four times. And so that means that they are continuously refreshing their content because they know that this particular page does really well for them in terms of organic traffic.
So as I dig further down, what can I also see? Well, I can see that Koinly is integrating really nicely, their own YouTube videos. So this is a great strategy because it’s giving Google signal from more than one of their entities, not just search, but also from their video side of things that they are an authoritative source around taxes in Australia.
So as we dig further down, you can see how they’re using some common long-tail phrases in terms of what people might be searching for questions. You see this sort of format used a few times in this post and they have, in which they have things like how to report your crypto tax activity. And what you’ll also notice is that aside from that first video we saw at the very beginning of the article, they’re even incorporating other videos that they have recorded around this particular topic.
So all in, as I scroll through this first post, while I can clearly tell is that they’re investing a lot of time and resources to creating these sorts of in-depth comprehensive guides, answering key questions around things that they’re product solves for. And what’s also really nice about this is that you can see how all of these visuals are pretty nicely designed as well, and they’re giving clear examples in their content as well.
A really easy way to increase the read time on your content is to include clear and specific examples as to what you’re writing about. And Koinly does that really effectively here where they’re digging into each of the examples of different scenarios where you might give crypto to a friend or family or crypto as a gift and so on.
And they tag it really nicely as well to really emphasize how they are experts in this particular topic. So all in, what you can see from this example is that Koinly is doing a great job in terms of providing extensive content around a particular topic that they are experts in. So this page goes on and on for a while, and if I were to guess, this is a very similar approach to what they did in their Germany guide. So let’s take a look at that.
Right off the bat, at the top of the page, we can see that Koinly takes a very similar approach. On the right hand side in fact, what we can see is that they, again, emphasize that this guide is regularly updated.
If I were to guess, since this was just published this year, in May of 2020, I’m guessing that they saw the success of the Australia one so then they decided to double down on this content. So that leads us to another strategy that Koinly is doing in their content marketing. They are doubling down on the series that are working for their particular company.
When you’re doing early stage content marketing, it’s all about throwing darts on the wall and seeing which darts actually hit close to the bullseye. And in this case, what the Koinly lead team has figured out is that the Australia tax guide was super successful. And so now they can replicate it for other countries as well where crypto taxes are relevant, which is pretty much going to be every single country.
So in this case, Columbia has done a great job of really doubling down in terms of the things that are working for them. And as we work our way through this post, what you’ll probably notice is that if I toggle between the screens, what you’ll notice is that the overall tables on the right-hand side here are pretty similar in terms of some of the topics that are covered.
So, what we’ve learned so far from Koinly is that if you can provide an extensive posts that answers probably the bulk of questions around a particular phrase, as well as supplement that with videos and interesting visuals, that that can be a great way for you to build up your authority on a particular topic.
But aside from these tax guides, Koinly is doing a lot more than applies other B2B SaaS principles that are really useful for you to know when your content right.
Another phrase that Koinly is ranking really well for is the phrase of calculating crypto taxes. So I opened up the article for this one, and this is related to FIFO, LIFO, and HIFO. So these are first in, first out, last in first out. And I think half in, first out, I’m not honestly sure because I’m not an accountant, but in this particular situation, they are explaining these concepts for their reader.
So the niceness of this post is that they are including some custom visuals. They are all nicely branded, they’re giving clear examples. Again, the Koinly content marketing team is doing a great job of giving clear examples that have numbers behind them, which is really helpful in their particular space, because they’re all about counting and providing some clear calculations.
So they’re really building their authority in this particular time. And this is probably why this post is doing so well is because they are giving clear examples and they are hitting all the long-tail phrases in terms of these different accounting principles of exactly how people may want to account for their respective taxes.
Content Marketing Tactic 2: Competitor Alternative Pages
Now taking a closer look, there are two other series of content that the Koinly team is doing really well. One of them I’ve covered in a recent article in terms of what support be as well as a few other Zendesk competitors have done. But essentially what they’re doing here is they are targeting their competitors.
So this content marketing tactic is tried and true, regardless of whatever SaaS space you’re in. But what the Koinly team has done here is that they had targeted one of their competitors, CoinTracker and they are essentially going after people that are going on to Google and searching for CoinTracker alternative.
So you can see here how they’re clearly targeting the phrase alternative on this particular page. And they’re speaking to some of the key nuances in terms of what differentiates their platform from their competitor. So this is a great approach to take if you are struggling to get some early traction or you’re just looking to control the narrative in terms of how you want people to think about your product versus your competitor.
So in this case, they’re making a clear push at the affordability component that’s a lot of the focus of the copy here. And they’re also just talking about some of the capabilities that they have. This is a pretty simple page, but if we go back into the top pages section of Ahrefs, you can tell how this page is incredibly impactful for them in which they are ranking number one for a phrase that gets 250 visits every single month, and is a highly buyer intent-based phrase.
If someone is searching for this phrase on Google, they are much more likely seriously, considering a software solution for their crypto taxes than if they’re just searching for how to calculate their taxes. Remember it’s all about having high buyer intent when you’re trying to convert on your content marketing pieces. There are different sides of the funnel, but when you’re trying to get conversion, it’s all about targeting these particular phrases.
Content Marketing Tactic 3: Complementary Integration Pages
The last example I want to dig into from Koinly today is a play from the Zapier SEO playbook. Essentially what the coin team has done is they have thought about what are some of the different integrations that people often have to have when it’s related to their crypto taxes. And then they have essentially created long form landing pages around this content.
So these are the integration pages. The URL of this page is koinly.io/integration/binance. And so what this is really targeting is it’s targeting that particular phrase in which somebody might be a Binance user and they’re searching for things like what integrates with Binance. So that may be, I can do my crypto taxes more easily.
So as I scroll through on this page, what I’ll see is they are clearly targeting Binance tax statements and reporting. And then they’re also talking about how Koinly, their tool integrates with Binance. And this is an exact play from the Zapier playbook. If you need to see exactly what that strategy is about, be sure to check out the Zapier article after this one.
But in this particular example, what you need to know is that they’re essentially replicating these pages over and over again, for all the different sorts of tooling that are related to their products. So here’s another example that was top ranking, where they have made an integrations page related to Trust Wallet. And then they’ve taken a very similar approach where they have a short video covering the topic while also detailing exactly how Koinly integrates with Trust Wallet.
What’s really cool about this particular strategy is that it’s highly scalable from a content marketing side of things. So if I just click the back button, I can see all the different pages that they’ve created using the strategy. They have created over 350 pages for exchanges, 50 plus for wallets, over 6,000 for blockchains. I don’t know if that’s actually true, but it would be pretty cool if it is, and it looks like it actually is not fully true, in that sense when I clicked into it, there was really only 15. But what you can overall just tell is that there’s clearly a ton of pages that the Koinly team is spinning up for all of these particular phrases. So it’s a highly scalable strategy in terms of the SEO side of things.
Digging into SimilarWeb
You may be wondering aside from Ahrefs, is there any other validation that this content marketing strategy has been working? There is actually, and one of the best ways to check that out is using the free version of SimilarWeb.
So I’ve gone ahead and typed in Koinly into SimilarWeb, and what I can see is from a monthly basis, they’re getting over a million visits every single month. And also when I dig into their traffic sources, they’re attributing at least 16% of their monthly visits to search traffic. So if you just take 16% of the 1.5 million, you’re actually way over the estimate of Ahrefs in terms of organic traffic, that Koinly is generating from their content marketing efforts.
From this deep dive, what I hope you’ve learned is that it’s all about creating scalable content marketing strategies that you can spin up multiple pages on and provide in-depth content around the particular area of expertise that you want to be known for. What Koinly has clearly invested in is providing in-depth tax guides based on different countries, as well as highlighting different integrations they’re part of and targeting right after their competitors.
If you take this sort of similar approach where you scale out two or three major content marketing initiatives, you are sure to get results as well.
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