The marketing playing field within the Cryptocurrency sector is heavily imbalanced by cowboys (and cowgirls).
Bots and low quality traffic are the currency of many, as black-hat methods and shabby work is seemingly in abundance, within a market that is supposed to pioneer and innovate. The fact of the matter is even agencies that are supposed Crypto PR specialists provide a transactional service, based on publishing articles on quantity as opposed to quality.
It’s all a case of taking what money they can get off of you, and waiting for your next order. Focus on traffic, conversions, clicks, impressions – is practically non existent.
And this is across the board.
PR Only Agencies
This is a big one. The concept of publishing PR articles for the sake of doing the articles alone, is something that many PR Agencies have been able to get away with for quite some time now.
This may not immediately make sense, but is majorly significant.
The norm that these guys have led you to believe is, you publish articles en masse – with no focus on optimising the content, or the legacy effect that content has on your website or other brand awareness campaigns.
This is simply not the case.
They want you to order as many articles off-page as possible, a multitude of press outlets. Every article published has more margin for these guys. They don’t care who reads the content, how many clicks it gets, or how it’s ranked in search results.
Pr Articles should not be ‘just’ PR articles. They should be structured with HTML, backed up by keyword research with the thought in mind of increasing clickthrough rate (CTR) of the articles by increased search engine coverage.
Press Releases are something that when done properly, in synchronicity with an effective On-Page content strategy – are highly effective. But you have to build the foundations around it in order for it to get more coverage, something PR-Only Agents do not care about.
It’s all about numbers, and the margin they make on you.
Third Party Banner Ad Platforms
This is a contentious one for many, but one that I feel actually is the elephant in the room.
There are ‘some’ Pay Per Click or PPC advertising models that exist within the Crypto space that are quite possibly the biggest scams going. This is something that might get us embroiled in a lawsuit, so without referencing which platforms in particular, I’ll go through the reasoning behind outing what is one of the biggest media spends in Crypto Marketing.
You probably know who I’m talking about. Crypto projects are tracked there, and obscene amounts of money are paid in order to take up banner ad space around the charts and graphs. Yep – you know who. Let’s call them Shitcoin Ads for now.
So, let’s say you run a Shitcoin Ads campaign.
First of all, bids management and current auction rates see’s clicks on this particular Shitcoin Ads platform range between $5 – $14 PER CLICK, for what is merely a banner ad.
Users on this platform are subjected to hundreds of shitcoin ads every single day, from every single Meme Coin and Dog S**t project on the BSC. The ads snippet has been heavily saturated, purely for the use of the developers taking more media spend from the sites paying customers.
The truth is – this is low quality traffic. It’s primarily made up of bots, and repeat users of the Shitcoin Ads platform in question. This is not the way to get new users, and attract the mainstream to your crypto product.
Furthermore, the cost for this form of Display Ads in comparison to like for like alternatives is simply crazy. Generally speaking, you can expect to pay around $1 for a display ad click (depending on vertical/CPC) and that’s reasonable bang for buck.
With this Shitcoin Ads platform in question, you can see bids run as high as $20 for a single click over what is an ad that actually you’ve subjected on somebody else. It’s the lowest form of intent you could find in an ad, and highly likely to bounce.
Add UTM codes to your landing pages for these Shitcoin ads, and you’ll see the clicks do indeed have high bounce, and low conversion rates. What does this mean? Low quality bots and crawler traffic.
Black-Hat/Poor Quality SEO
The thing with Crypto SEO is that it’s highly complex. Not only do you need a solid understanding of Google and how to rank a site, but you also need an even greater knowledge on the cryptocurrency vertical itself as to attract the ideal end user.
That’s what SEO is all about.
That very complexity is what makes SEO brilliant, but is also what allows the cowboys to operate.
Agencies can show you some ‘reports’ that show some green charts and a few rankings for some keyword positions. However, they are mostly clueless as to actually build traffic. The reports are useless unless there’s a strategy behind it focusing on building rankings and traffic.
Furthermore, when it comes to increasing rankings for competitive keywords that offer actual value – you’ll see these guys come unstuck.
The Biggest Agency in Crypto Asked Us For Help
Sounds crazy doesn’t it? But it’s the truth as it happened.
There’s a particular agency out there who are synonymous as a PR agent but also try their hand at SEO. I say try. They are terrible.
These guys sell SEO but do not have the faintest idea on how to deliver, and I’d find them in my inbox every other day asking how to rank their client or affiliate site.
If it wasn’t illegal for me to do so – I’d share the comms. But actually, it just inspired me.
If they are asking us how to do it, it’s a clear indicator of a few things:
- They aren’t capable of providing the service they sold
- There’s a demand for it
- We are the best and we have only just launched.
Rogue Technicians Adding Porn/Spam Links
This ultimately paved the way for the creation of Coinpresso – however, I would absolutely be very wary of any SEO work you sign up for.
We met with a client recently who had the misfortune of hiring an SEO ‘technician’ who, quite frankly, I’d love to have a few moments within a quiet room. What he/she has sold to this client is possibly the biggest scam within SEO I have seen in over 7 years of working in Digital.
This really is the pits. How do they get away with it?
Source: Ahrefs
They will send you reports that seem to indicate things are going in the right direction. Strong Domain Rating (DR), lots of backlinks, and referring domains seemingly increasing over time.
However, when you actually look under the lid – things are a VERY different story.
This is not an attack. This isn’t Negative SEO.
This is PAID work. Someone has actually taken money to build over 6 Million blackhat/porn links that in reality, have done a lot more damage than they would ever do good.
To put this into context, it’s like someone building you a mansion out of paper mache, and then drawing & colouring in bricks and cement over the mache. It’s designed to deceive you, so they can at least get away from you by the time it starts raining.
By that time, you’ve already paid and the damage to your website is already done.
This is a real case study, absolutely no manipulated content whatsoever. And it sucks.
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