Coinbase, the U.S.’s largest and the world’s second-largest crypto exchange, epitomizes rocketship growth. After its Series C funding in 2015, the company was valued at $500 million.  As of July 2024, it’s valued at roughly $65 billion—a more than 12,000% increase.

While the company’s growth is attributed to many factors, including several acquisitions, ecosystem partnerships, and growing public interest in crypto, what can’t be undermined is Coinbase’s powerful growth marketing strategy, which encompasses a highly strategic SEO program.

According to Ahrefs data, Coinbase.com receives more than 8.3 million visits every month and ranks for more than 800,000 keywords. However, what’s most interesting about Coinbase’s SEO strategy is its use of programmatic SEO (pSEO), which draws in more than 72% of its organic traffic.

Coinbase’s pSEO pages receive over 6 million visits per month

Coinbase uses two core pSEO pages to drive over 6 million monthly visits (per Ahrefs data). These two pSEO page types are designed to attract mid-to-lower funnel searchers looking for information about purchasing and exchanging cryptocurrencies  (i.e., those with transactional intent).   

1. Converter pages

These pages match the search intent of people looking to convert cryptocurrencies (e.g., “bitcoin”  into traditional currencies  (e.g., “USD”). These pages all follow the same URL structure: coinbase.com/converter/[cryptocurrency]/[traditional currency] 

• Around 180,000 converter pages receive over 3.7 million monthly organic visits. 

• Converter pages rank in the top 10 for more than 16,000 keywords.

2. Price pages

These pages match the search intent of people looking for information about the price of different cryptocurrencies. These pages all follow the same URL structure: coinbase.com/price/[cryptocurrency] 

• Around 68,000 price pages draw in over 2.3 million monthly organic visits.

• Price pages rank in the top 10 for more than 32,000 keywords.

Breaking down Coinbase’s price pages: why they work

Price pages directly address the search intent of people looking for cost information about different cryptocurrencies. This approach affords substantial long-tail content opportunities because there are thousands of different cryptocurrencies.

If we zoom in on one cryptocurrency, we can see the impact of this strategy at scale. For example, Coinbase’s Shiba Inu price page ranks number 4 on search engine results pages (SERPs) for the keyword “Shiba Inu coin price,” drawing in close to 10,000 monthly visits (per Ahrefs data).

All price pages include the same components and structure, enabling Coinbase to leverage its database of cryptocurrency information and information from other data sources to programmatically publish thousands of pages and update them in near real-time with the latest information. 

Each page includes the following components — all designed to match search intent, convert visitors to users, encourage longer time on site, and account for other technical factors like site interlinking to boost SEO performance:

1. Crypto price: A real-time chart depicts the current price of the currency with a CTA to “buy [currency]” that directs users to a Coinbase account creation page. 

2. About: Provides a general overview of the currency and its genesis. This section likely boosts SEO value by matching keywords and search intent related to “what is [cryptocurrency]?” or “how do I buy [cryptocurrency]?” 

3. Insights: Offers the latest “bull” and “bear” synopsis from different analysts on both sides of the fence. This section offers value-added content by providing quick, easy-to-understand and compare insights into what experts are saying on both sides. 

4. Market: Provides details on the currency’s market stats (popularity, market cap rate, etc.); market performance (price change by the hour, day, week, and year); and market benchmarks (overall performance and performance compared to market).  

5. Related assets: Interlinks to different conversion pages and price pages to improve site crawl-ability and encourage a longer time on site (a signal for search engines that improves rankings). 

6. Social: Summarizes the latest social chatter and sentiment about the cryptocurrency from Twitter, Reddit, and other social media sites. This data looks to be provided by a third-party data source (LuncarCrush).  

7. Calculator: Interinks to different conversion pages (e.g. “SHIB to USD”) to improve crawl-ability among search engines like Google. 

8. Guides: Provides long-form thought leadership content about the currency (white papers and other resources) to boost Coinbase’s subject matter authority. 

9. Weekly summary: Offers up-to-date summary of the cryptocurrency’s performance in a user-friendly format that provides quick insights to improve SEO through greater relevance and value. 

10. FAQ: Answers common questions about the currency in a relevant and structured way to boost SEO performance. 

Breaking down Coinbase’s converter pages: why they work

Converter pages match search intent for people looking for information about the currency exchange rates between cryptocurrencies and traditional currencies. Again, this search trend presents a significant longtail opportunity due to the vast number of crypto and traditional currency combinations. 

• {bitcoin} to {USD}; {bitcoin} to {MXN}; and so on 

• {ethereum} to {USD}; {ethereum} to {MXN}; and so on

All converter pages include the same components, enabling Coinbase to leverage a page template and dataset to programmatically publish pages and update them in real-time with the latest information about currency conversion rates. 

Each page includes the following components:

1. Crypto to traditional currency converter: The top section of the page immediately delivers on search intent for the exchange rate and includes a CTA to “buy [currency]” which leads users to a Coinbase sign up page. 

2. Overview: Offers a broad summary of the cryptocurrency with links to long-form resources about the asset type.

3. Markets: Provides an up-to-date synopsis of the cryptocurrency’s performance and interlinks to the corresponding currency price page to boost interlinking. It also includes links to Coinbase’s “how to buy” pages, which provide instructions on how to purchase different currencies. Again, this is intended to improve interlinking to improve site crawlability among search engines like Google.

4. Conversion tables: These tables break down conversion rates by day, month, and year to offer searchers even more context about conversion rates. 

5. Explore More: This interlinks to other Coinbase conversion pages and price pages to improve site crawlability and encourage longer visits. 

Coinbase’s strategy exemplifies the power of pSEO for rapid growth

One of the most advantageous aspects of pSEO is its efficiency in scaling content production. Once a company like Coinbase identifies a long-tail search pattern, creates a page template to address that pattern, and builds a corresponding dataset to support the page elements, it can essentially “turn on” the production of pages, publishing them nearly automatically at scale.

The results of this approach are remarkably rapid. As SEO expert Jaume Ros pointed out in his coverage of Coinbase’s SEO strategy, Coinbase began publishing its “converter” pSEO pages in January 2022. Within 5 months (by May 2022), these pages generated more than 2.4 million organic monthly visits. 

How Coinbase amplifies its pSEO success with a solid internationalization strategy

Around 80% of the global crypto trading market happens outside the U.S., representing a significant growth opportunity for Coinbase. In addition to seizing new markets, Coinbase is focused on optimizing its content for an international audience. They’ve done so by creating country-specific subfolders with translated content for more than 20 different countries.

Coinbase’s pSEO pages are especially simple to replicate and translate into country-specific pages because they follow a structured template and the content doesn’t require country-specific context adjustments (other than language translation).

So far, Coinbase has translated about 128,000 converter pages and about 55,000 price pages from English into different languages (per Ahrefs). For example, of Coinbase’s 12,869 English price pages, about 5,650 have been translated into Turkish (see example of a Turkish page below).

The Turkish price pages account for over 237,000 monthly organic visits, about 10% of the overall organic traffic generated from price pages (per Ahrefs data). When scaled across multiple languages and countries, it’s easy to see how programmatic content can accelerate Coinbase’s international growth strategy.

Work with daydream to build a pSEO engine

Coinbase's use of templated pages is a testament to the effectiveness of programmatic SEO (pSEO) for creating high-quality, scalable content. This approach allows for rapid content generation and often delivers results faster than traditional SEO methods. 

At daydream, we help companies like Descript, Notion, and Tome build and scale high-performing pSEO engines. Our platform automates all the workflows involved in building and maintaining a pSEO strategy—from keyword identification to content creation and performance optimization. If you’re interested in using daydream and joining our growing list of customers, email us at thenukak@withdaydream.com to start the conversation.