How a full SEO strategy and audit for a Swiss crypto exchange identified the root cause of a traffic decline — and a 35× keyword opportunity waiting to be captured.
Bity — a Swiss crypto exchange offering buy/sell, OTC trading, crypto ATMs, and gold investment — was hit hard by Google’s March 2024 Core Update. Traffic declined sharply from 4 March 2024, with the /de and /fr multilingual pages affected most severely. Despite a brief recovery spike in August 2024, traffic never fully returned to pre-update levels.
The situation had a telling pattern: organic CTR remained consistently high — a strong trust signal showing users found Bity relevant when they did find it — but impressions were flat. Google was holding the site down despite demonstrated user engagement. The /fr pages showed early signs of recovery by January 2025, but the main site remained suppressed.
The brief: diagnose why a trusted, well-engaged crypto broker was being penalised — and build a strategy to recover and grow beyond the previous ceiling.
The engagement covered four core areas:
Traffic and competitor analysis — Bity’s 9.3K monthly organic visits significantly underperformed competitors with comparable Domain Ratings: Relai (DR 59, 12.8K), Bitcoin Suisse (DR 66, 17.4K), Mt Pelerin (DR 61, 18.4K), and SwissBorg (DR 70, 61.3K). Bity’s backlink-to-referring-domain ratio of 2.5 was clean and strong — the gap was keyword strategy and content architecture, not authority.
Technical audit — Identified critical errors including broken internal links, missing canonicals, 404 inlinks, and indexing issues contributing to the post-update suppression.
Keyword strategy — Unbranded service keywords presented a 35× greater search opportunity than branded terms (3,220 vs 90 monthly searches). Seven content pillars were defined: buy and sell crypto, invest in gold, crypto wallet, find a crypto ATM, VIP/large amount trading, buy [coin], and pairs exchange.
Content and product strategy — A product-led SEO approach was recommended: individual service pages per keyword pillar, programmatic SEO for trading pairs (BTC/CHF, ETH/CHF, SOL/CHF), and competitor comparison pages to capture bottom-of-funnel traffic.
A full SEO and product roadmap was delivered, prioritising commercial and transactional pages first — a pyramid approach, not a top-of-funnel-first content funnel.
Targeting unbranded service keywords offered 35× more monthly search volume than branded terms (3,220 vs 90). With competitors already ranking for “crypto broker Switzerland”, “buy crypto Switzerland”, and coin-specific terms, structured individual service pages represented the fastest path to new organic visitors — people who don’t already know Bity exists.
Analysis of /fr traffic data showed a significant growth in impressions by January 2025 — a strong early signal of Google reinstating trust for the French-language pages. This informed a recovery-first strategy: fix technical issues on the highest-traffic multilingual segment before expanding to new content, using the /fr recovery as a proof of concept for the main site.
A framework for programmatic SEO targeting trading pairs (BTC/CHF, ETH/CHF, ETH/USDT, SOL/CHF) was scoped and delivered, enabling Bity to compete for dozens of high-intent search queries at scale. Competitor pages (“Bity vs [Competitor]”) were also scoped to capture bottom-of-funnel traffic from users actively comparing crypto exchange options in Switzerland.
Bity’s post-update situation was a textbook case of a trusted, high-quality product being held back by technical and structural SEO gaps — not by brand credibility or content quality. The consistently high CTR despite suppressed impressions made that clear: users who found the site converted, but Google wasn’t surfacing it enough.
The strategy combined two tracks: technical recovery to restore what was lost, and a new keyword architecture to grow beyond the previous ceiling. For a Swiss crypto broker operating in a YMYL category, the combination of product-led service pages, multilingual SEO, and programmatic trading pair coverage offers compounding growth that branded keyword reliance never could deliver alone.
Google Core Updates are broad algorithm changes that reassess rankings across the entire index. They disproportionately affect YMYL categories like finance, where Google applies stricter E-E-A-T standards. Sites with technical gaps or thin content structure can see drops even if their product is excellent.
Product-led SEO builds organic visibility through pages tied directly to your product offering rather than generic content. For Bity, this means individual service pages for each offering — crypto exchange, gold investment, ATMs, OTC — each optimised for the specific keyword people use when searching for that service.
Branded traffic comes from people who already know you exist. Unbranded traffic comes from people actively searching for your service who haven’t yet chosen a provider — the highest-value audience. A 35× larger unbranded opportunity means 35× more potential new customers reachable through SEO.
A traditional content funnel starts with high-volume awareness content and works toward conversion. A content pyramid inverts this: start with commercial and transactional pages that directly drive revenue (20% of content), then layer educational content above to support them (80%). For a crypto broker, this means building “buy crypto Switzerland” pages before “what is DeFi” articles.