How CricBuzz gets 398 million monthly traffic & makes $7.8M revenue!?

CricBuzz is one of the most visited websites on Google with 398 million monthly traffic. Let's learn how they did it!

3rd November 2022
4 min read

In a nutshell

CricBuzz is a website that covers all things cricket. That means the website shares real-time live match scores, all the series details, live commentary, player details and more!

CricBuzz primarily makes money by running ads on all its platforms. So, the more visits it gets through Google, the more would be ad revenue. In that case, implementing SEO and getting more traffic truly serves the bottom line of CricBuzz.

Overall, CricBuzz simply dominates the search rankings:
Organic Keywords = 480K
Organic Traffic = 398M
Backlinks = 1.8M
Domain Rating (DR) = 77

The subfolders that bring in the majority of their traffic is as follows:
/cricket-match = 40.3M
/cricket-series = 38.4M
/profiles = 12.7M
But, how do these subfolders bring so many users?

1. The main reason why CricBuzz gets such an insane amount of traffic is because of keyword research!
2. CricBuzz ranks for some extremely high volume and low difficulty keywords that alone bring thousands in traffic.

3. In SEO, your site can only rise up to the potential of the keywords you target. So, choosing the correct keyword set can be a game changer.
4. The SEO strategy of doing keyword research helps in this process.

Now, there are definitely other factors that contribute to CricBuzz's success but if not for these keywords and the millions of people completely obsessed with cricket, CricBuzz wouldn't be in the top creamy layer of most visited sites on Google!

But, how do you replicate CricBuzz's success?
Well, you will have to find high volume and low difficulty keywords in your specific domain and start creating pages for them. You might not hit a jackpot as CricBuzz did but a few thousand monthly volume keywords can definitely boost your SEO journey.

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Every month, Google processes over ~89.3 billion searches[1]!

But, 90.63%[2] of the content from ~175 million[3] websites gets NO TRAFFIC!

In fact, the lion's share of traffic goes to the creamy layer of the top 50-60 websites that are dominated by tech giants like YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Amazon, etc.

But, very surprisingly, you’ll also find a small Indian startup called CricBuzz generating an insane amount of traffic.

CricBuzz is a cricket news website, and it gets:

  • 398M monthly traffic and,
  • makes $7.8 million in revenue!

It beats the monthly traffic of sites like LinkedIn, Microsoft, the New York Times and Flipkart.[4]

So, today I’ll be covering how CricBuzz uses one fundamental SEO strategy to become one of the biggest websites on Google. So, let’s get into it!

cricbuzz seo strategy

What exactly is CricBuzz? And, how does it make $7.8M in revenue?

CricBuzz is a website that covers all things cricket. That means the website shares real-time live match scores, all the series details, special tour details, player detail, news, etc.

The website also writes live commentary for ongoing matches and provides detailed expert-level analysis of the game. So, it’s essentially a directory of cricket-related data & news.

cricbuzz seo strategy

CricBuzz was founded in 2004 and today it has

  1. 100 million+ app downloads
  2. ~3 billion + page views
  3. 50 million+ worldwide users
  4. $7.8 million revenue

But, how does CricBuzz make money?

CricBuzz primarily earns money by running ads on its platform. So, the more visits it gets through Google, the more would be the ad revenue.

In that case, implementing SEO and getting more traffic truly serves the bottom line of CricBuzz.

Download buildd app

Let’s look at CricBuzz’s SEO numbers

Overall, CricBuzz simply dominates the search rankings across all its subfolders!

  1. It currently gets traffic of 398M every month. This might vary from season to season depending on if a popular cricket series (e.g. World cup, IPL) is happening.
  2. It ranks for 480K keywords. And, out of all these keywords, ~99% are non-branded!
  3. It has 1.8M backlinks and a DR of 77 ⇒ Not as high as the other top websites like Facebook (DR = 100) or LinkedIn (DR = 98).
  4. On top of that, CricBuzz’s closest competitor, ESPN Cricinfo ranks for 899K keywords and gets only 90.4M traffic. So, CricBuzz is clearly way ahead in spite of ranking for lesser keywords.
cricbuzz seo strategy

But, what are these pages that are bringing so much traffic? Well, let’s analyze CricBuzz’s subfolders to find out.

Investigating their sub-folders

Here are the top 7 sub-folders that bring in more than a million traffic for CricBuzz:

  1. /cricket-match ⇒ 40.3M
  2. /cricket-series ⇒ 38.4M
  3. /profiles ⇒ 12.7M
  4. /cricket-commentary ⇒ 10.5M
  5. /live-cricket-scores ⇒ 6.8M
  6. /cricket-schedule ⇒ 6.4M
  7. /cricket-news ⇒ 3.46M
cricbuzz seo strategy

So, why are these subfolders bringing so many users? Let’s find out.

Hitting the SEO keywords Jackpot!

The reason why CricBuzz does so well on SEO and in turn gets millions in traffic & revenue is because they have hit the keyword jackpot. Now, what do I mean by that?

Well, you see there are a group of keywords on Google that are searched by millions of people in a month and if those keywords all come under the same domain then that presents a golden opportunity!

In SEO, your site can only rise up to the potential of the keywords you target. If the volume of your top keywords is only in the hundreds, then your site’s traffic will also be proportional. Maybe you will reach thousands in traffic at best.

But, in the case of CricBuzz, it consistently ranks for keywords that have a volume of millions. Hence, pushing it to 400M+ traffic!

CricBuzz’s goldmine of keywords

Let's take the example of the subfolders we saw above. These subfolders rank for keywords with specific repetitive terms like:

  1. “live”, “score”, “match” → “live cricket score”, “match score”, “cricket live”, “score live”, etc
  2. [team-1] vs [team-2] →“india vs bangladesh”, “pak vs sa”
  3. [series-name] → “ipl 2022 score”, “asia cup 2022”
  4. [player name] → “virat kohli”, “sachin tendular”, “ben stokes”
  5. [series-name] schedule → “t20 schedule”, “ipl schedule”
  6. [series-name] points table → “ipl points table”

There are many such buckets of keywords all relating to cricket. But, the beauty of this domain and keywords is the fact that a) each keyword bucket has hundreds of variations and b) all these variations have a sizeable volume.

For example, just Googling the “[series-name] points table” type keyword will show you these many options!

cricbuzz seo strategy

Similarly, a page like Virat Kohli's profile page ranks for over 4000 keywords! That’s including all the 100s of different spelling variations of the name “Virat Kohli”.

So, if you create a page targeting just one keyword it will automatically rank for all the 100 different variations of that keyword multiplying your total traffic!

CricBuzz very cleverly has pages that rank for both

  1. live-match keywords ⇒ queries for live matches
  2. previous-match keywords ⇒ queries for previous matches

So, their traffic is evergreen throughout the year!

Final Takeaways! And, how to do keyword research for your startup?

Of course, there is more to why CricBuzz does so well on the SEO front.

  1. By covering the entire scope of all cricket-related search queries on Google, CricBuzz has acquired authority on the topic. So, it invariably ranks at the top now.
  2. Plus, the website is a fan favourite. So, even though for some keywords the site is ranked at lower positions in the top 10, dedicated fans will still search for the site in the SERP! Seeing that users prefer CricBuzz, will push Google to eventually rank it at the top.

Now, there are many reasons why avid cricket fans love CricBuzz. But, in the end, the company's priority is to get traffic to generate advertisement money. And, the traffic they get is all thanks to these keywords!

So, how can you replicate CricBuzz’s success and do keyword research for your startup?

Well, you will have to find yourself some high-volume, low-difficulty keywords in a specific domain and start creating pages for them. Now, it’s not always possible to hit the jackpot and find a low-competitive domain that has keywords with millions of volumes as CricBuzz did.

But, finding a good set of keywords with at least a few thousand monthly volume should definitely set your startup on the path of SEO success.

We have detailed our exact strategy to find such lucrative keywords in our free SEO course. Do take a look!

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