How Hotstar fixed its SEO to gain 60M+ organic monthly traffic and $200M+ revenue!

Hotstar follows the "user-centric optimization" strategy and worked on its technical SEO & site structure to rank for millions of keywords. Here's how they did it!

8th December 2022
8 min read

Google is OBSESSED with its users.

So, if you want to drive high organic traffic via SEO, 'User-centric performance optimization is the way to go!

But, that's a lot of BIG words. What, exactly is user-centric optimization?

Well, you have to provide the best technical and content-based experience to your users, and Google will recognize that and rank you at the top!

Hotstar, backed by Disney, is one of the biggest OTT platforms in India. In its early days, Hotstar was struggling to really tap into its SEO potential.

But, after making major improvements and focusing on user-centric optimization, they have reached:

  • 60M+ organic traffic via SEO
  • 500M+ app downloads
  • and revenue of $200M+!

Here's how they did it πŸ‘‡

What is Hotstar?

Hotstar is an Indian OTT platform that works on the on-demand subscription-based model. You can stream your favourite shows and movies online on Hotstar. This OTT site is affiliated with Disney+ and owns the exclusive rights to stream India's favourite cricket league, IPL.

Through its SEO efforts, Hotstar is basically aiming to get more reach to all the content on its platform, which includes large sets of domains like movies, series, sports, cartoons, and talk shows, in many different languages. A mammoth task but Hotstar absolutely NAILS SEO!

So, how are they doing SEO-wise?

Hotstar is a total SEO MONSTER!

  1. Organic Traffic ➝ 64M
  2. Organic Keywords ➝ 2.9M, out of this 95%+ keywords are non-branded.
  3. Backlinks ➝ 1.31M
  4. Domain Rating ➝ 81
hotstar SEO marketing strategy

If you look at their top subfolders, you'll see these subfolders bringing in the majority of traffic (as expected):

  1. /in/sports ➝ 15.8M
  2. /in/movies ➝ 11M
  3. /in/sports/cricket ➝ ~14M
hotstar SEO marketing strategy

But, 7 years ago, in 2015, when Hotstar was first founded, they were not witnessing the same shining SEO results as today.

So, to understand their SEO journey to 60M+ organic traffic, we will first have to learn more about the problems they were facing and how they went about solving them!

What were Hotstar's major goals during the early days?

Well, simply put, their major goals were to

  1. Increase the overall ranking of webpages on Hotstar's website
  2. Increase the total number of impressions and in turn visitors (clicks)
  3. Finally, increase the overall conversion rate of the website

But, there were a few issues with Hotstar's website that were working against these goals. This article by Indian Marketers mentions these issues and all of their corresponding solutions in detail.

We can classify these hindrances into 2 main categories:

A) Technical Issues

  1. The website structure and the way code was written caused many crawling-related issues.
  2. It used to take a lot of time to load a page, which was harming the entire user experience.
  3. Apart from the crawling issues, search engines were also having trouble indexing Hotstar's web pages.

Beyond the specifics of what the problem was, it seemed like Hotstar was facing classic technical SEO errors.

When you implement technical SEO well, it can be a real growth hack for your SEO efforts. But, when it's ignored and the errors keep piling up, they can be extremely detrimental to your SEO results.

So, tackling them head-on is super important. We will get deep into technical SEO in the next sections.

B) Keyword-related improvements

Apart from the technical issues, Hotstar needed to rank for better keywords to start increasing its traffic.

  1. Their next goal was to rank for non-branded keywords, meaning keywords that don't have Hotstar's brand name in them. [1]

    Now, starting out, any brand would mostly rank for branded keywords. Meaning only when you exclusively search for Hotstar will the page appear.

    The primary reason for this is that usually non-branded keywords are searched on a much larger scale and also each individual query has a huge volume compared to their branded counterparts.

    For example, currently, Hotstar ranks for these 2 keywords:

    • Non-branded keyword => "live ipl match" => 630K volume
    • Branded keyword => "hotstar tv shows" => 15K volume
  2. Now if you look at Hotstar's home page, you'll notice that keywords like "sports", "live matches", "streaming", "tv shows", "movies", " movies" etc. were the main query groups Hotstar needed to target because the user intent of these queries exactly matches their content.

    But, the problem is that most of these queries are

    • HIGH Volume
    • HIGH Difficulty

    Naturally, such keywords are super difficult to rank for. So, Hotstar had a huge task in front of them!

But, there is a way around this hurdle. Acing both technical SEO and other SEO basics can greatly help with this. Let's dive deep into the solutions to understand how!

How did they solve this?

They solved these issues by a) fixing all their technical SEO errors and improving wherever there's potential and b) creating pages to rank for more diverse keywords.

But, what exactly is Technical SEO?

Any technical improvements you can make to your website that translate into a better user experience qualify as "Technical SEO". These changes mainly come under the category of on-page SEO, meaning you are making changes to the elements of a given web page.

The goal of Technical SEO is two-fold:

a) Improve the overall user experience and create a high-quality, well-functioning site with no technical errors
b) Make sure the search engine is able to crawl your site, index your pages and then rank them easily!

Now, what do crawling, indexing and ranking mean here?

  1. Crawling ➝ Search engine algorithms scour the web to find unique URLs to discover the content on that page. It is basically the process of discovering content on the internet.
  2. Indexing ➝ After crawling, they index each webpage on the website and organize them according to the content present on each page.
  3. Ranking ➝ Once your page is indexed, now it can be ranked for a relevant query.

Some examples of technical SEO are as follows:

  1. Page speedΒ β€” It's super important that all the content and media on your webpage load fast. If it takes forever to load, your organic visitors will start leaving.

    As page speed is an important factor that contributes to user experience, Google considers it while ranking your page for a query.

    Now, you can use Google's Pagespeed Insights tool to check your website speed. Simply enter your website's URL and you'll get a complete overview of your core web vitals.

    hotstar SEO marketing strategy
  2. Make sure the pages are crawlable β€” Now, search engines automatically crawl your website but there are ways to aid the process.

    A good website structure helps with crawling the most. Search engine algorithms use links to discover content on your website. So every connection from one page to another improves the crawlability of your website.

    A good hierarchical structure and proper internal linking between pages should do the job here!

  3. Create an XML sitemap β€” Apart from this, you can also create a proper sitemap. A sitemap is basically a map of your website. It lists all the URLs in a structured manner.

    Now, when a search engine crawls your pages, it automatically generates a version of this sitemap. But, you can make Google's job easier by submitting one on Google Search Console.

  4. Avoid duplicate dataΒ β€” Duplicate pages are a no-no for search engines. Google marking your pages as duplicates consistently can cause a penalty. In some cases, the search engine might stop ranking your pages because of this issue.
  5. Remove dead linksΒ β€” Any link that leads to an error or a non-existing page is deemed as a dead link. Over time as you create more and more pages, there is a chance you will end up with dead links. Removing them is always a best practice.
  6. Make sure your site is secureΒ β€” Safety is obviously another priority for a search engine. So make sure your website is SSL or HTTPS secure.
  7. Perform regular site audits β€” A site audit is basically a comprehensive review of any website. You can audit your site to find out all the above technical errors on your website. With the overview, you can start working on these errors.
  8. Use structured data β€” Structured data basically helps display rich results for your web pages. It is a code block that you add to a webpage that helps the search engines understand what the page is about. There are different types of structured data for blogs, job pages, product pages etc.
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Buildd your startup's marketing like a media company.

So, what did Hotstar do?

1) Solve Technical SEO issues

Now that you know all the basics around Technical SEO, let me list down all the little changes Hotstar made and the impact of those changes.

Solution

  1. They performed a thorough site audit to identify & rectify errors like[1]:
    • Crawling or indexing errors
    • dead links
    • duplicate content
  2. They also made fundamental changes to the way content is rendered on their website so that search engines are able to crawl dynamic JavaScript pages.[1]
  3. Finally, Hotstar uses dynamic meta content & page titles for its web pages.

    Now, what exactly is a dynamic title?

    When your page has dynamic elements, then using dynamic meta tags is advisable. So, instead of manually inputting meta titles and page titles, dynamic tags derive the title from the information available on a page.

    For example:

    Genre-based titles ➝ Here the title template remains the same but the genre changes

    • Watch Romance Movies & TV Shows On Disney+ Hotstar
    • Watch Action Movies & TV Shows On Disney+ Hotstar
    • Watch Drama Movies & TV Shows On Disney+ Hotstar

2) Target more diverse keywords

We have already established that Hotstar wanted to a) target more non-branded keywords and b) target keywords under specific domains. Now, there is a pretty simple way to achieve this, Hotstar can simply pick a domain and list all the non-branded keywords.

Another important way to help search engines with crawling and indexing is a good internal linking structure.

Hotstar's site structure design tackles both of these needs with ease. Here's what it looks like!

  1. The entire Hotstar website is divided into sub-categories like:
    • TV, Movies, Sports β€” broad categories
    • Languages, Channels, Genres β€” specific categories
  2. hotstar SEO marketing strategy
  3. Each content piece, say the movie Brahmastra is assigned under a broad category and specific categories. For example
    • Broad category β€” Movie
    • Language β€” Hindi, Malayalam, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu
    • Genre β€” Fantasy, Adventure
    • If we take an example of a series, we could also specify the TV channel that owns it.
hotstar SEO marketing strategy

But, how does this help with SEO?

Well, with these broad categorizations, Hotstar can programmatically create many landing pages for combinations like

  • languages ➝ hotstar.com/in/languages/hindi
  • genres ➝ hotstar.com/in/genres/action
  • channels ➝ hotstar.com/in/channels/star-world
  • language + movies ➝ hotstar.com/in/movies/languages/english
  • channel + TV shows ➝ hotstar.com/in/channels/starplus
  • and, more! It's essentially a game of permutation and combination

By simply structuring these pages properly, Hotstar can now rank for a number of different keywords for each page!

Example:

  1. "biopic movies"
  2. hotstar SEO marketing strategy
  3. "hindi movies"
  4. hotstar SEO marketing strategy
  5. "star plus shows"
  6. hotstar SEO marketing strategy
  7. "tennis live match"
  8. hotstar SEO marketing strategy

As for the internal linking, each broad category page essentially links to all content that comes under that category. But, each individual content page also internal links to other content pages under the "more like this" subheading.

So, the website template essentially takes care of everything!

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

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.

FTX crash explained - 30-year-old MIT grad loses $16B in 10 days!

FTX crash timeline:

November 2nd, 2022 β€” Until November, everything was going super well, when CoinDesk, a crypto news site published a document containing the balance sheet of Almeda Research & how it had a large number of crypto tokens called FTT belonging to FTX.

So, Almeda relied entirely on a token that was created by its sister exchange and was not backed by other liquid dollars or assets.

November 6th, 2022 β€” Learning this, Binance CEO, Changpeng Zhao, announced that the company would be offloading all its FTT reserves.

November 8th, 2022 β€” As a result of the massive offload, FTT's price collapsed below $22, hitting both FTX and Almeda Research.

This run caused panic among FTX customers with traders on the platform scrambling to withdraw their actual dollars and assets from the exchange. This resulted in the withdrawal of $6B dollars of assets from FTX.

Now, the exchange did not have the liquid funds to pay their customers. So, they had to be bailed out. SBF went to Binance for help. And, Binance's CZ announced that he would gladly help out.

November 9th, 2022 β€” After evaluating FTX's balance sheets, Binance backed out of the deal citing the mishandling of funds of FTX and Almeda with a glaring $8B-$10B hole in the balance sheet!

November 10th, 2022 β€” FTX officially announced that they are shutting down operations and filing for bankruptcy.

This startup did programmatic SEO with NoCode on $50/mo stack!

Breweriesnearby.com is a programmatic SEO website built by Ian Ruta.

Ian is really passionate about breweries.

So, considering the high SEO potential of brewery keywords, he decided to buildd a directory for craft breweries using NoCode tools.

Programmatic SEO is a way to create 1000s of pages based on an underlying database.

Here are the different parts of Breweriesnearby that together make a programmatic SEO website:
a) Content
b) SEO potential
c) Database
d) Automated Pages

But, why go the NoCode way?

Problem:
- Generating SEO traffic is NOT straightforward
- It requires rapid experimentation
- Time and cost of hiring a dev team made the project risky ➝ in-front cost
- Plus there was bound to be recurring dev cost ➝ multiple iterations

Solution:
- With NoCode, Ian built the MVP and version 1 at fraction of the cost and time
- The project was built with less complexity - as there was no need to communicate and align with a team.
- Plus he could experiment and iterate quickly based on user feedback

NoCode Tech Stack

1. Webflow β‡’ pages are automatically created from Webflow's CMS data and templates. It has in-built technical SEO capabilities and provides design flexibility
2. Airtable β‡’ is the main database that stores all the content we discussed earlier.
3. Whalesync β‡’ syncs data from Airtable to Webflow's CMS. This is a faster more user-friendly syncing alternative to Zapier.

4. Jetboost β‡’ NoCode Webflow tool that adds features like search, pagination, and filtering to your website.
5. Octoparse β‡’ Octoparse is a free scraper tool that gathers data from brewery directories and structures them into spreadsheets that are pasted into the Airtable database.
6. SEMRush β‡’ SEO tool that helps identify low-competition, high-volume long-tail keywords surrounding breweries.

Final impact

A) Cost
- Webflow + Airtable + WhaleSync + Octoparse + SEMRush β‡’ $50/month
- Opposed to the $3k for a dev team

B) Time
- MVP ➝ 1 week
- Version 1 ➝ 3 more weeks

C) Metrics
- 30,000 organic impressions
- 1000 organic clicks
- 1000 pages live
The site was launched in July 2022, so their numbers are steadily increasing.

But, regardless, you cannot discount the fact that Ian was able to buildd a complex product affordably in just one month with NoCode.

πŸ’‘ Lessons:

1) Learn NoCode by doing
2) When stuck, visit online NoCode communities
3) Learn the scope and limitations of the tools you use before you start building

4) It’s important to still maintain lean principles as well, even if NoCode is already a lean approach.
5) And, as and when you buildd the product, try to validate as much of it as possible at different stages before committing too much of your time.