How Moneycontrol gets 62M+ traffic through their brilliant SEO strategy?

Moneycontrol's data-backed pages are traffic and links magnet! Let's learn how these pages help Moneycontrol get 62M+ traffic.

15th September 2022
3 min read

In a nutshell

Moneycontrol is a simple financial and business portal that hosts a ton of information on individual public companies, global and Indian indices, business news articles, personal finance, and more!

Moneycontrol's SEO numbers
- Traffic ⇒ 62M+
- Keywords ⇒ 3.8M
- Backlinks ⇒ 35.2M

Top Subfolders:
- /india/stockpricequote ⇒ 32.6M traffic
- /news ⇒ 7M traffic
So, majority of Moneycontrol's traffic comes from their "stockpricequote" pages.

Now, these 'stockpricequote' pages are essentially part of a stocks directory.
Each stock in the directory has it's own individual page. For example, there is dedicated page for Asian Paints, ONGC, HDFC bank and more!

Now, on the ONGC page there are many sections like
- ONGC share price
- SWOT analysis
- Stock Overview
- Advanced chart

This page also links to ONGC's financials page that includes their annual and quarterly balance sheet and profit and loss numbers.
Collectively these pages rank for high volume keywords like "ONGC share price", "ONGC revenue", "ONGC swot analysis" and more!

Since these pages primarily include general company data, many other reputed websites on the net link to them. For example, ONGC's Wikipedia page links to their Moneycontrol financials page.
So, with these pages they not only get high traffic but also links - so it's a win-win situation!

Not all sections under these "stockpricequote" pages are available for free to a user. Moneycontrol hides part of the data under a CTA, so serious traders would be encouraged to buy their pro plan.
Apart from this, they also run ads on their platform which brings part of their revenue!


In the 21st century, the closest thing to an omnipotent, know-it-all humanoid with the memory of past, present and future is Google!

But, Google's godly ability is not the result of a lone effort. It is enabled by a partnership between Google, the search engine, and billions of websites on the internet.

These websites essentially host all the helpful information and Google finds it & shows it to you, like a highly efficient librarian. Kind of like this:

moneycontrol seo marketing strategy

So, when a website is really good at publishing original information, data, insights, analysis & statistics that are useful to Google's users, it rewards them by ranking them at the top of search results.

An Indian site that excels at this is Moneycontrol. It has over 500,000 paying users and gets a monthly traffic of 62+ million via Google!

So, let's understand how Moneycontrol's data-driven pages are a traffic and link magnet, and a HUGE asset to generate brilliant SEO results.

So, what exactly is Moneycontrol?

Moneycontrol is one of India's top finance and business portal.

Initially, the website was designed to display end-of-the-day stock prices. But, today, it has evolved into a go-to resource for all finance and business-related information. It's especially used by serious traders for researching individual stocks and businesses.

The website includes pages dedicated to individual public companies, global and Indian indices, business news articles, personal finance blogs and more!

Moneycontrol is essentially an in-depth directory that hosts information on all businesses in India!

How is it doing on the SEO front?

The description of Moneycontrol's website alone screams DATA. And, Google, of course, loves this!

Moneycontrol's SEO numbers very clearly reflect that:

  1. According to Ahrefs, Moneycontrol gets 63.1M traffic every month.
  2. It ranks for 3.8M keywords, out of which more than 98% of keywords are non-branded. That means, the website ranks for searches that don't contain "moneycontrol".
  3. And, it has 35.2M backlinks and a domain rating (DR) of 85!
moneycontrol seo marketing strategy

Investigating top subfolders

These broad numbers look pretty great. But, where is this 60 million-plus traffic coming from? Well, let's take a look at Moneycontrol's subfolders.

Traffic to Moneycontrol's top subfolders:

  1. moneycontrol.com/india/stockpricequote ➝ 32.6M
  2. moneycontrol.com/news ➝ 7M
moneycontrol seo marketing strategy

Interestingly, Moneycontrol's news articles don't account for the majority of its traffic. But, instead, it's the business financials directory that brings in 50% of its traffic.

Moneycontrol's data-backed pages get traffic and links!

Let's get into the details of this subfolder.

  1. Now if you look at the '/india/stockpricequote' page, you'll basically see a directory of all public stocks.
  2. moneycontrol seo marketing strategy
  3. This directory page links to each individual page dedicated to a particular stock.

    For example:

    ⇒ Asian Paints — /india/stockpricequote/paintsvarnishes/asianpaints/AP31
    ⇒ HDFC Bank — /india/stockpricequote/banks-private-sector/hdfcbank/HDF01
    ⇒ ONGC — /india/stockpricequote/oil-drillingexploration/oilnaturalgascorporation/ONG

  4. These pages have a complete report on the yearly financials, share price history and business analysis of the said company.

Example: ONGC

Let's take the example of ONGC, and analyze its page in more depth.

The ONGC page has the following sections:

  1. ONGC share price
  2. moneycontrol seo marketing strategy
  3. SWOT Analysis
  4. moneycontrol seo marketing strategy
  5. Stock Overview
  6. moneycontrol seo marketing strategy
  7. ONGC Advanced Chart
  8. moneycontrol seo marketing strategy
  9. Financials
  10. moneycontrol seo marketing strategy

Now, in the financials section, if you click on "Balance Sheet", "Profit & Loss" links, you'll be directed to a dedicated financial's page that includes all the quarterly & annual balance sheets and Profit/Loss statements of ONGC.

This page comes under the '/financials' subfolder that brings in 646K traffic per month.

moneycontrol seo marketing strategy

Now, collectively, these pages rank for keywords like:

  • ONGC share price — share price section
  • ONGC revenue/ONGC net profit — annual/quarterly reports
  • ONGC SWOT analysis — SWOT analysis section
  • ONGC profit and loss — P/L section
  • ONGC share price chart - advanced chart
moneycontrol seo marketing strategy

The "[company-name] share price" keywords are the best performing among the bunch and they alone bring in 22.3M traffic. That is ~70% of all traffic coming to these pages!

But, what about backlinks?

Now, we know that the essential ingredients for amazing SEO results are as follows:

  1. Good keywords — CHECK
  2. Internal links — CHECK
  3. URL structure — CHECK
  4. Backlinks — ???

Well, Moneycontrol also easily wins on the backlinks front. Here's how!

Now, you know there are a number of other websites that write about businesses in general.

These articles also quote a company's share price, revenue, profit, and cash flow numbers. Such websites link to Moneycontrol's "stockpricequote" or "financials" page as a source for these numbers.

In fact, Wikipedia is a prime example of this!

Wikipedia's ONGC page links to the Moneycontrol page:

ONGC Wikipedia page ➝ ONGC Moneycontrol financials page

moneycontrol seo marketing strategy

Such high-quality links at scale have helped Moneycontrol reach a high domain authority of 85.

So, creating a highly data-oriented directory has naturally won them both rankings and links — which means huge traffic for Moneycontrol!

But, how do they make money from this?

Now, the question is how Moneycontrol even makes Money from this product.

Well, there are a couple of ways Moneycontrol can monetize their 60M+ traffic!

  1. For starters, you can see that Moneycontrol's website is filled with ads. So, these ads must bring in a good amount of revenue for Moneycontrol.
  2. They also have a subscription program called Moneycontrol Pro, to get paying users.

But, how does Moneycontrol push their regular website visitors to subscribe to their pro plan?

Well, considering that the majority of the visitors on Moneycontrol come from "share price" type of keywords, we can assume that a fraction of these people are serious traders.

Smartly, Moneycontrol hides a few sections in the 'stockpricequotes' page with a
call to action ⇒ ”Get detailed analysis with Moneycontrol Stock Insights".

moneycontrol seo marketing strategy

This encourages people to subscribe, so they can use the whole range of data on the site for their research, completely ad-free!

Lesson: Data is King!

The simple "[company] revenue" or "[company] share price" numbers are so basic and widely used that they are referred to by thousands or even millions of pages at a time. That means a huge number of backlinks.

As these backlinks increase, so does the domain authority and so does Moneycontrol's position in the rankings for all pages.

Overall, our lesson is simple — DATA SELLS!

And, with its data-rich website, Moneycontrol easily beats its news media competitors like Economic Times, Mint, Zeebiz and more.

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Tanishq's masterstroke to capture India's gold market

Tanishq is the crown jewel of Titan and Tata! But, it was not a smooth ride for Titan's jewellery wing to climb to its current INR 23,268 crores revenue in FY22. Let's dive in to see how Tanishq WON the Indian jewellery market!

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