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

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!

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

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. 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

3. 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. SWOT Analysis

3. Stock Overview

4. ONGC Advanced Chart

5. Financials

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.

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

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

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".

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.