SEO Wars: Zomato & Swiggy's SEO strategy to get millions of organic users! - Part 2

Zomato get's 6x traffic of Swiggy! So, how exactly does Zomato beat Swiggy to rule Google? Well, lets find out!

21st April 2022
5 min read

Today it's really not about getting 'the traffic', but it's more about getting 'the relevant traffic'!

Both Zomato & Swiggy clearly understand this. Hence, they have gone all out with their SEO efforts to get millions of organic visits every month.

Now, we've covered in detail how Zomato organizes its individual restaurant pages. But, Zomato goes even a step further to rank for most niche keywords.

So, we'll be exploring Zomato's search intent strategy & Swiggy's SEO strategy to get 5M+ traffic! Read on!

Zomato: The restaurant reviews website?

Now, in part 1 of this article, we have in detail explored Zomato's top sub-folders. Ultimately, we established that the final restaurant URL structure looks something like this:

URL Structure: zomato.com/[city-name]/[restaurant-name]-[location-name]

These pages are very cleverly designed to target different types of keywords.

How? Well, let's break it down.

Role of Search Intent!

Just to refresh your memory, search intent tells you what kind of results the user is looking for.

To understand how Zomato leverages this, let's look at a restaurant page.

zomato swiggy SEO strategy

On this page, you'll find information about the given restaurant, review, their menu, photos & an option to order online. All these are different pages that show up for particular search queries for that restaurant.

1) Review

  1. URL structure ➝ /[city-name]/[restaurant-name]-[location-name]/reviews
  2. According to Ahrefs, these review pages alone get 223K traffic

2) Order

  1. You have two sets of pages in the order category.
    • URL structure 1 ➝ /[city-name]/order-food-online
    • URL structure 2 ➝ /[city-name]/[restaurant-name]-[location-name]/orders
  2. In total, these pages get a traffic of 591K

Similarly, you have /menu, /photos & /info page.

Now, it's pretty much simple.

  • When you Google "Mainland China reviews", you'll come across this Zomato review page ➝ www.zomato.com/mumbai/mainland-china-malad-west/reviews.
  • Whereas, if you were to simply type "order Chinese food online", the first organic result will be this /order-food-online page ➝ https://www.zomato.com/mumbai/order-chinese-online.

The pages for non-Indian locations don't have the order feature. So outside India, all the traffic comes from pages review & info pages. Out there, Zomato is just a restaurant directory/review site, at least for now.

What does Swiggy's strategy look like?

Now, coming to Swiggy — let's first look at their top subfolders!

zomato swiggy SEO strategy

Mainly, Swiggy has 2 distinct sets of sub-folders — the /restaurants folder and /city-name folder.

Some of the top subfolders are:
➝ /restaurants — 133K
➝ /delhi — 78K
➝ /chennai — 76K

Now, Swiggy majorly has 2 types of sub-folders:

1) /restaurants

Mainly, all the restaurant pages are organized under this subfolder.

URL structure ➝ swiggy.com/restaurants/[restaurant-name]-[location]-[city]-[code]

2) /[city-name] (example, /delhi, /chennai etc.)

Now, what exactly is the point of having subfolders for different cities?

Well, the /mumbai subfolder on Swiggy links to different zones that Swiggy operates in, in that city.

So, you have:

URL structure ➝ /[city-name]/[zone]

The only visible organizational structure for these restaurant pages is the code assigned to each page. Basically, it means that Swiggy has indexed all the restaurants in their directory, and their URLs reflect the same.

So, what do we learn from these two approaches?

Just looking at Swiggy's & Zomato's SEO numbers you can clearly tell that Swiggy is trailing behind when it comes to SEO.

If we only consider India, Zomato ranks at the 1st position for 102K keywords among 3M. On the other hand, Swiggy ranks at the 1st position for only 10K keywords among 500K. These of course majorly include brand keywords.

Clearly, Zomato is doing something right. And, that's definitely with respect to how they organized their site & their emphasis on capturing different search intent-based keywords.

1) URL structure

A URL to a page is essentially meant to be like the address to that particular page on your website. So, if you consider your website as a city. Then the cities are divided into zones & sub-zones, to create accurate addresses. Subfolders play a similar role as zones in the case of your website.

A good URL structure (and an organized website) helps Google understand what your website's page is all about.

In fact, Google recommends you have a proper navigation structure. So, web-crawlers understand what role each page plays in the big picture!

Now, even though, Swiggy's pages are not organized into a proper parent-child structure like Zomato, all the /city-name pages and /restaurants pages are internally linked together. So, that should help the authority juice flow throughout the website.

But, still having a proper hierarchy-based URL structure is recommended.

2) Focus on Search Intent

Zomato has designed its pages and overall site such that it can capture a huge scope of keywords & accurately target their search intent. Especially, since these are online food delivery sites, they should definitely aim to capture users searching for "online deliver in ..." on Google.

Zomato's /order pages do this job very well. But, what's funny is that Zomato doesn't even allow you to order directly order from the browser. On the order page, it will point you towards its mobile app to place the order!

Weirdly, Swiggy does allow you to place an order directly from the browser, but it doesn't target these keywords.

3) Blog

Apart from these pages, both Zomato & Swiggy also write blogs.

  • Zomato has a dedicated sub-folder for its blogs ➝ zomato.com/blog ➝ Traffic = 10.1K
  • While Swiggy organizes its blogs on a subdomain ➝ blog.swiggy.com ➝ Traffic = 3.7K

Zomato & Swiggy barely get any organic traffic for their blogs. In fact, it seems like they have not tried to optimize their blogs for any keywords at all. So, there's definitely a huge scope for both parties on this front.

Ultimately, in the war of SEO, just by the numbers, the rank board currently reads:
Zomato - 1, Swiggy - 0.

Zomato clearly wins today!

But, there's good scope for both brands to further capitalize on SEO, and Swiggy is known to catch up real quick. So we'll have to wait & watch where these brands eventually end up in the SEO game!

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SEO Wars: Zomato & Swiggy's SEO strategy to get millions of organic users! - Part 1
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BookMyShow's SEO strategy to make 88.9M monthly traffic!

BookMyShow is an online ticket booking website. Over 66% of total users that arrive on BookMyShow come from Google. This all thanks to their SEO strategy. So, let's learn about it!

BookMyShow gets over 88.9M monthly traffic and ranks for 2.6M keywords. Their top subfolders are:
- in.bookmyshow.com/buytickets — 32.6M
- in.bookmshow.com/explore — 5.3M

The "buytickets" subfolder pages rank for keywords like "rrr showtimes", "kgf chapter 2 ticket bookings". Basically, search queries with the intent of "purchasing" or buying tickets.

Whereas the "explore" subfolder ranks for more general, "explorative" keywords like "movies playing", "hindi movies near me", etc.

But, BookMyShow's backbone are the "city" subfolders. You see, BookMyShow's website is divided into cities. And, inside these cities, you can browse through different movies and theatres.

Here's what the structure looks like:
City ➝ Movies ➝ Movies landing page ➝ Book tickets
City ➝ Theatre ➝ List of movies ➝ Book tickets
Once you choose the movie you want to see and the theatre, you land on a specific page. On this page, you can book the ticket.

Suppose you search "movies in bengaluru", since your query is exploratory type, you'll land on the page:
URL structure ➝ /explore/home/bengalur

Now on this page, suppose you click on the movie Thor. Now, you'll land on the "movie" page in the "bengaluru" city subfolder
URL structure ➝ /bengaluru/movies/thor-love-and-thunder/ET0030240

If you click on the "Book tickets" button, you'll land on this page in the buytickets subfolder
URL structure ➝ /buytickets/thor-love-and-thunder-bengaluru/movie-bang-ET00331601-MT/20220707

In the above example, you can see that BookMyShow cleverly takes a user from the "exploratory" stage to the "purchasing" buytickets stage!

Its subfolders are designed such that each ranks for specific search intent.

So, users who are ready to purchase on the first stage, arrive at the buytickets entry point. Whereas, the users who are more in the exploratory stage can arrive on the explore page.

Put simply, they've implemented the basics of SEO flawlessly.

Why is India obsessed with 10-minute delivery startups?

All big brands fighting to get a piece of the quick commerce pie.
- Zepto raised $100M in 45 days after raising $60M
- Swiggy put $700M into Instamart
- Reliance put $220M into Dunzo
- BlinkIt raised $100M from Zomato in 2021

So, the baseline for grocery delivery time has been revised to 10 minutes now. Similarly, you also have to offer free delivery & discounts if you have to stay in the race.

Competition is making these startups do things they otherwise possibly won't. Look at Zomato. The company was already competing with Swiggy in the food delivery space but now it's going head-on to challenge Swiggy's 10-min delivery startup Instamart.

Zomato is going all-in to bail out a bleeding company — BlinkIt, in a $700M deal to get its own 10-min grocery delivery startup.
But, what are these startups trying to achieve?

Well, the biggest argument for quick grocery delivery is that it will bring in a long-term behavourial change in consumers, which can hopefully never be reversed. So, the bet is, once you are used to having groceries delivered in 10-min, you can't go back to the old ways.

But, what's wrong with this assumption?
- Well, in day-to-day life it rarely happens that you need grocery items to be delivered right away.
- Plus making money heavily depends on having a higher-order value which is not the case with these startups.

Now, even if these startups overcome both these problems, yet the fear of losing customers to competitors still remains.

Overall, it's surely an uphill battle for quick delivery startups to survive and eventually make money.
For now, though, enjoy the luxury of getting your groceries delivered at the blink of an eye 😉