SEO Wars: Zomato & Swiggy's SEO strategy to get millions of organic users! - Part 1

Swiggy & Zomato are very similar startups but their SEO strategy is very different. So, let's probe into their strategies to learn what works and what doesn't!

20th April 2022
4 min read

The tech world has seen some epic rivalries throughout the years. Think Apple vs Microsoft.

About 40 years ago, these two tech giants were coming for each other's throats. And, they were definitely not subtle about it!

One such rivalry brewing in India is between Zomato & Swiggy in the food delivery space. Both startups are wildly popular, but they have always been in a race to one-up each other.

  1. Zomato made ~$260 million dollars in revenue in 2021, while Swiggy made ~$490 million dollars.
  2. On New Year's eve, both of them broke records, where Zomato reached 2.5M orders in a single day & Swiggy crossed 2M orders!
  3. When Swiggy launched its 10-min grocery delivery startup, Instamart, Zomato had to get into the fun by buying BlinkIt for almost a billion dollars!

Now, I must admit, this rivalry is more fun than vicious, unlike Apple vs Microsoft. But now, they have also brought their competitive streak to the search engine — Google!

Although these startups are similar in operation, their approach when it comes to SEO is very different. I, of course, couldn't help but probe into their individual strategies to see what works and what doesn't. So, let's get into it!

SEO Wars — How are Zomato & Swiggy doing?

Before we get into their strategies, let's first look at some numbers!

Zomato

  1. Over 63% of Zomato's traffic comes from "Search" according to Alexa. So, SEO is definitely an important channel.
  2. Zomato gets 33.7M organic traffic every month according to Ahrefs!
  3. Although, not all of these visits come from Indian users, where Zomato majorly operates. But, based on location, India still accounts for ~50% of Zomato's traffic, i.e. 16.4M monthly visits.
  4. Overall, Zomato ranks for 6M keywords. Among them, ~99% are non-branded keywords, i.e. queries that don't include "zomato" in the phrase.
  5. It has 11.2M backlinks and a website rating (DR) of 89 out of 100, which surely helps it rank at the top!
zomato seo numbers

Swiggy

  1. Swiggy gets 5.9M monthly organic traffic & ranks for over 552K keywords. In the case of Swiggy, almost all the traffic comes from India, unlike Zomato.
  2. Out of the 552K keywords, ~70% keywords are non-branded.
  3. It has 357K backlinks and a website rating (DR) of 79 out of 100!
swiggy seo numbers

Zomato's approach to master Google's search!

So, like we always do, let's first look at Zomato's top sub-folders. Just from a cursory glance, you'll see quite a few location-based subfolders.

For example, we have

➝ zomato.com/ncr — 1.79M monthly visitors
➝ zomato.com/mumbai — 1.36M monthly visitors
➝ zomato.com/banglore — 1.06M monthly visitors
➝ zomato.com/kolkata — 539K monthly visitors
➝ zomato.com/chennai — 526K monthly visitors

zomato swiggy seo

Zomato uses these subfolders to organize the restaurants on their platform according to different cities.

So, basically, a KFC in Mumbai & Bangalore will come under the /mumbai & /bangalore subfolder respectively.

There is a good reason for having these subfolders. But, before we get into it, we will first have to understand how this hierarchy is structured.

To explain this, let's continue with the example of the Mumbai subfolder & KFC as the restaurant.

  1. Firstly we have the main subfolder ➝ zomato.com/mumbai
  2. Within this folder, we have a subdirectory with the URL structure ➝ zomato.com/mumbai/restaurants.
  3. This landing page contains all the restaurants operating in Mumbai, plus different food categories.
  4. zomato swiggy seo
  5. Then, you have a very dedicated sub-sub-page that lists all the KFCs in Mumbai.
  6. URL structure ➝ zomato.com/mumbai/restaurant/kfc

    zomato swiggy seo
  7. Now, when you click on one of these KFCs at a particular location, you are directed to that particular KFC locations page.
  8. Example ➝ /mumbai/kfc-lower-parel

  9. So, the final URL structure for all restaurant pages looks something like this:
  10. Final URL structure ➝ zomato.com/[city-name]/[restaurant-name]-[location-name]

But, what's the reason behind having this structure?

Well, the idea is to organize all the pages on the site so they naturally rank for their location. Plus, with these location pages, you also automatically location-specific keywords.

So Zomato has separate pages for queries like "KFC Mumbai", "KFC Lower Parel" etc., all neatly organized.

And, of course, each preceding stage in the hierarchy links to the next stage & vice versa! So, the authority juice flows to all the different pages & all the pages also are indexed by Google!

But, that's not it. Zomato goes a step further to target all the possible niche restaurant keywords with different search intents.

Confused? Well, you see Zomato gets 50% of its traffic from outside India, particularly the United States. Now, you are probably wondering, how exactly is that possible. Well, you see Zomato operates like a simple restaurant review site for these countries.

And, of course, this approach also helps Zomato in India!

I'll be covering all this & Swiggy's SEO strategy and compare them both to derive valuable insights for you in Part 2 of this article. So, stay tuned!

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ONDC Explained : How this UPI-like network will break the rule of e-commerce monopolies in India?

ONDC = Open Network for Digital Commerce
Is a government of India initiative to connect all the e-commerce players into one network.
Rationale:
Retail market = $1tr
Online retail market = $55bn, 5% of total market
ONDC wants to expand this beyond 5%.

How is ONDC similar to UPI? Well, ONDC is built on the success of UPI.
UPI is a network => banks + sellers + users. It is then plugged into
- payment platforms - GPay, PhonePe
- apps! - Paytm, Swiggy
ONDC similarly connects different e-commerce players into one network.

But, how is it different from the general platform model? Well, let’s compare the two models:
A) Platform model
Suppose, you use a platform like Amazon to buy a product online.
USER = You
PLATFORM = Amazon
SELLER = Retailer selling his product on Amazon

Here, the USER is connected with the SELLER via Amazon, a PLATFORM. So, all the steps like
- Discovering the product
- Order placement
- Shipping and Delivery
are fulfilled by Amazon.
So, this interaction happens in isolation and is enabled by a platform.

B) ONDC model ONDC breaks this platform dependency by creating a network that will onboard different players like
➝ Platforms - Amazon, Flipkart, Paytm, Swiggy
➝ Sellers - Retail stores and restaurants present on platforms
➝ Logistics - Dunzo, Goodwill

Now, once all these e-commerce players are onboarded on the network, ONDC does 2 things:
1) Unbundles their functions
2) Enables interoperability
Confusing, right? Let me explain in more detail.

In the previous example Amazon was performing a few different functions:
1. Brings the user
2. Onboards the seller
3. Connects them
4. Handles all the order details
5. Delivers the product

Now with ONDC, all these functions
➝ Unbundled - different parties fulfil different steps
➝ Interoperability - these parties all work together
So for example,
- function 1 (get users) ➝ Amazon
- functions 2, 3, 4 (onboarding seller & handling the order) ➝ local retailer on say, E-Samudaay
- function 5 (delivery) ➝ Dunzo

So, ONDC is essentially a protocol that can be plugged into any network and not a super app. With ONDC government of India aims to expand the e-commerce market and reduce dependency and power of large players like Amazon and Flipkart

Zapier's SEO Playbook to get 2M organic monthly traffic!

Zapier is a simple workflow automation tool that allows you to move information between apps & connect them to create automated workflows. It gets ~2M monthly traffic & has 50k+ automated pages! It's vastly successful, thanks to its brilliant SEO strategy.

To drive traffic to their website, Zapier created two sets of pages. The blogs on "Best Apps" & the App Integration pages.

One of the top-performing Zapier subfolders is the /apps landing page. This set of pages accounts for ~15% of Zapier's total traffic with 235K monthly visitors! The idea behind creating these pages is simple. Zapier wants to target all users who are searching for ways to connect different apps.

This set of pages forms a 4 stage hierarchy, where each stage links to the next stage. The pages are, Main Page -> App Profile Page -> App-to-App Integration -> Zaps Page.

Next, the best app blogs are basically blogs that list down top apps in the market in a particular category. For example, the best URL shorteners, the best note-taking apps, the best to-do list apps, etc. These pages get 900K monthly organic traffic, ie. 60% of traffic to their site!

Zapier ranks for really difficult keywords with these pages. It does that by writing high-quality SEO optimized content, internally linking all pages to flow the authority & acquiring high-quality backlinks.

All these pages are internally linked & are created using an automated template to reduce effort while creating new pages!