Cryptocurrency search growing fast across India: SEMrush

SEMrush started out in 2008 as a small group of SEO and IT specialists united by one mission — to make online competition fair and transparent, with equal opportunities for everyone. After 11 years of trailblazing experiments and constant progress, it has grown into the world's leading competitive research service for online marketing.

Here, Fernando Angulo, Head of Communications at SEMrush, talks about cryptocurrencies. Excerpts:

DQ: What have you seen from the search results about the adoption of, or how the people are thinking about blockchain and bitcoin cryptocurrencies?

Fernando Angulo: First let's talk about the intent of the people when they are searching, they're looking for something information transactional, or they want to buy something in terms of cryptocurrency, in terms of this entire industry.

The investment on cryptocurrency was the first place so they are searching, where to invest, what is the best cryptocurrency, how to get cryptocurrency transform into rupees or how to get physical money about that?

For some states and for some locations in India, that's becoming really popular. The trend is only going on the people who are talking about this, and the ones who are creating content for our organically ranking for this are just a lot. The people who want to use cryptocurrency are consuming the data. That's the thing we can see in terms of results. The interest of course, if we have content, we have the results, and we have the interest of the people. This is something that is growing, faster than in in every other Asian country.

Even if we're talking about China, the interest about cryptocurrency in China was fast, and really big.

DQ: Blockchain and bitcoin have been around for some years now. Has India done any development in this field?

Fernando Angulo: In terms of cryptocurrency, I believe, you have your own cryptocurrency here. There are companies that have developed a bit, and I believe the government is also investing a lot. That's only for the news we have in the search. The search queries show that the bitcoin is still the number one.

We have a second cryptocurrency, which is mostly popular here. But then, the most popular is still the bitcoin. For people who are searching for that, they have all sorts of content right now. The content creation is going really, really fast. You have knowledge about cryptocurrency, you are going to build a blog, you're going to open a startup and you're going to create something because people are consuming that data. So that's making the market grow more in terms of contents created that leads to more results on the search engine.

That's how we thought that we can see the price of the bitcoin and the numbers of searches. That's why I was mentioning that there is a certain correlation between them three years ago, there was not much information about cryptocurrency. There there was just a hype, which is in in basic terms, it was viral. Everybody was talking about bitcoins, but most of the people didn't have any idea and the prices went crazy.

In terms of SEO, if you had a post or URL with 600 words, you can rank for that post on organic search. Today, you need to write something about 3,000 words. The competition is there in terms of amount of content is crazy, because there are a lot of companies who are doing that.

DQ: Do you remember that in South Korea was there was a huge cryptocurrency jacking?

Fernando Angulo: That was also there, three years ago! I don't have the data with me. The hype about cryptocurrency, and the reaction from governments was a crisis situation. You have people mining cryptocurrency, you have people acquiring cryptocurrency, and the control of the bands was kind of lost there.

For countries like South Korea, everything is related to bank and everything is related to the government. They were losing control. So, they needed to cut out that really fast. It was a crisis situations in Muslim countries.

I believe in India, you also have rules because of that. Banks don't want to lose control of course, and going with cryptocurrency is losing control. I have a poll in my personal Twitter account: What are the things that humanity needs to rip off? I put three things: passwords, cables, or taxes. Everybody was saying taxes, so that means, nobody wants to pay taxes. Cryptocurrencies are the biggest way to avoid taxes.