Organic Traffic in 2024: Winners and Losers among CFD Brokers

• After the September 2023 controversial Helpful Content Update (HCU), Google released a few significant algorithm updates and revised its documentation.

• In May 2024, they also launched AI Overviews in Search to help people quickly find information and explore the web's offerings.

• Following these updates and a more competitive AI-driven search landscape, some brokerages are showing impressive gains, while others are experiencing significant losses in organic traffic.

In 2024, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) remains a crucial component of digital marketing for online businesses. As search engines continue to evolve and more people rely more and more on the internet for just about anything, its importance is expected to continue, if not increase, in 2025.

Cristian Cochintu, an independent SEO consultant with extensive expertise in the financial technology (fintech) sector, has analyzed the situation of CFD brokers that have occupied the top positions in the last 12+ months based on the estimated organic traffic.

The data below shows how IG.com and Oanda remain the top performers in the search engine results pages (SERPs), consolidating their positions after the latest updates and launches.

Source: Ahrefs

"While Oanda is driving around 80% of the organic traffic with their famous Currency Converter, IG.com remains the benchmark in the industry. Their organic traffic increased over 20% during the year. However, the top gainers are eToro, Forex.com, Alpari, LiteFinance, and Plus500, among others. On the loser's side, Capital.com, Admirals, and ThinkMarkets are leading the race to the bottom in SERP", explained Cristian Cochintu.

eToro​​ +1M (100% growth within a few months)

eToro has taken an extraordinary lead, with SEO efforts focused on improving instrument pages' positions through programmatic SEO.

Source: Ahrefs

"Scaling the pricing pages with a customer satisfaction template is a great way to target thousands of keywords. However, it runs the risk of creating thin content that offers little to no value to the user", according to Cristian Cochintu.

"This advanced SEO tactic requires a deep understanding of what Google rewards and penalises, as programmatic content needs to satisfy user intent and not violate Google's spam policies and become "programmatic spam". Google's helpful content update and the follow-ups have made several victims among online brokers already," added the fintech SEO specialist.

FOREX.com +500k (100% growth within 1 year)

The website doubled its organic traffic, while its average organic traffic value reached an impressive $1,2M. That shows the value of organic search traffic if it were to be acquired via PPC in Google Ads.

Source: Ahrefs

"Forex.com consolidated their position for forex-related keywords, ranking first for the generic forex term in the US, UK, India, Germany, Vietnam or Colombia, and other long-tail informative related searches", explained Cristian Cochintu.

"Forex.com also ranks first for high-value transactional searches such as forex trading app, forex trading account, forex demo account, or forex trading platform, proving that done well, SEO for forex still works", added the SEO expert.

Alpari​ +450k (160% increase in +12 months)

Alpari's impressive organic growth is pretty misleading when you look at their organic traffic value, which is just $100k per month—x10 less than the top competitors.

Source: Ahrefs

"The competing domains are now websites like wise.com, xe.com, or revolut.com, with around 30,000 common keywords ranking in the top 100 organic search results. The currency converter drives most organic traffic from regions where this tool is popular, such as Russia, Nigeria, Ukraine, India, Uzbekistan, or Pakistan", says Cristian Cochintu.

"SEO for financial services, often provided by expensive agencies, frequently falls into the keyword volume trap. Businesses should not chase volume; they should focus on understanding what their audience is looking for and creating content that aligns their goals, ultimately with their audience's goals", added the freelance SEO consultant.

LiteFinance +350k (300% growth within 15 months)

Using a .org domain typically used by nonprofit organizations, LiteFinance shows some of the healthiest organic growth in the industry. In addition to English, the brokerage ranks high in Thai, Korean, and Arabic.

Source: Ahrefs

"Successfully applied by other financial portals in the last years, LiteFinance's multilingual SEO strategy focused on informational content, mainly generic education and forecasts for the markets with the highest global search volume", explained Cristian Cochintu.

"The tendency to rely on AI to produce and translate content just because you can and has never been easier is a recipe for mediocrity. Once again proved that keyword-rich content, authoritative writing style, citing reliable sources, incorporating credible quotes and statistics, is the key to becoming a topical authority", added the SEO specialist.

PLUS 500​ +250k (80% increase during 2024)

Plus 500's organic presence growth started in 2023 and gained traction in 2024. The total number of organic keywords for which the site's ranking position is within the 1st to 10th results by month has doubled this year, from 6k to 12k.

Source: Ahrefs

"Like eToro or Coinbase in the crypto industry, instead of using SEO to market the product, the product became the SEO driver; pricing pages in multiple languages, such as Spanish, Dutch, Polish, Italian, German, or Czech", said Cristian.

"Rather than relying on keywords and content as the bedrock of their SEO efforts, these mammoth online brokers and exchanges used a scaled approach, relying more on developing product specs, taxonomy, cross-linking guidelines, and page design", added Cristian Cochintu.

Capital.com -500k (-60% decline within 18 months)

The March 2023 Broad Core Update was intended to improve how Google's systems assess content overall and reward high-value web pages. Site owners were advised to create high-quality, high-value webpages with helpful content, good user experiences, and strong E-E-A-T signals.

Source: Ahrefs

"We all notice a surge in content powered by generative AI. This technological leap has made it easy to produce content at scale. However, not all the content meets the quality standards that Google seeks", according to Cristian Cochintu.

"Capital.com's trading guides for the most popular assets contain a lot of duplication, generic information, and sometimes outdated information. Also, sites aggregating information from other sources without offering their unique product or service struggled with this update. Capital.com mainly aggregated AI-driven forecasts and price predictions in their market analysis", explained the SEO specialist for financial services.

Admirals​ -450k (-70% lose within 15 months)

Admirals' organic traffic shows the highest volatility among online brokers in the last +5 years. According to a Google spokesperson, in September 2023, Google rolled out the controversial helpful content update (HCU), leading to a 45% reduction in unhelpful content. This update has refined how Google understands which webpages are "unhelpful, have a poor experience or feel like they were created for search engines instead of people", Google added.

Source: Ahrefs

"With onboarding temporarily suspended since April 2024 and failing to learn from past mistakes (hello, inexperienced SEOs and agencies!), Admirals lost almost 500,000 monthly organic visits. There are clear signs that the website was affected by the HCU. The situation is similar with the .sc website, which experiences a steady downward trend starting with the mid-year core update that penalised thin and duplicate content, losing almost 80% organic traffic", explained Cristian Cochintu.

He added that Admirals' organic traffic chart perfectly reflects the search evolution: "From around 2019 till mid-2023, there was an "SEO gold rush", with opportunities for small and mid-size companies, less recognizable brands, to capitalise on SEO publishing a lot of content because there is a lot of search potential. This content, written for search engines, not for humans, lacked expertise and real-life experience. It worked well, but with search evolving from simple keyword queries to a complex, data-driven ecosystem that is constantly changing, many sites saw visibility drops as Google updated its algorithms."

ThinkMarkets​ -200k (-50% decline within 3 months)

After a solid uptrend started in 2021, ThinkMarkets lost 50% of its organic traffic once Google completed the June 2024 spam update. The update targeted websites violating Google's spam policies. The key points of the update were automated generated or translated content, as well as thin, duplicated, or poor-quality content.

Source: Ahrefs

Just scratching the surface, Cristian Cochintu identified that "ThinkMarkets' trading academy translated into Mandarin Chinese and Thai is the primary source of organic traffic, ranking high on low-competition keywords. The strategy is not bad, but the implementation and topic coverage are thin, without a topical map and several on-page issues.

"Websites should make sure their content is following Google's E-E-A-T guideline, diving into the real world experience, having the expertise for that topic, the so-called authoritativeness certification, or the ability to be seen as an authority on the trading and investing topics, injecting some leadership experience and trust", added the fintech SEO specialist.

Other winners

Exness, Deriv, and XM are the other three top competitors in Forex SEO, with around 1M monthly organic visits. However, their organic traffic is due to the large number of users in Asia and Africa, with fewer organic keywords ranking on the first page than other brokers.

XTB and CMC Markets have two of the most robust domain ratings and are gaining around 500k monthly organic visits. According to Cristian Cochintu, there are missed opportunities: "XTB's organic growth is driven by brand searches as the on-page SEO strategy is not competitive enough, while CMC Markets is competitive mainly in English."

"Saxo Bank, Libertex, and AXI are showing a growing interest in SEO with promising results, ranking for around 10k organic keywords on the first page, with potential to scale in the future", added the SEO expert.

Focus on experience-driven content and diversify your traffic sources in 2025

After analyzing over 100 online brokers, Cristian Cochintu said: "With SEO evolving, adapting tactics and leveraging automation to create better and helpful content, NOT more or cheaper, as well as optimizing content specifically for AI-generated search results, allowed some companies to scale their business. At the same time, failing to prepare for future core updates and seeking short-term gains while ignoring best practices has led to a strong decline in organic search".

In his concluding thoughts, the SEO expert highlighted that relying solely on search traffic and mass-produced content isn't sustainable: "Google rewards authenticity, so prioritize deep, comprehensive, experience-driven content on a subject over surface-level keywords target, enhancing user experience and creating value with E-E-A-T."

Additionally, with the AI Overview expanding and the buzz around the SearchGPT launching in 2025, Cristian recommends diversifying your traffic sources to build resilience: "Explore platforms like YouTube and TikTok to reach new audiences. Highlight your team's expertise and expand across channels to future-proof your SEO strategy."

Cristian Cochintu is an independent growth and SEO consultant with 20 years of experience in the online trading and investing business, working with brokerages and affiliate marketing networks.

These organic traffic estimations from Ahrefs are based on the keywords with which the websites rank in the top 100 and estimate the traffic based on the ranking of each keyword relative to the search volume of each keyword.