The Most Popular Trading Academies in 2024 Or Top 5 Trading Academies by Organic Visits

• To make the most informed decision, prospective traders and investors often explore educational offerings provided by leading brokerage houses.

• These collections of courses, tutorials, and webinars specialise in educating and training individuals about stocks, forex, futures, and cryptocurrencies.

• They are also marketing tools for targeting the informative intent in search engines.

There are many choices out there when it comes to trading and investing resources. One option is to explore offerings provided by leading brokerage houses. These companies have many online articles and tutorials for their clients, and they host periodic on-site seminars in their branches, along with webinars for new and experienced traders.

The old days when you had to pay for trading lessons are almost gone. In the rush to gain visibility and recognition through organic growth efforts, they offer free education, usually gathered in a dedicated section suggestively named "Academy".

Cristian Cochintu, an independent SEO consultant with extensive expertise in the financial technology (fintech) sector, has analysed the educational resources the top stocks and CFDs brokers offer, ranking them based on their estimated monthly visits from organic search.

After 20 years in the industry, Cristian Cochintu split the brokerages into contenders and pretenders:

• Pretenders put most of their efforts and resources into paid advertising and "push" marketing in general, for quick gains. They have a short-term strategy driven by display ads targeting novices, sometimes cold calling and small affiliates. Their content is limited and basic, regurgitated and sometimes AI-driven. Occasionally they use macro-influencers to promote their services and products.

• Contenders are investing in creating relevant and engaging content to enhance user experience and create value with experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust. They have a long-term strategy driven by reputable market analysts and educators. Their domains have authority and they often use niche nano-influencers with a loyal follower base.

Although such academies can be seen in both groups, the research shows that only a few can be found by people searching for trading and investing education. Here are the top 5 ranked by organic visits per month in 2024, "the good and the bad".

Binance Academy

Binance Academy reached 400k organic visits per month during the "SEO gold rush", with opportunities to capitalise on SEO publishing a lot of content because of a lot of search potential. This worked well until the September 2023 Helpful Content Update (HCU), with many sites experiencing a downtrend once Google updated its algorithms.

Source: Ahrefs

With an impressive multi-language selection of articles focused on quantity (15k pages), Binance Academy lost 60% of the organic visits. Based on available data and personal experience, only a handful of websites have fully recovered their pre-HCU performance, while the majority have seen only modest progress or no progress at all.

eToro Academy

The eToro Academy is a collection of guides, courses, and tutorials created over many years and gathered in one place. This educational content drives around 100k organic visits per month. The crypto content is overperforming stocks and forex guides and tutorials.

Source: Ahrefs

With so many pages, some of them outdated, targeting the same topics, or written without a genuine scope for the user, content pruning is needed in 2025. This involves refreshing, consolidating, or removing obsolete, and low-performing pages to make room for the best content to flourish.

IG Academy

Available in multiple languages, IG Academy contains just a small portion of the content offered by the leading brokerage house that drives over 4M organic visits per month.

Source: Ahrefs

With class-leading SEO execution including localization, the section doubled its monthly organic visits in the last 6 months and has the potential to become one of the main sources of organic traffic for non-branded searches in 2025.

Plus500 Academy

Localised for many regions, PLUS500 Trading Academy includes guides, webinars and ebooks. The educational section is growing fast, gaining 20k organic visitors per month in 2024.

Source: Ahrefs

PLUS500's SEO efforts to grow their market share accelerated in 2024. Covering some of the main verticals such as instrument pages and education, the brokerage is showing one of the healthiest uptrends in the industry, 600k organic visits per month - up almost 100% since the start of 2024.

IBRK Academy

Launched in the summer of 2024, Trader's Academy by IBKR offers financial education with free courses and trading lessons on the concepts and tools of online trading and investing.

Source: Ahrefs

IBKR's campus reached 16k organic visitors in December 2024, with an estimated value in paid ads equivalent to 20k. The content does not match the search intent, and although it has a lot of valuable information, it does not rank in search engines and drives a very limited number of monthly organic visits.

Conclusions

Among their offering pages targeting the transactional intent ("buy ABC", "trade ABC", and "invest in ABC" type of searches) and a regular presence on high-ranking third-party websites targeting the commercial intent ("best of", "reviews", "comparisons"), online brokerages with long-term growth plans need to target the informative intent ("what is", "how to", and "forecast") for the top of the funnel. However, the extreme top of the funnel, "too far astray" topics are not worth it.

Unfortunately, most of the education provided by online brokers is not discovered by searchers either because it is not optimized for search intent to earn better rankings and more conversions, or because it has regurgitated content without choosing an angle or adding unique information.

To stand out from the crowd in 2025 online brokerages need to improve their on-page strategy, focus on experience-driven content and inject some real-life experience, concluded the independent SEO consultant.

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.