Benefits of SEO for your own Casino sites
- Large ROI Potential – Attracts lots of clicks from Google search with each click being free.
- Sustainability – Unlike PPC & affiliate traffic, organic traffic does not dry up the moment you stop paying. As such, efforts to develop organic traffic can sustain a business during harder times.
- Strategic advantage – Visibility in organic search is not quick or easy — which is a good and a bad thing. Once you have established yourself in the organic results, your competitors can’t simply buy their way in. This can provide a strategic advantage over the competition if they are relying on paid traffic.
- Brand Value – If you would one day want to sell your brand/website, SEO rankings will increase the value immensely compared to a paid traffic only brand.
- High Credibility – Searchers trust organic listings over paid ones.
- Brand awareness – Ranking in Top 10 creates free and high-value brand awareness, leading to more and more users doing branded searches like ‘casino name +bonus’ etc. It also gives you leverage to make better affiliate deals.
SEO for casinos Case Study
This case study examines how 888casino.com is getting 700.000k monthly organic traffic from Google by investing in SEO for their own casino site.
888casino.com is owned by 888holdings group, they have one brand umbrella with niche divided domains (888casino, 888sports, 888poker, 888bingo). I will be examining the 888casino.com site. They are an interesting example because they use both paid traffic (Google Ads and Affiliate), but also started using SEO to get organic traffic in 2015.
Let's find out where their SEO efforts were focused and how it affected their traffic growth
WaybackMachine (archive.org) is an organisation that works to archive the internet by saving cached versions on their servers. We can see in the image below that 888casino.com published their blog in September 2015 (first blue dots)
We can also confirm when they started their blog by checking data in Semrush, one of the market-leading SEO research tools. The purple organic traffic line below for 2015 did not change much when the blog didn’t exist yet. This supports the data from Waybackmachine.
2016
The blog was published in September 2015, and after 5 months we start to see positive results happening in the image below (purple line, February 2016). This is normal. It takes time for Google to rank sites in the Top 10. We start to see an upwards trend after February.
We can also see that thanks to the blog, the organic traffic went up from 56k in 2015, to an average of 131k per month in 2016.
2017
2018
The huge jump in traffic (purple line) we see here is most likely due to Google accepting the site as an Authority on Casino related subjects due to quality SEO optimized content. This is when Google starts to rank you for a lot of related searches and not just keywords you targeted.
2019
As the data shows, SEO does indeed work for Casinos, not just affiliates. An SEO optimized blog is one important step in the right direction
FAQ
Most frequent questions and answers
Nobody can guarantee you #1 positions and if they do, they’re lying. Google’s algorithms are secret and they’re constantly changing. Also, this very much depends on the website’s current level of optimization, how tough the competition is and the available budget. I can’t guarantee #1 positions but I can guarantee that I’ll do my very best to try to get you website there. By following Google guidelines and doing keyword and competitor analysis you can see what works and doesn’t work. That data allows you to set realistic goals for your content & strategy. If the data shows that you can rank in top 10 on Google, it’s very likely that you will in time.
This really depends on where you’re at right now and where you want to be. It’s also influenced by how tough your competitors and the industry you’re in are. Lastly, there are other factors that we can take account for: How well is your website already optimized? Do you have your own writers, programmers and graphic designers? If yes, you might be able to cut costs. If not, the expenses will go up.
If someone required your services, would you be willing to put up the work upfront and let the client pay at the end if they think they should? You don’t pay for the results, you pay for the labor. Your work will improve their website regardless of how fast it will increase in rankings. I will however come up with a detailed monthly report to state what work has been done and the effects that work had on the website and its rankings.
Adwords is a great advertising platform and it’s definitely useful in the beginning. However, you’ll always have to pay for it. Also, many people these days are using AdBlockers. You might even have one on your PC right now! The truth is people click more on organic search results. Ads on Google only get about 2-3% CTR (and it has been decreasing) while the rest goes to organic searches. That’s why the average cost per ad will only be going up. Keep in mind that SEO takes a little time, so the sooner you start, the better.
Not to be mean, but you might think your website is the best, when in reality it might have a dozen big issues. An outdated looking website can still be the best and design doesn’t always dictate performance. Think of Amazon, Craigslist or Reddit. Very popular sites, yet simple in design. You might even say they look outdated in certain areas. However, they focus on the user experience, which dictates how well a website will eventually perform in the search engines. There’s a lot we can improve through A/B testing. You might really like red buttons and cry after them, but if green buttons convert better, I’m sure you can wipe your tears with the extra cash.
Well, that really depends on many things, such as budget and competition, but it’s honestly an incomplete question. Do you want to rank #1 for one specific keyword? For one hundred keywords? For thousands? The site might grow as a whole, but some keywords might still rank faster than others, again, depending on multiple factors.
SEO takes time because it involves many things, from the quality of your business to the technical things happening on your website. They all need to be aligned in order for a website to rank well for an extended period of time. It’s like building muscle. You need to train little by little every day to see results on the long run. The sooner you start, the better. However, if the site has a severe underlying issue regarding an important area such as indexation, results might be seen right away.
Here’s the deal, there’s an old saying: Do you want to rank high tomorrow but only for one year or do you want to rank after one year but for a lifetime? If you want to rank very high tomorrow, just spend some money on Adwords. If we use BlackHat tactics we might see results quicker, but we risk only seeing them for a short period of time. Even worse, the website might be permanently affected afterwards. On the other hand, if we follow the guidelines and do everything right, the rankings will be there forever. The only way of speeding up the process is by increasing the budget and scaling the good things.
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