Data: Big brands fall in fragmented casino market

Major casino brands have lost huge levels of visibility over the course of 2016, with the likes of Betfair, Ladbrokes, Coral and bgo.com, all suffering falls in their organic search presence.

Back in early 2016, we highlighted how many brands were potentially leaving themselves exposed to reductions in visibility by focusing their search marketing strategies too heavily on a small number of high volume but highly volatile keywords.

Having performed the same analysis in January 2017, we have seen a marked change in the casino market, with a greater number of smaller brands entering a much more fragmented market and displacing a number of the brands that we identified as potentially vulnerable when we performed our January 2016 analysis.

The state of the market in 2016
When we performed this analysis in 2016, taking into account the 353 biggest traffic driving keywords in the casino sector (including slots, blackjack and roulette), we found that Paddy Power was the market leader, thanks to strong rankings across a broad range of keywords.

Paddy Power managed to secure that position despite (at the time) not holding a position one ranking for many of the top traffic-driving keywords. Instead, visibility was built on consistent rankings across the board, and high rankings for lower-volume but less competitive terms.

By comparison, we identified that Virgin Games and Betfair were driving strong levels of traffic, but from a much smaller pool of keywords. Betfair was generating over 9,000 organic visits from just 164 keywords, while Virgin Games was driving around 8,500 visits from just 120 keywords – compared to more than 250 keywords for Paddy Power.

In our January 2016 analysis, we suggested a strategy that focused on a handful of smaller keywords carried a degree of risk, leaving brands exposed to sharp falls in visibility should rankings drop, either through natural ranking fluctuations or from wholesale algorithm updates. This then has the potential to significantly reduce traffic in an extremely short space of time, forcing brands to make up the loss with costly PPC campaigns.

Big brands losing, with smaller players taking advantage
While Paddy Power continues to lead the market in the online casino sector, we have observed significant visibility losses across many of the other big brands, with a number falling out of our top 10 altogether. Betfair saw the biggest year-on-year fall in visibility, dropping from second place in our 2016 ranking to 105th – costing the brand 8,968 organic search visits. Virgin Games, third on our index in 2016, has also dropped out of our top 10, losing 6,966 estimated monthly visits.

Of the five brands that had the smallest keyword coverage in 2016, four of them are the biggest losers in 2017, with Unibet and bgo.com completing the list. However, we cannot simply attribute these falls purely to poor keyword coverage. There are, clearly, other factors at play.

While other brands with broad coverage, such as Sky Vegas and 32Red, still perform well, Ladbrokes, which had the largest keyword coverage of all of our top 10 brands a year ago, has also vanished from the top 10, losing 6,214 monthly visits compared to this time last year.

The brands that have fallen from the index have been replaced by many lesser-known brands, such as starwins.co.uk (only registered in May 2016), high5casino.com and casino.org. This is a trend we often see in volatile search markets like casino, and corrections typically follow, although it is a trend that comes at a significant cost for these major operators.

It’s impossible to definitively pin down the primary cause of these drops across the sector without a thorough analysis of individual SEO strategies, and it’s also possible that September’s Penguin update may be an influence, but this analysis once again demonstrates that while a diverse keyword coverage is no guarantee, it does at the very least spread the risk and help to protect brands against algorithmic fluctuations.