SEO Tracker: How 888casino strengthened its position at top of the casino search market

The online casino market remains an incredibly competitive search market but one brand, 888casino, appears to be increasing its dominance in the UK search results.

We last looked at the UK casino search market back in February, with 888casino coming out as the market leader with a search visibility of just over 25,000.

But back then, the margin of the brand’s victory in the battle for search traffic was incredibly thin – just 401 clicks separated it from the second-most visible brand, Admiral Casino, whilst Mecca Bingo and Casio.com were both generating strong levels of traffic as the third and fourth most prominent brands respectfully.

Behind that intense competition was a number of different SEO strategies. Some brands, including 888casino, were focusing on building a very broad keyword strategy that encompassed most of the 353 keywords in our analysis whilst others, such as Mecca Bingo and Admiral Casino, were generating their traffic from a much smaller proportion of the keyword set.

Six months on, we’re seeing some changes in the market.

July casino search rankings

The first thing to note is the gap that is starting to open up between 888casino and the competition. Whilst both 888casino and Admiral Casino have both increased the level of traffic that they generate from search, the former now generates just over 3,800 more than the latter. 888casino now generates a visibility of 30,884, up from 25,123, compared to Admiral Casino’s 27,026 (up from 27,425).

Casino.com is the third-placed brand in the market with a visibility of 19,864 (around 1,000 higher than in February 2019), although 89.9% of this traffic is derived from a position one ranking for the biggest keyword in this market – casino.

Brands broadening their SEO strategy

That reliance on one or two high-volume keywords is one of the reasons why keyword coverage, and the importance of a broad keyword SEO strategy, is an issue that we discuss frequently. Whilst brands naturally want to target those competitive, high-volume keywords, an over-reliance on those terms can leave a brand exposed to changes in rankings or search algorithms. Even a relatively small drop in rankings for a keyword can have huge impacts for a brand’s visibility in the market and, in a competitive environment such as online casino, it can be extremely expensive to make up for that lost traffic through paid search.

What is interesting is that Casino.com has appeared to diversify its SEO strategy with larger keyword coverage than it had six months ago. The brand ranks for 20 more keywords than it did six months ago, meaning that it ranks for 67% of the keyword set. But the rankings across those keywords are generally not where they need to be to generate meaningful traffic. The brand has just 36 top-ten rankings and just 10 position one rankings (including the one for ‘casino’) – and many of these are for low-traffic mis-spellings of the term ‘casino’.

Another interesting example is Gala Spins, with the brand being the fourth most visible brand despite ranking for just seven keywords in our sample. That position is driven by just one keyword, ‘slots’, accounting for 98.9% of its organic non-brand visibility – a huge proportion that, whilst clearly demonstrating the strength of the brand’s strategy on that one keyword, does leave the brand exposed to a change in rankings.

Redbet a victim of March’s broad update?

Redbet is a notable faller in the market. The brand was the fifth most visible brand in the market in February 2019 but has since fallen to 27^th position in our analysis.

Data from the monitoring service Searchmetrics suggests that the brand suffered a 55.3% fall in traffic between March and May of this year, with the biggest drop in that period coinciding with a Google announcement of a broad algorithm update. This update, confirmed by Google, is one of a number of recent updates designed to improve search results in what are deemed ‘sensitive’ subject areas. The fate that befell Redbet as a result of this may well apply to other operators in the coming months, given the increased frequency at which that these updates have been released over the course of 2019.