SEO Tracker: Betfred takes lead in much-changed slots market

Betfred has come to the forefront of a slots market that has continued to grow after last year’s igaming boom, while former market leader Admiral Casino now finds itself behind a number of rivals in terms of visibility.

With steady growth over the past year, Betfred has now positioned itself as the most visible brand in this sector, having previously been uncompetitive in the organic search rankings. This of course comes after Betfred signed an agreement with Pariplay to provide its users with over 100 new slot games on the platform, a sure sign that the brand is going from strength to strength at this time.

Slots sector dominated by three search terms

Although the slots market has continued to grow following earlier increases in search activity following the Covid-19 pandemic, with overall searches for the 251 biggest keywords rising from 190,000 in September 2020 to 217,000 today, the niche remains dominated by three key terms which bring in a total of 82,400 searches between them.

‘Slots’, ‘online slots’ and ‘free spins’ are by far the most important search terms in the market, and it is here that we begin to see why Admiral Casino has far less visibility than it did nine months ago. The brand has lost the top ranking for the first two of these key terms, and this has contributed heavily to an overall decrease in visibility from 21,336 estimated monthly clicks in September to 10,947 clicks.

The two aforementioned search terms alone account for 7,874 of Admiral Casino’s lost monthly clicks, as it has slipped from top spot to rank in third and fourth respectively.

It is with these search terms that we also begin to see how Betfred has transformed its slots offering from a company that didn’t have a single first page ranking back in September, into the most visible company in the market. The UK-based brand now ranks fifth for ‘online slots’ and takes the top ranking from Admiral Casino for the most important single term in the niche: ‘slots’.

Betfred has consolidated its rankings for these keywords by improving its rankings across the board, now ranking for 114 out of the 251 keywords we checked, compared to only 34 in September. Impressively, it now has 28 terms ranking in the top three positions, giving an estimated 15,387 clicks between them.

Admiral Casino not the only brand to suffer

While Admiral Casino is perhaps the most notable faller, it is not the only one in the market, with both Pink Casino and 32Red also notable fallers.

For Pink Casino, we see a loss of 4,129 estimated monthly clicks as a result of their average weighted ranking falling from 10 to 31 – primarily due to falling rankings across many mid-volume terms – seeing the brand drop from second overall to fifth.

While the brand has moved up to second for the high-volume term “free spins” and does still perform well on “free” and “no deposit”-appended terms, it has lost out on more general terms such as “slots game” and “online slots uk”.

For 32Red, the fall is created by lost ranking positions for terms that the brand was particularly reliant on for traffic back in September 2020.

The brand has lost 4,618 clicks – 57.4% of its organic, non-brand traffic – with 1,849 of that loss attributable just to the term “online slots”, where it has fallen from third to ninth. Overall, the brand now ranks in the top three positions for just 45 of the keywords in our analysis, compared to 84 back in September – with many of those 45 terms being much lower volume keywords.

It certainly seems that Betfred has put itself in the best position possible to continue taking advantage of the growth that the slots market is experiencing, but it remains to be seen how these brands that have lost traffic, in many cases directly to Betfred, will respond to this new challenge.