iGaming SEO Case Study: 7,500% Growth in Organic Traffic!

The stakes are high in the iGaming industry.

There is an insane amount of money being thrown into this market from all over the world.

According to iGaming Business, it currently has a total global gross win of €102.8b in 2022 and is expected to increase to €173.2b five years from now.

With this much money going into the market, expect tough competition from the smallest to the largest betting brands.

Usually, ranking at the top of the industry’s most lucrative keywords is a crapshoot.

But it is definitely possible!

At Searcharoo, we aren’t necessarily sports bettors in the strictest sense.

We rely less on luck and more on our ability to rank gambling sites on top of organic search.

We grew an online gambling website to achieve an Ahrefs traffic value from virtually nothing on March of 2020 to $141,000 in June of the following year!

Want to find out how?

This case study will show you the exact iGaming SEO strategy we implemented on this sports betting site. 

Let’s begin!

A Closer Look at the Site

The site was relatively new in the industry when we started working on it in March of 2020.

It generated roughly 10 daily organic visitors and did not have an established link profile, which is par for the course among new websites.

This was a massive undertaking for us at Searcharoo. 

First, we had to develop and implement an SEO campaign from scratch to drive more traffic to the site.

And while lesser SEO services would fail to achieve this goal.

We are more than up for the challenge.

Improve Site’s Organic Traffic Using Ranking Blueprint

The Ranking Blueprint is our tried-and-tested process of getting iGaming websites, from online casinos to affiliate sites, on top of Google search.

The Blueprint tells us what we must work on to improve the website’s search engine performance.

Here are things our Ranking Blueprint checks on websites:

[diagram of Searcharoo’s holistic SEO process based on its Ranking Blueprint service]

• Keyword rankings of the site’s current pages and the monthly search volume of your target keywords.
• Who your site’s top competitors are on search results via competitor analysis.
• Site structure, i.e., which pages in your site link to which page, how far are your pages from the homepage, etc.
• Link profile to determine the site’s top backlinks and the links it needs to build to rank higher on SERPs.

From these factors, we can uncover the EXACT strategy and tactics we must implement to help raise a site’s organic visibility.

Learn more about how our Ranking Blueprint can grow your website’s traffic in search engines by clicking here.

In the meantime, let’s break down how we implement the various factors our Blueprint checks on a website…

Analyze Content

The goal of all your site pages is simple:

Make sure they rank on search results for their respective keywords.

To do this, you must create great content that meets users’ search intent.

This way, you can provide the necessary information to users, resulting in higher rankings on search engines.

However, this isn’t always the case among websites. 

Some pages have content that, to be blunt, just isn’t good enough.

Having these pages on your site won’t fly in competitive industries such as iGaming where everybody’s pulling all the stops to rank their websites for their search terms.

For this website in the casino games industry, we checked the following:

• Pages that are indexed on Google but aren’t ranking on the first page, and
• Pages that your competitors have, but you don’t on your website.

Regarding the former, we re-optimised each page for search terms where the page is showing on Google.

We also make sure that these terms have a relatively high search volume.

By optimising for keywords that lots of people search for, we can generate more traffic to these pages once it starts ranking higher on Google.

For this purpose, we used Surfer SEO to cluster these keywords to create a Content Editor.

From here, we can see terms related to the keywords to include in the existing content.

Doing so helps us improve the page’s topic relevance for their search terms, thus improving its ranking in the process!

We also used Marketmuse to cover other terms we need to mention on each page.

Using multiple tools enables us to cover all the bases when creating content that its audience and Google want to see on the page.

We followed the same process when creating content for the site.

But first, we had to determine which keywords to optimise on the site.

To do this, we used Ahrefs’ Content Gap to see keywords for which its top competitors are ranking and the website isn’t.

By making existing pages BETTER and creating the BEST new content for the site using the process above, we developed a more ROBUST content strategy for the site.

Improve Site Architecture

Google spiders rank web pages on search results IF they can crawl them. Unfortunately, some websites are much more difficult to crawl than others due to their structure.

This website has a few issues regarding site architecture, namely:

• Pages with different topics link to each other,
• Pages link far away from the homepage, and
• Pages don’t have internal links at all.

All the issues above are characteristics of poor website architecture.

Google spiders would then be unable to find the pages on your site, resulting in them not appearing on organic search at all!

We used Screaming Frog SEO Spider to generate a visual overview of your site’s internal linking structure to solve the problems above.

This gives us a clear picture of which pages are far away from the image and don’t have pages linking to them.

From here, we’ll devise a strategy to ensure that only related pages link to others, forming topic clusters on your site.

Having multiple clusters about iGaming helped inform Google that the site is an authority in the industry.

This helped the site increase its keyword rankings on Google as a result.

At the same time, we ensured that all pages were linked to the homepage, achieving a flat site architecture. Here’s what it looks like:

Ideally, all pages should be four clicks away from the homepage to make crawling them much easier for search spiders.

Building Links

Finally, we ensured that the site has a solid link profile with iGaming backlinks from authoritative websites.

Backlinks are arguably the most important ranking factor alongside content when ranking websites on top of Google.

For this case study, we searched for domains that the site doesn’t have links to yet using Ahrefs Link Intersect.

We then filtered the domains according to organic traffic and Domain Rating (DR), an Ahrefs metric that determines the authoritativeness of a site according to its backlink profile.

From here, we determined the best way to acquire a backlink from these high-authority and high-traffic domains.

Using data from Ahrefs Link Intersect, we looked at how competitors secured a link from the site based on its type.

For example, if the link is found on the body of the post, the competitor may have used the link insertion approach. 

For links in the author bio, it’s most likely a guest post outreach. We then used the most appropriate approach and secured the backlinks ethically.

Guest Posts

Guest posts are an excellent form of link building for many reasons. 

We used guest posts strategically to build exposure and authority in the iGaming niche. 

This has also driven significant traffic to the site!

Our favourite thing about these guest posts is that we have complete control over the links built and the quality of the surrounding content.

We hit super relevant guest post placements to the main money pages on the iGaming site too! 

We opted for relevancy on high DR sites as we knew we were going to power these with tier 2’s further down the line. 

We will detail how using Tier 2 links in conjunction with guest posts is paramount to our link-building process. 

Niche Edits

When done correctly, building niche edits helps diversify your SEO and expand your domain.

Although Niche Edit link insertions are extremely powerful, they can sometimes lack relevance.

For this reason, we primarily built niche edit links to the supporting pages on the iGaming site.

When combined with a solid internal linking structure, this passes the power (or ‘link juice’) throughout the site.

Our link insertion service played a huge part in the growth of this site.

This guaranteed backlinks from real websites with aged domains with relatively short turnaround times.

We also had complete control of the anchor text, allowing us to diversify our links further.

Our outreach team does the heavy lifting by reaching out to blog owners and assessing suitable placements from our established contacts.

Tier 2 Links

We used tier 2 links to increase the authority of the pages linked to the iGaming site. 

We noticed considerable increases in traffic!

Tier 2’s can increase the DA and UR metrics of pages linked to your site.

We extracted all the most relevant links in the backlink profile and tapped the highest DR relevant links with tier 2’s to enhance authority and power

In this case, we used tier 2’s in conjunction with guest post articles as this allowed us to create extremely relevant articles and power these up accordingly. 

This led to:

• More authority.
• More referral traffic.
• More relevance.

The second-tier links also allow us to enhance relationships with website owners who are more than happy for us to build links to their pages. 

This created further linking opportunities which indirectly helped the site’s growth. 

Social Signals

Social signals are becoming more important to increase the traffic and visibility of websites online.

We used social signals such as likes, retweets, shares, pins, etc., across a wide range of social media platforms and communities. 

We drip-fed social signals for 30 days at a time to see the best results. 

Social signals are an important marketing strategy to enhance social backlinks and organic traffic and we put these to good use to get this sort of growth!

We have tested this time and time again!

We know that this contributes to the website becoming more visible. 

The exposure increases traffic to the shared page and raises the likelihood of getting additional backlinks from websites other than social media. 

Combination Is Key

The 7500% growth of the sports betting site came from a mixture of links, particularly in areas the site was lacking. 

We used the Ranking Blueprint to find exactly the amount of links our client was missing in comparison to their main competitors. 

This also included the type of links they were lacking.

Ultimately, it is best to diversify the links by using a mixture of guest posts, niche, edits, tier 2’s and social signals to get the best results possible. 

Our link-building packages offer a wide range of metrics, and backlink quantity and offer a discount when compared to individual link purchases.

They complement each other perfectly to maintain diversity and contribute to a mix including relevance and authority.

This link diversity facilitates the ranking process by preventing any Google penalties.

Google algorithms continue to improve, so it is important that our SEO strategies also do. 

Link diversity helped improve the iGaming website in areas it lacked, whilst also preventing the algorithms from detecting unnatural patterns that could cause a penalty. 

Something REALLY IMPORTANT about Building Links…

Normally, most SEO agencies get link building wrong. Here’s why:

They just build links expecting that these are enough to help convince Google that the site earned them.

Unfortunately, that’s not always the case.

For better or worse, Google has gotten smarter at identifying sites with unnatural backlinks.

So, even if you built the best backlinks you could find, Google would simply ignore them and won’t increase your organic rankings.

To justify the high-quality backlinks we’ve built during this period, here’s what we did:

Boosted the site’s social proof by generating authentic likes, shares, and comments on tweets, pins, and Facebook posts.

The increase in social activity helped make the website look authentic in the eyes of Google and gave it no choice but to rank the site higher, which it did!

Results

As mentioned, the site experienced a boost in traffic value five months after we started working on its SEO.

However, we have continuously and diligently worked on the site until now to continue improving its organic traffic.

Here is the site’s referring domains during this time as well, where it also continuously grows to 1,500 as of March of 2022:

More importantly, here are the results of our SEO efforts:

From 10 monthly organic traffic in January 2021 to 75k in April 2022, a 7,500% organic traffic increase is not bad at all!

This is considering that sports betting is a highly competitive niche and requires time and expertise to see steady growth over the years, we’ll definitely take the results of its SEO impact.

Conclusion

As you can see, SEO is not just about content and backlinks. Instead, it has evolved to become a HOLISTIC process that involves improving every facet of your website.

From understanding the website structure to uncovering other areas to work on via a thorough website audit, you should be able to determine how to improve its SEO performance.

That said, ranking your website on Google is not a gamble.

So, you need a reliable SEO agency that relies on skill and knowledge for your gambling site.

If anything, we at Searcharoo bet on ourselves when it comes to growing gambling websites (see what we did there?).

Consider:

• Our Ranking Blueprint gives us a bird’s eye view of your website, which enables us to determine issues that need to be addressed.
• Our knowledge of the latest and best SEO practices helps us provide you with the tactics your site needs for its sports betting and casino SEO strategy.
• Our wealth of resources and tools allow us to roll out the site improvements faster and more efficiently.

Whether you have a sports betting or online casino website—or any website for that matter—expect Searcharoo to help you win first place on SERPs.