Online casino traffic: how to analyze traffic, audience, keywords, and site ranking

Online casinos need huge volumes of traffic. If you operate an existing platform or you’re planning on launching one, you can create a strategy to boost your traffic by analyzing your competitor’s site and comparing it to your own. Let’s see how it works.

In the world of iGaming, website traffic correlates neatly with revenues. The more visitors you have, the more you can convert into depositing players. But drawing the kinds of traffic that online casinos need isn’t easy.

Given the advertising restrictions that often apply to the sector, optimizing a site for search is critical. Effective search engine optimization depends on a collection of factors including visual design, website copy, layout and navigation, and much more. Nearly every pixel is a variable worth examining.

Website traffic is a tally of how many people visited the site in a certain period of time: a day, week, month or year. This is the main indicator for assessing the overall effectiveness of promotion and the popularity of certain pages, as well as analyzing your competitors. Traffic analysis allows the company to reveal growing areas and improve website metrics, which can help with optimizing a strategy of promotion.

Step one: study site statistics, audience, and sources of traffic

Before diving into the fine details, you should get a top-down view of your own site.

Your site’s history factors into its performance on search engine result pages. Domain age influences the search engine’s level of trust; the older the site, the more trust it enjoys from the search engine.

The number of indexed pages shows the size of your site. This can also show which engine the site is geared towards. For example, if a site has more pages on Google than Yandex, the webmaster is more focused on an audience that prefers to use Google.

However, the truth is that site volume is not always a guarantee of quality. Some pages may be unoptimized, contain old information, or simply not provide any value to users. Rather than aiming for a large number of pages, site owners should aim for quality content that truly responds to user needs and provides valuable information. This approach will help improve the user experience and increase the likelihood that site visitors will return again and again.

Loading speed is incredibly important to players. If your website loads too slowly, users will simply close it and go elsewhere. A short loading time has become essential for any business’s online presence — online casinos especially.

Target Audience

Website traffic has a number of different metrics to analyze. Breaking down these statistics will give you a clear view of how visitors to your site behave, which in turn will point you towards what’s working and what isn’t.

You can learn a lot about your target audience by breaking down who visits your site and when. Look into:

• Channels that drive the most traffic.
• Users’ geographic location.
• Devices from which users surf.
• Users’ age and gender.
• Most popular times to visit — time of day, day of the week, month.
• Most popular pages.

The basic building block of website traffic analysis is the unique visitor. A unique visitor is a website visitor with a unique IP address. Basically, looking at the number of unique visitors over a period of time shows how many individual people visited the site.

Here are some of the other statistics you should look at:

• New user — a user who hasn’t visited the site before.
• Sessions — a session is when a visitor to the site views multiple pages. The number of sessions will usually be higher than the number of users, as the same user will usually generate multiple sessions.
• Sessions per user — the number of times the same user returns to the site in the given time period. The more sessions per user, the more value users get from your site.
• Pages per session — the number of pages users visit during a session.
• Session duration — the average amount of time a visitor spends on the site.
• Unique pageview — the number of times a page is viewed by separate unique users.
• Time on page — the amount of time that users spend on a particular page.
• Number of pages per session — how many pages users interact with during a particular session.
• Average time on page — this measures how long users stay on a particular page.
• Bounce rate — this is a measurement of how many website visitors leave the page almost immediately after viewing it. It’s taken as a way to measure how satisfied visitors are with the content. A high bounce rate could indicate the content isn’t optimized properly.

Traffic sources/channels

Analyzing the sources of traffic will show the route visitors took to get to your site.

• Direct traffic: this is when visitors either bookmark the site or type the address directly into the search bar.
• Search traffic: this is when visitors enter a term into a search engine like Google or Yandex and select the site from the Search Engine Results Page (SERPs).
• Referrals: traffic coming from links posted on other resources around the internet
• Advertisements: traffic that comes from advertisements.
• Email: Visitors that arrive at a site through clicking on a link in an email. Strategies like newsletters can grow traffic.

Step two: analyze the competitive environment

Once you've assessed your audience, traffic and website, it’s time to examine what your competitors are doing.

This allows you to avoid mistakes by learning from someone else's. If you've been in the industry long enough, you're probably already familiar with key competitors and their websites. However, to prepare for the possible new competitors, you should periodically research and analyze information about market share. Analyzing competitors' sites will help improve your current promotional strategy.

Why is competitor analysis important for SEO?

SEO competitor traffic analysis is required as a part of casino industry analysis. The main goal is to understand what SEO strategy your competitors have chosen and how you can beat them. Comparing your competitors’ sites allows you to identify their SEO methods and determine which are effective (or ineffective), which is an important step in developing a strategy to improve your website.

The main aim of SEO is to attract organic traffic to the website, and the best tool to achieve that aim is statistics. It allows them to determine with greater accuracy the effectiveness of various methods of attracting traffic.

Competitive SEO analysis is the most accurate way to work with real-time statistics. It helps to determine which promotion methods are effective in a particular category, region and at a specific time. Understanding how search engines work allows you to predict the results from implementing various strategic solutions identified by analyzing your competitors and determine which methods have allowed them to succeed.

How to identify competitors

Identify competitors for online gambling analysis using SEO rankings based on keywords, business categories or product listings. If you need to find competitors, focus on competitor domains, not just keywords. When analyzing competitor websites, you should follow certain rules:

1. Allocate query groups to search for competitors.
2. Choose a region for a search. For example, if the site is based in Australia, you should not analyze the casino market in Canada, Ireland or Thailand.
3. Enter the most important search queries from each group and note down the top 10 websites from rankings.
4. Do an analysis of which websites appear in the toplist most frequently and compile an initial list.
5. Evaluate the basic parameters of the selected competitors and filter out the least valuable ones.
6. Repeat this process several times to compose a final list of competitors for in depth analysis.

Keep in mind that not all of the competing websites will have the same structure and number of categories. In most cases, there will be a competitor in each category. If the site already has traffic, you can find a competitor with Ahrefs by entering the desired domain into the search.

Step three: analyze your competitor’s sites

Once you’ve narrowed your focus down to just a few competitors, it’s time to learn everything there is to know about their sites

How to analyze your competitor’s sites

When approaching the analysis of competitor sites, there are a number of basic characteristics to pay attention to that could have a significant impact on the site's traffic and results:

Website type: Determine how similar your website is to your competitors. This is important because comparisons with sites of a different type are likely to be irrelevant.

Domain area: Determine what and how many domains your competitors are using. This can provide insight into the size of their presence on the market.

Age of the website: Find out how long your competitors' websites have existed. Old websites may have an advantage in search engines because of their experience and credibility.

Growth trend: Study how fast your competitors' sites are growing. Fast-growing youthful sites can provide valuable information on how they are becoming successful.

The baseline screening stage helps eliminate competitors that don't meet the criteria and focus on the most appropriate for analysis. Once this is done, a benchmark analysis of the visibility across websites should be done and the leaders most suitable for further study and analysis should be identified.

If only a small number of sites are left (e.g., 3-5), don’t rule any more out. You need to leave at least a few sites to analyze and compare. Sites that are close to yours in these metrics move on to the next stage — comparing visibility dynamics. You should pay special attention to fast-growing younger websites and study their optimization techniques. Based on this, you will be able to identify the leading competitors and conduct a more detailed analysis of various aspects of their search engine optimization.

Technical equipment

One of the first aspects to consider when analyzing websites is loading speed. Fast loading time plays a key role in the user experience and can affect a site's ranking in search engines.

The robots.txt file is an important tool for managing the indexing of content on a website by search engine robots. The presence of the robots.txt file on websites allows you to understand which pages are hidden from search engines and how the structure of the website is organized.

The server response code provides information about the status of the request when the server is accessed. Analyzing these codes for the websites allows you to determine how effectively the site interacts with search engines and user queries. But the presence of duplicate pages on the site can negatively affect its indexing and ranking in search engines.

With an increasing number of users surfing via mobile devices, adapting a website for smartphones is becoming increasingly important to its success. There are three main approaches to the mobile version of a site:

• Adaptive design is where the site adapts to the resolution of the device in use, such as a smartphone or a table.
• Some brands opt to create a mobile version of their site. Differences from the main site include weight, download speed, convenience, and simplicity. Mobile versions often limit functionality, keeping only the most important features.
• Mobile applications are programs downloaded onto a smartphone. The app replicates the brand name, visual design, and everything else of the casino, while offering fewer features; for example, sometimes the app is a single slot game.

Another alternative solution is Telegram Casino, which presents an alternative front end where the popular messenger’s bots make the gameplay easy and intuitive, and a special way of encryption makes the whole process secure.

Links

External links, where other resources on the web link to a site, contribute to the site’s authority. The more external links there are, the higher the site ranks on the SERPs. The number of links is important, but the quality of the link matters just as much, if not more. Links from more authoritative sites convey more trust.

There are a few ways to break down references.

Backlinks

Backlinks are hyperlinks that lead to the site. There are two main kinds of links: natural and artificial.

Natural links appear on websites due to users' activity. People share links to useful products, services, or content with friends, colleagues, or just with subscribers. This organic link building process is based on recommendations and personal user preferences, making such links valuable to search engines.

SEO links, or paid links, are created and placed by specialists to improve your website's search engine rankings. They can be either leased or permanent.

• Rented links are ones that are placed for a specific period of time and are paid for that duration. This method may be cheaper and allow you to acquire a large number of links quickly, but they are often placed on sites with a lot of spam, which can negatively affect your site's reputation. Also, if payment is not received or the lease expires, links can be removed, and this will definitely affect your site's ranking.
• Eternal links remain on the donor site permanently after payment and are placed inside articles or posts on quality sites. They are considered more valuable because they have naturally flowing content and are placed on sites with high search engine trust. Buying such links is more expensive than leased links, but their effectiveness for site promotion is much higher.

Search engines rank links from sites that have relevant or similar topics to your site as more valuable. However, the exact algorithms for their evaluation are not exactly known. In general, a link from a site that has a similar theme to yours (for example, a site about computer games or gambling if your site is in the gambling industry) will be considered more natural than a link from a site dedicated to a completely different topic, such as childcare.

Google's Penguin algorithm, which is constantly improving, is used to identify purchased or low-quality links. This algorithm analyzes factors such as anchor text, link context, and how links are placed to determine if they are natural. The dynamics of link mass growth, quality and authority of sites and other factors are also taken into account to identify unnatural or unwanted links.

While search engines aren’t always transparent about the criteria they use to rank sites, it’s widely understood that natural links are more of a boost to search page rankings than artificial links.

Anchor links

Anchor text is usually blue and underlined. It’s the link that users click on which takes them to another page. Compiling a list of anchor text from around the web will show exactly which anchor text and phrases are bringing traffic to your competitor’s site.

Types of links

There are some other kinds of links to look into:

• Active vs. inactive: Active links take the user directly to the linked site when they click on the link, whereas inactive links are URL text that must be copied and pasted.
• Direct vs. indirect: Direct links take the user directly to the linked site, whereas indirect links first take users through a redirect.
• **Graphic links **are pictures or other visual elements that take users to a site when they are clicked on.

Content on the site

Content plays an important role in SEO promotion for several reasons.

To begin with, it contains keywords and phrases that users type into search engines. Including these keys in the content makes it easier for search engines to understand exactly what the page is about. Personalized content catches the search engines' focus. It differs from other materials on the internet and can rank better in search engine rankings. Content should be informative, relevant, and appropriate for the target audience. Search engines aim to provide results that are most relevant and useful to users.

The combination of tables, lists, headings and other formatting elements makes content much more well-structured and reader-friendly. This improves user experience and potentially boosts behavioral factors such as time-on-site and bounce rates. Incorporating images, videos and other multimedia elements makes content more attractive and easy to understand. It can also improve SEO by optimizing images and using related media.

In general, quality and well-optimized text is a key factor for successful SEO promotion, as it satisfies the requirements of search engines and increases user experience.

Tools and services that help in the analysis of online casino sites

There are a number of free and paid tools you can use to analyze your own and your competitors’ sites. Here are some of them:

1. Similarweb.com — provides traffic data, sources of traffic, audience demographics, and other metrics.
2. Semrush.com — offers a wide range of tools for keyword analysis, organic and paid traffic estimation, and competitor research.
3. Serpstat.com — assists in keyword analysis, organic traffic estimation and tracking positions in search engine rankings to analyze SEO performance.
4. Ahrefs.com — provides data on link building, organic search, content analysis, and other aspects of SEO.
5. Majestic.com — provides metrics on links, indexed pages and other parameters to analyze SEO performance.
6. Whois.com — provides information about the domain holder, registration information, and other relevant data.
7. Seogadget.com — provides various tools to analyze SEO metrics and improve a website's visibility in search engines.

Conclusion

After analyzing your competitor’s site, you can take what you’ve learned to polish your own. Pin down what they have and zero in on what they don’t. Are they keeping up with recent changes? Are they doing continuous online gambling market analysis and optimizing their site to suit current trends?

Is their page fully optimized for online gambling market analysis, or is there a gap you can fill?

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