ONLINE CASINO CASE STUDY
Introduction
Our client, the Crypto Casino Brand, has established itself as a prominent player in the online gambling industry. However, they wanted to receive more FTDs through their website and less rely on affiliates. As the casino market becomes increasingly competitive, a strong online presence is essential for any brand to succeed.
The brand’s main objective was to increase its FTDs from organic search visitors. To achieve this, we, the Casino Marketing Agency (CMA), set up a system to track FTDs from their website. This allowed the Crypto Casino Brand to measure the direct impact of our services on their business. In this case study, we will examine the starting point and goals of our client and how CMA was able to provide them with a successful marketing solution.
Client Profile
1 year
On the Market
Affiliates
The Main Influx of Players
Only Brand
Search visibility
Organic FTDs
Goal of request
Results of Our Work
~50+
FTD per month
9 Months
Break-Even point
6 Months
Fist results
How Did The Online Casino Marketing Achieve These Results?
When we first began our partnership with the Crypto Casino Brand, their website was only receiving a few hundred visits per month from search engines like Google. Their online presence was almost non-existent. Our team was given the green light to make any necessary changes to the website to increase its visibility on search engines and attract new clients.
To achieve this goal, we started by completely restructuring their website. Our first step was to conduct a comprehensive analysis that included three different categories of research:
1. Market research
On the Market
2. Analysis of the competitors
(this gave us excellent casino marketing examples)
3. Website SEO audit
On the Market
We’ll take a closer look at each category in just a moment, but here are the key takeaways for our analysis. We:
Identified several hypotheses
Tested each of them
Determined which ones actually work
Began to adjust the marketing strategy in accordance with the chosen direction
Our efforts proved successful, as the Crypto Casino Brand was able to increase their organic FTDs by 20 times within the first 24 months of our partnership. If you’re interested in improving your marketing efforts, we invite you to schedule a free strategy contact us. Now, let’s dive deeper into the specific areas of research we conducted to build effective content marketing strategies for the brand.
1. Market Research
The market for online gambling is highly competitive, and the online casino industry is no exception. The competition is fierce, and it can be difficult for smaller brands to stand out. Furthermore, our client’s website had a low domain rating, making it even more challenging to promote their business online.
During our initial research phase, we discovered that all of our client’s competitors were large and established players (Stake, BitStarz, Bitcasino, Games.Bitcoin.com) in the industry with years of online and offline presence. We found affiliate sites and news websites (Cryptonews, Mercurynews, Business2Community) dominating the first page of Google search results related to crypto gambling.
It was a 50/30/20 split between these news websites, affiliate review webistes, and casino brands. However, there were no links to our client’s websites in the top 50 results for any short tail or long tail keywords related to their games or offers. There was yet another issue that we found: most of the top casinos focused on one main area of games at the beggining (live, slots, table, provably fair). However, our client wanted to have it all. So, we had to compete with 3 sets of large websites, each with their own established target audience.
Niche complexity:
- News websites with high authority and ranking
- Large and reputable law casino brands with years of online presence
- Affiliates that are focused on one casino-category
2. Analysis of Competitors
As previously mentioned, our competitors in the online casino industry focused on specific areas of gambling, such as sports betting, live csaino, online slots or provably fair games. This posed an additional challenge for us, as we had to conduct separate research for each type of competitor.
Sports Betting
Websites
Live Casino Websites
Casino Slots Websites
Provably Fair Games Websites
We started by analyzing our client’s top competitors and studying successful marketing strategies in the industry. Our research revealed that the leading brands were large, established players with extensive experience and coverage in the market. They had high-quality content, numerous backlinks, strong brand recognition, and a significant online presence. To make matters more challenging, our client had a smaller digital marketing budget than their competitors.
Furthermore, our competitors had been implementing successful SEO strategies for many years, which had helped them establish domain authority and gain trust from search engines like Google.
3. Website Audit
When we first began working with the client, they had a website but never really did any SEO work with it. We evaluated the client’s website in 3 main areas:
The quality of their existing content
Their backlinks profile
Technical issues
Also, we took a look at conversion rate optimization. This means how likely the average visitor is to contact the law firm after checking their website.
- Bad content, as mentioned above
- Practically no backlinks to the website
- Poor technical condition of the site, so the user experience was not ideal
- Insufficiency of client registration forms (no pop-ups, sign-up forms were not optimized to converse)
As a matter of fact, we’ve done many more website audits since then and have found out that the vast majority of our clients have similar issues. Do you want to get your website audited?
Strategy – It’s All About the Money (Returns on Investment)
Our team didn’t let the challenges discourage us. Instead, we embraced them as a challenge and developed a comprehensive content marketing plan to improve each aspect of our client’s website and achieve a positive return on investment as soon as possible. While SEO can take between 6-12 months to show results, we aimed for the lower end of that time frame and were able to deliver results within just 6 months.
In the following sections, we’ll share our strategy that led to a 20-fold increase in website traffic within 24 months. Additionally, we’ll share a valuable tip that helped us generate leads almost instantly.
Content Marketing
We decided to work on 2 areas:
For commercial keywords (aka “service” names) – We broke them down into more specific “services”. For instance, instead of having one page for Bitcoin slots page, we created many separate pages for different types of slots. There was a page for classic, a page for bonus buy, one for high RTP, one for megaways, and so on. This gave us an opportunity to work with less competitive keywords, as well as to create pieces of content that targeted very specific games. This better met the expectations and needs of website visitors, thus making them more likely to register.
For informational keywords – We began to write blog posts in order to introduce informational target keywords. For example, we created a post with details on “monopoly live strategies”. This piece alone gets over 1,000 page views per month. Inside the article, we integrate call-to-action to encourage the client’s visitors to try strategies at our client’s casino.
PRO TIP
Blogging is not a unique marketing strategy for the casino industry. In fact, many online gambling brands have created blogs with the goal of generating traffic and increasing engagement. However, not all blogs achieve the desired results. Our client, a casino brand, had previously attempted to create blog content without seeing significant results. As a result, we decided to leverage their existing content to achieve faster results.
You may think that this approach contradicts the need for fresh and original content, but below we’ll explain how we were able to use both types of content to improve our search engine ranking. But first, let’s take a closer look at content marketing strategies within the online gambling industry.
In the online casino industry, search engine results for law-related queries typically yield two types of articles among the top 10 results.
In our content marketing strategy case study, we developed a unique approach by combining these two types of articles and creating deep, expert content written in simple language. Instead of creating new pages, we repurposed previously published blog posts that had not generated significant traffic.
To achieve this, we used the same web addresses as before, which are time-proven pieces that Google favors. We then rewrote each piece of content to provide fresh, updated information that Google also values. Additionally, we conducted thorough keyword research to identify more opportunities for the article to achieve a high ranking.
We also implemented other tactics to create successful content:
- We incorporated pictures, videos, or graphics in each blog post and service page
- We hired gamblers (poker, blackjack, ex-Evolution employees) to give their comments about our most popular articles . So, we received highquality video content to publish on the law firm's Youtube channel and social media accounts.
- Then, we took an audio track from the video and made a podcast. We repurposed the same piece 3 times!
It was this approach that began to bring in good results.
Backlinks
A quick word about link building – we looked at what approaches our competitors were using and we tried to either replicate or improve upon them. We used many different tactics for link building, such as guest posts, community forums, game providers, our partners, PR, link-bait content and much more. You can learn more about the strategies and tactics we use on the page dedicated to our backlink and internal link building service.
Technical SEO
We corrected the technical aspect of the client’s website. Our team fixed the issues within the first 3 months of work; we won’t cover it in detail due to the highly technical nature of the fixes. We have a deep understanding of technical SEO, so we were able to tell which site code need to be fixed and put it in order. You can learn more about this service here.
Conversion Rate Optimization
To increase the chances of converting site visitors into players, we made several improvements to the website. We placed the phone number in a more prominent location on the page and added several new communication options. These included:
- A sticky header with a visible sign-up form.
- An online chat function.
- We broke up text into a pop-up window with registration form.
- Get bonus form was implemented; users can leave their email to get personal bonus.
- A registration form was added to each page
PRO TIP
Since the client had Affiliate Marketing, and since they were willing to wait for 6-9 months, we proposed setting a marketing budget and initially dividing it 70/25/5 between Affiliate Marketing, SEO and Facebook Ads. During the first stage of our work, the client had FTDs brought in from affiliates and Facebook Ads. Once we began to see SEO-driven results, we started to shift the budget in this direction. We reduced the budget for sponsored listings and increased criteria for new affiliates – so we started to see huge increase organic leads. Those leads are already paid, and a casino doesn’t have to share revenue out of them with anyone. Now the budget allocation is 60/40 between SEO and Affiliate Marketing. In same time, the total marketing budget is the same.
Implementation of a Step-by-Step Plan
- Finding “low-hanging fruits”to get SEO boost
- Site analysis
- Niche research
- Competitive analysis
- Brainstorming and strategy approval for 12 months
- Developing traffic growth strategy
- – Content Plan
- – Link Building
- – Technical SEO
- Development of reporting system and proper analytics setup
- Implementing customer growth tactics
- Blogging
- Webmasters outreach
- Search and/or social ads
- Strategy correction based on the first dataset
- Sales Grow – your investments are starting to pay off
- Conversion rate optimization of landing pages
- Email newsletters
- Sales funnel optimization
- Marketing strategy review and development for the next 12 months
At the end of the 3rd month, we were able to determine which strategy worked the best. We began rewriting service pages, breaking them down into narrow subpages. This process took several months, and it was completed during the 9th month of work.
Are You Ready to Boost Your Organic Traffic?
As the online gambling industry is complex and highly competitive, we had to think strategically to stand out from the competition – and we successfully did so.
Through our work, the casino brand saw a 20-fold increase in organic traffic over a period of 12 months.
Our client is extremely satisfied with our work, as evidenced by our 2-year partnership with them. However, once a month we audit them and continue to introduce new and sophisticated technologies to further improve their online presence.
We are dedicated to helping other online gambling companies achieve similar (or even better) results and are more than happy to assist in any way we can.