Casino SEO Case Study: +889% Organic Search Traffic

Today I want to show you the power of using a simple and proven SEO strategy.

The truth is some niches are more competitive than others.

But there is one thing that always stays the same regardless of the niche or industry that your website operates in.

What’s that?

A simple and solid SEO strategy that gets results:

In this SEO case study, you’ll see the exact strategy we used to grow our gambling client’s organic traffic by over 800%.

And the best part is that this SEO strategy is timeless, meaning you can take each step and implement it on your own site.

Let’s jump in!

A Closer Look At The Case Study

Our casino client’s primary target market is in:

Organic traffic started to plateau and they weren’t able to take their site traffic to the next level to continue growing.

That’s when they reached out to Search Logistics for help.

The campaign’s primary goal was to build the site’s authority because it was struggling to rank for new keywords.

They also wanted to expand their content to increase visibility while attracting the right kind of visitors to their website.

The Biggest Challenges We Had to Overcome

The gambling industry is one of the hardest industries to thrive in.

It is extremely volatile and heavily regulated, so the quality of SEO you need is significantly higher than in most other industries.

Below are the main challenges that we had to overcome in this campaign:

But that’s just the beginning…

Gambling is very competitive online.

So even if you can get past the first few hurdles, you are up against fierce competition with large budgets.

This is coupled with the fact that Google generally categorises casino websites as YMYL (Your Money Your Life).

YMYL websites cover topics that can impact a person’s future happiness, health, financial stability or safety.

Google scrutinises these websites more and requires that the site demonstrate a much higher level of authority and trustworthiness.

Not an easy thing to do!

And just when you thought we were at the end of all the challenges…

Gambling websites are typically affected by most major Google updates. That means keeping a gambling site stable and consistently growing is hard work.

As you can see:

It requires a high level of skill and niche experience to be successful.

We also needed to identify and secure backlinks from topically relevant websites to build the site’s domain authority.

Most high-authority and topically relevant sites won’t link to gambling sites.

That’s a big problem.

What’s the solution?

We needed to use careful blogger outreach to get the right kind of links.

The final challenges were to:

Here’s a step-by-step guide to how we handled all of these challenges.

Create A Plan Of Attack

After running a site-wide SEO audit, our team developed 3 specific steps to overcome the challenges and get our client’s site growing again.

The good news is that you can use these exact steps to get similar results for your own website. Just follow along.

Step #1 – Content Expansion To Increase Visibility

Content is the key to higher rankings and more keyword visibility in the SERPs.

An effective strategy to enhance your website’s keyword visibility is to develop pillar pages and link them to topically related cluster pages.

These are known as content hubs.

They are effective because they-

I recommend checking out this case study to learn how to pick effective topics for your content hubs.

Review content is an area that Google has paid particular attention to over the past year or so.

This is such a large focus for them that they’ve even gone as far as to develop their own reviews ranking system.

The aim of this ranking system is to reward review content that provides:

If you want to develop your own review site content, demonstrating those 3 things is a must.

Reviews were an essential revenue and traffic stream for our client.

Because of this, we knew we had to ensure that their content was not just good – but the best.

Writing Reviews

Here’s everything you need to know when writing great review content:

1. Evaluate From The User’s Perspective

Always keep the end user’s perspective in mind.

That means covering the most important aspects of the product, including the pros and cons.

The review’s goal is to give the reader the information they need to make a good decision.

2. Demonstrate Your Expertise

Provide credible evidence to show your readers (and Google) that you are an expert. Use language that demonstrates you are an expert and explain any unique terms thoroughly.

Be detailed about the features/benefits and avoid generic and vague explanations.

Take it a step further by including an author bio at the top or bottom of your page. The bio should:

3. Demonstrate Your First-Hand Experience

Google and your readers want proof that you have tested and used the product or service you’re reviewing.

This helps readers trust your opinion and makes them more likely to purchase the product.

4. Be Descriptive And Thorough

Add as much relevant information to your review as possible.

This includes any quantifiable specifications or measurements of a product and how it differs from key competitors.

5. Highlight The Pros And Cons

Some readers just want to know the highlights!

Always include a concise pros and cons section allowing the reader to quickly get the information they need.

6. Highlight Key Decision-Making Factors

Highlight the important factors that influence people when purchasing the product or service.

Your goal is not to cover everything – only the most important factors people care about.

7. Add Links To Other Useful Resources

Add links to other resources that prove what you are saying is true and demonstrate topical expertise.

These can be external links to other websites or internal links to your own pages.

If you keep those 7 key points in mind, you will give your reviews the best chance to rank high in the Google search results.

You will also provide the information your readers need, boosting conversions.

That’s exactly what you want, right?

Make sure you check out Google’s guidelines on writing content reviews here if you want to learn more about what they expect.

Step #2 – Building Authority Through Link Building

If you want to build your site’s authority, you must invest in link building.

The gambling niche is a notoriously difficult niche to build backlinks in.

But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible!

It just means you need to level up your game and stick to proven link building strategies that will deliver the results you’re after.

For our client, that meant using specialised blogger outreach.

Blogger Outreach

Here are the exact steps we took:

1. Finding Link Prospects

One of the best ways to find great links is by using your competitors’ backlink profiles as a benchmark.

If a site links to your competitor, they are more likely to link to you too.

Ahrefs’ Link Intersect tool is perfect for finding backlink opportunities because it shows sites that link to your competitors but not you (yet).

This is perfect for our client because we know that the sites linking to our competitors are fine with giving backlinks to gambling sites.

2. Getting The Contact Information

After putting together a list of target websites for outreach, you need to find their contact information.

First, try to find a good email to contact on the website.

If you can’t, use a tool like Hunter.io or FindThatLead, which will automatically find it for you. This is the best and fastest way to get contact details quickly.

3. Crafting Your Outreach Pitch

The pitch is the most overlooked part of the outreach process – but it’s also the most important.

It ultimately determines whether you will get a link, so make sure you do a good job.

The most successful outreach pitches…

This can be mentions of specific pages that you found interesting on their site, a relevant quote or even a tweet that you saw the author post elsewhere.

It’s really up to you.

The key is showing that you’ve done enough homework to understand the author and website.

Every pitch we write answers the following three questions:

1. Who are you? – Let them know about yourself and your own website.
2. Why are you contacting them? – This part of the pitch is where the personalisation is most important. You need to explain why you want a backlink from their website. For example, you might be fixing a dead link on their site.
3. What do you have to offer? – Explain why their readers will benefit from the link to your web page. An example could be that your article is more comprehensive and thus will be more informative, which will benefit their readers.

It takes time to find the right style of pitch that works for you.

But your conversion rates should increase significantly by answering the 3 questions above and sticking to that format.

4. Monitor Your Progress

Outreach link building is a numbers game.

Not every pitch you write will get a response and that’s ok!

But it’s important to make sure that you monitor the progress of your outreach campaign. Identify which pitches get the most responses and adapt accordingly.

This also means that you should experiment with different subject lines to see what gets the most opens and replies.

As a result of our outreach link-building campaign, the client’s link velocity and referring domains have seen consistent growth:

This has helped build the site’s authority to a point where we can rank for competitive keywords.

It has also stabilised the site through Google updates and ultimately generated more traffic.

Pretty good, right?

Remember: Link building is about consistency. Follow the process above and stay consistent in your efforts or just use LinksThatRank.

That’s how you will start to see the big gains you want!

Step #3 – User Experience Optimisation

At the end of the day…

SEO is about increasing the number of organic visitors you get from Google by optimising your site and content for Google.

Simple, but not easy.

Why?

Getting users onto your website is only half of the story.

Once you’ve got them there – you need to encourage them to stay and ultimately convert into customers.

That’s where the user experience optimisation side of SEO comes in.

The truth is our client’s website lacked the best practices for usability and navigation. So there were some pretty big fixes we needed to make.

Here’s what I mean:

Internal Linking

Internal linking is when you place a hyperlink from one page of your site to another page of your site.

It is essential to help search engines discover and understand the website’s structure.

But that’s not all…

Strategically interlinking relevant pages has a number of other benefits:

The internal link also helps search engines establish the relevance and context of linked pages.

This ultimately boosts each linked page’s overall visibility, authority and ranking potential.

Crazy, right?

The truth is that internal linking is one of the most underrated strategies in SEO at the moment.

You would be surprised at the results you can get from a good internal linking structure.

Our team created a clear structure of internal links that fed up from the blog posts and individual review pages up to relevant category and subcategory pages.

This provided a nice site hierarchy for Google to understand and made it easier for visitors to get the pages on the site that actually converted them into customers.

Win-win.

Main Menu Navigation

Your main menu navigation forms the basic overall structure of your website hierarchy.

It also has a significant impact on your overall user experience.

The main menu should help Google crawl and index the most important pages on your website.

This will improve the chances of category and content pages ranking higher in the SERPs.

But that’s not all…

Good main menu navigation helps users find what they are looking for.

Think of it as clear signposts on your website that point users in the direction they want to go.

This will ultimately provide a better user experience with the added benefit of having users spend longer on your website while lowering your bounce.

This is exactly what you want!

Best Practices

Below are the best practices we implemented for our client when redesigning their main menu navigation:

1. Use Descriptive Labels

Labels like “Who we are” don’t actually say who you are and take up a lot of space in the menu navigation.

Instead, use easily discernible labels that show exactly what you do so that users can quickly find what they need.

Here’s an example:

It is simple but also obvious what page the user will land on if they click the navigation link.

2. Don’t Overcrowd

The goal is to keep it simple and only include the most important pages in your main menu.

Overcrowding the navigation with too many pages will overwhelm your visitors.

Overcrowded navigation also means that Google won’t understand which pages offer your users the most value.

Here’s an example of an overcrowded main menu navigation:

What’s more?

Navigation with fewer links generally means more authority being passed from your homepage to other important pages.

This is because the homepage (in general) has the highest page authority (i.e. PageRank) of any page on your site – usually because it has the most internal and external links pointing at it.

If you have a main menu with too many items, this authority is diluted and the links don’t carry as much weight to the other pages on your site.

We recommend aiming for 5 to 8 main menu items for your navigation.

3. Choose The Right Placement

The order in which you display each of your main menu navigation links can affect how users navigate your site.

This means you should place:

This is why you’ll usually see a website’s products or service pages at the start of their menu and the contact page at the end.

4. Optimise For Mobile

We are in a mobile-first world.

Ensure that your main menu is just as easy to use on mobile devices as on desktop.

There’s less real estate to work with on mobile, so a great solution is to use the hamburger menu so that users can click on an icon that expands and displays the full menu.

Most of your site visitors will visit your site on a mobile device.

So pay close attention to it!

Redesigning our client’s site user experience was the final piece of the puzzle.

It pulled everything together and ensured they now had a perfectly optimised site for SEO AND user experience.

The Results Are In

The results of this campaign were satisfying because of the sheer amount of work we put in.

The client’s organic traffic increased significantly and most importantly, maintained consistent growth over the past few years:

But that’s not all…

The site is now ranking for 1,063 keywords in the top 10 positions in Google.

The overall results were incredible for any website, but even more so because it is a gambling niche site.

Wrapping It Up

Here’s what this case study shows:

Regardless of how competitive your industry is, you can achieve great results by following core SEO principles.

People are always looking for the latest and greatest SEO tactics. But the truth is time-tested and proven SEO strategies always deliver the best results long-term.

And our client’s results only prove this further.

The best part?

You can follow the exact same steps to get similar results for your own website. The key is to stay consistent and focus on delivering quality for your readers.

Here’s a recap of the 3 main steps you need to follow:

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