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How to boost your casino research with SEO competitor research

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September 29, 2023

In the saturated online casino scene, competitor research could be the key to taking yours a step above the rest. Understanding your competitors and their strengths and weaknesses could give your business a significant advantage. With this information, you’ll know which areas to target and excel at.

At QWERTYLABS, let’s explore everything about SEO competitive research, why it’s important for your online casino and strategies you can follow to begin conducting your own research and improve your current SEO strategy. Whether you’re new to SEO or a seasoned professional, this guide can help you get started with the basics of SEO competitor research and get your online casino off the ground.  

What is competitor research?

SEO competitor research is the process of gathering information about your industry’s competitors to better understand how they operate and replicate their success while avoiding any weaknesses. It’s a common marketing strategy that lets you better understand your target audience and improve your overall business strategies. 

When conducting SEO competitor analysis, you can achieve the following:

  • Learn your competitors’ strengths and apply them to your plans
  • Capitalise on your competitors’ weaknesses while avoiding them yourself
  • Measure your current SEO performance against your competitors to identify areas for improvement
  • Get a better understanding of the current competitive landscape within the online casino industry.

Why competitor analysis is important for online casinos

SEO Competitor Research is a critical tool for any online casino seeking to succeed within the industry. There are several reasons why you should incorporate competitor analysis into your marketing plan. Let’s explore some of them below:

Benchmark your current plans with your competitors

Understanding where your business currently stands with your competitors is important for you to build a plan to help you elevate your SERP ranking. Incorporating an SEO competitor research analysis into your marketing strategy will help you create a benchmark for improving your performance.

Gives ideas for future content

When you’re trying to understand your target audience, competitor research can help you properly identify their needs and interests. You can easily gain inspiration and find content ideas that could fit your niche and deliver better and tailored content for your audience.

Positively impacts website ranking and visibility

When done correctly, conducting SEO competitor research can improve your rank on the SERPs and boost your online casino’s visibility so more people can find your website. 

So find the queries and keywords your competitors haven’t ranked in yet and use those. Take note of which ones they’ve found success in and avoid those. Identifying and closing this keyword gap can make your online casino more competitive. Make sure that when you’re looking to target new keywords, it still aligns with your casino’s brand. Otherwise, it might end up hurting your rank.

Helps you stay competitive in the online gambling industry

The online gambling industry is one of the fastest growing industries in recent years, being worth up to $92.9 billion in 2023. The rapid growth in popularity of the industry is a result of the recent major advancements in technology, which greatly helped online casinos become more accessible to a wider audience. This is why marketing research targeting your competitors is more important now than ever. If you want your online casino to stand out from the rest, find the gaps where you can shine and use that as leverage to introduce your casino to your target audience.

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How to do SEO competitor analysis for online casinos

When it comes to staying on top of competing casinos, keeping track of your rivals’ strategies and performance is key. Here are the guidelines on how to do competitor analysis in SEO:

  1. Find competitor websites in the online casino industry

Since your competitors are other casinos or similar websites, you’re more or less going after the same target market. This means that you will most likely be using the same keywords. Your competitors are those that rank highly for those target keywords.

Start by determining who your competitors are; you can do this by looking up your keywords on a search engine like Google. The top results on the SERPs for your main keyword are the ones you want to look out for and evaluate for your competitor research.

It’s important to note that not all websites are your actual competitors. While an online news outlet, for example, might be a competitor for your keyword searches, it’s generally not worth trying to outrank these types of websites since it’s not a direct competitor to your business. Learn to prioritise your resources and only go after similar businesses.

How to identify SEO competitors:

  • Do industry research. This is crucial when you’re trying to understand your competitors and how they’ve found success in organic searches using keyword research. Aside from analysing Google searches, you can use several other techniques to identify your competitors.
  • Use industry directories. These are like online yellow pages. They’re lists of similarly themed businesses that offer the same types of services. By looking at an online industry directory, you can easily find what other websites have the same niche as yours. It’s a good place to start looking for your competitors.
  • Go to review websites. This is especially useful because not only do they give you access to a good list of competitors you can work with, but they also reveal information and reviews left by their audience. You can use this extra information to your advantage by improving upon it with your online casino.
  1. Evaluate competition websites for insights and inspiration

Once you’ve identified who your main competitors are, it’s time to gain some insights into their strengths and weaknesses and figure out how to use them to your advantage. There are three main things to look for: authority, content and new keyword rankings.

Authority

A website’s authority is measured by its overall SEO performance and quality of content; the better your website’s authority is, the higher its position on the SERPs. If your competitor has a higher authority than you do, it'll be harder to outrank them.

Using link-building strategies is an effective way for you to improve your website’s authority. Create high-quality backlinks; this tells Google’s crawlers that your website is relevant to a certain keyword, driving more organic traffic to your online casino.

Content

Improving your conversion rate and having people stay on your website for longer starts with creating quality content — this involves the topic of your content, metadata, and others. You can learn how to create better content for your website simply by observing better-ranked websites. Analysing their web content can help you better understand the topics and keywords they’re targeting.

Take note of their strengths and weaknesses so you know which aspects of their content to emulate and which ones you should avoid or improve upon. Capitalise on their shortcomings and ensure your content is better than theirs in relevance and quality.

New keyword rankings

Stay ahead of your competitors by targeting new keywords they may be going after. If you know which keywords they are targeting and how they are ranking for those keywords, you can use that to your advantage by crafting a better keyword strategy and identifying new opportunities to improve your performance. 

On that note, you may notice that your competitors might experience a drop in rankings for certain keywords. Take that as an opportunity to target that keyword with a better strategy using the knowledge you’ve learned.

  1. Conduct keyword research competitor analysis

Once you’ve established who your competitors are, it’s time for you to focus on your keywords. These are the search queries that are suited for your target audience, which you first need to determine.

Identify your target audience

Before you can start creating a marketing plan for your online casino, you must first understand your goals and who you're marketing for. Brainstorm some ideas by asking basic questions about your audience first and determining what they’d look for in your casino.

Do keyword research

Find your target audience’s search queries and look for trends using keyword research tools. These tools can also help you determine relevant long-tail keywords for you and even give you their keyword difficulty to figure out if they're worth targeting.

Analyse competitors’ keywords in their content and SEO strategies

Now that you have your keywords, take a look at your competitors’ websites again and note their content optimisation techniques. This includes their URL structure, internal linking, meta-description and titles, and more. These are all key factors for audience retention and are worth replicating for your website. If they’re done well, they can generate high traffic for their website.

  1. Do competitor website content analysis

Now that you have a good foundation for improving the structure of your website, it’s time to turn your focus on your search engine targeting strategies. Below are some tips and techniques you can follow to improve your on-page optimisation.

Content quality

Give yourself a good head start by learning what you should and shouldn’t do in terms of your website’s content. Content quality is the biggest factor that determines your website’s relevancy on the SERPs. The better your content is, the more users will find your website.

User experience

If you want to turn casual visitors of your online casino into loyal players who keep returning for more of your services, your website needs to have a responsive web design. Navigation can be a pain for some users, so make sure your website is user-friendly as possible by making everything as readily available to them as you can. 

As a good rule of thumb, try to make it so that the most essential pages are no more than just a few pages deep. This ensures that your users don’t have to wade through your content to find what they need.

  1. Perform backlink competitor analysis

One of the final and ongoing steps of SEO optimisation is off-page SEO. This involves SEO strategies done off of your website. You can gain valuable insights by comparing your off-page SEO strategies to those of your competitors. This could involve providing links that go back to high-quality content on your website or improving your domain authority with backlinks. The main goal of off-page SEO is to increase the number of visits you get to your website’s pages, lengthen your average visit duration and decrease your overall bounce rate.

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Strategies on how to use competitive analysis data for your casino

After doing SEO competitor research, how do you apply what you’ve learned to your casino? Here’s a short list of strategies you can use to improve your online casino’s performance. Remain competitive in the online gambling industry with these techniques. 

  1. Find a niche

Differentiate your casino from others and create a unique identity tailored to specific players by finding a niche. The online gambling industry is rapidly growing and quickly becoming oversaturated by hundreds of other online casinos looking to target the same audience you’re looking for. 

Having your own niche that satisfies a specific demographic helps define your online identity and offers something unique that players can’t find anywhere else.

  1. Offer promotions

To players, one of the best parts about online casinos is the abundance of promotions they can earn, which helps them win more as they continue to make bets in your casino. It’s a huge selling point for many players and a deal breaker for most. Take advantage of this by offering your players different kinds of promotions and events that they can participate in. 

Not only does this give them more opportunities to earn bonuses and spend more time at your casino, but it can also provide a more dynamic experience. This improves the quality of their gaming experience, which could result in a more loyal player base.

  1. Improve online transactions

Online casinos have become a strong contender for gambling enthusiasts thanks to the convenience of online transactions. Nowadays, cryptocurrencies have become the top method of payment in online casinos because of how secure and fast they are as a method of payment. Not only will players have the peace of mind they need when gambling online, but their deposits and withdrawals can be processed within a matter of minutes.

  1. Always update your games

The great thing about online casinos is how much more flexible it is as compared to land-based casinos in terms of your game library. This means that you can offer as many games as you like. It’s much easier to update your game catalogue and keep things interesting and exciting for your players. It’s much better practice for you to have games to keep players entertained, engaged and coming back for more.

  1. Provide excellent customer care

Above all else, it’s much more fun for players to play at an online casino that actively cares for its community of players. This means having a dedicated team of customer support agents ready to answer any questions your players might have. This shows a willingness to help and engage with your audience which gives them an extra reason to trust your establishment.

SEO competitor analysis tools for competitor research

Many tools with innovative features are designed to make SEO work much easier for you. Incorporating these tools into your SEO strategies and tactics could help improve your website’s rankings and performance. Here are our top picks when it comes to SEO tools:

Ahrefs

The all-in-one Ahrefs software keeps track of your growing search traffic and gives you the data you need to optimise your websites. Ahrefs is especially useful for analysing your competitors’ performance and giving you insights on how you can improve your own. It can do all that while keeping track of live data like search traffic and keyword rankings that are useful for websites looking to step up their SEO game.

Semrush

This SEO tool has all the same capabilities that Ahrefs has in that it can keep track of your website’s performance, analyse your competitors and help with backlink analysis. Understand your market more intimately with all the information you can get from Semrush. You can then use these to create a content strategy aiming to improve your online visibility.

Moz

Finally, Moz is another SEO tool that can give you all of the information you need to improve your website’s online presence and visibility. By giving you live content marketing metrics that reflect your website's performance, from its rank on the SERPs to the keywords you need to hit or improve on, Moz is an invaluable tool that will give you fresh insights and drive more traffic to your site.

Uncover your website’s potential through competitor analysis

By taking the time to analyse your competitors’ SEO performance, you can gain valuable insights that can help you take your online casino a cut above the rest. Doing continuous maintenance on your website, like adjusting your content structure or doing on-page and off-page SEO techniques, can be a lot of work but can have amazing results in the long run. By having a sound content strategy, digital marketing for your casino can become a piece of cake.

Improve your website’s SEO technique with QWERTYLABS

Our expert SEO team is more than happy to help you get your online casino up and running. We provide helpful services that will help you establish a strong brand identity and build your online presence from the ground up. 

Alongside that, we also offer high-quality SEO content creation services guaranteed to improve your click-through rates and get you the conversions you need. Don’t miss out on this amazing opportunity to improve your performance and beat the competition. Contact us today!

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