SEO Tracker: Admiral Casino resilient to search volume drops as Wink and Mecca fall away in slots

Once a highly competitive, high-volume market that was considered a key opportunity for cross-selling and up-selling consumers in the egaming sector, the slots market has experienced some difficult challenges in recent years.

While not necessarily seen as a ‘front door’ to new consumers by many gaming brands, which instead saw slots as a side-game to casino and bingo-based products, slots was and is still a significant opportunity for search market visibility.

But the market was impacted by the EAT update from August 2018, which saw a very close, competitive market become much more fragmented in favour of the bigger brands in the sector.

If we take a look back at the 10 most visible brands in the slots market before and after the EAT update, we can see the market fragmenting quite notably, with bigger, more established brands such as Mecca Bingo, Wink Slots, Admiral Casino and 888casino clearly leading the market.

This was not because they themselves became more visible, but because many smaller brands lost visibility, suggesting that the EAT update, which was focused on rewarding brands that established levels of expertise, authority and trust, was having an impact in this sector.

So, has this trend continued?

An increasingly tough market

Fast forward to today and we have seen further changes in the market. Most notably, Mecca Bingo has lost its position as the most visible brand in the slots market to Admiral Casino.

While we have seen some notable brands drop out of the top 10, we still see familiar names within the 10 most visible brands in the slots sector.

Mecca Bingo’s visibility has fallen from 19,483 in January 2019 to just 6,145 in September 2019, even though the brand’s keyword coverage has remained the same at 38.6% of the 251 keywords in our analysis.

A large part of Mecca Bingo’s loss of visibility is the loss of its position one ranking for “slots”, the biggest keyword in the market, to position three. The brand has also dropped out of the top three for “slots online” (6^th) and “online slots” (7^th).

Bgo.com currently holds the position one ranking for the term “slots” and although the brand does have an above average keyword coverage percentage, this one keyword accounts for 96.7% of the brand’s organic search visibility.

Admiral Casino, which leads the market and holds a number of position one rankings for mid-volume terms, is the only brand that was in the top 10 in January 2019 to have increased its visibility since September. A large part of this is due to the fall in search volume across the slots market.

Search volume in the market is falling

A big factor in the changes that we have seen in the slots market through this analysis is the reduction in search volume around slot keywords. This in some respects reflects trends that we have seen in other areas of the egaming sector, but the drop in slots is particularly notable.

Search volume has fallen from 242,490 in January 2019 to 194,240 – a drop of 48,250, with this drop being driven largely by falls in the high-volume keyword terms.

Search volume: Largest decreases

Search volume: Largest increases

This fall in search volume provides something of a double-whammy for brands such as Mecca Bingo, which was generating visibility from high-volume terms. In markets where search volume is falling, the effect of even a small ranking drop is multiplied significantly.

There is clearly still value in brands focusing on slot-based keywords despite these reductions. Particularly for those brands with strong reputations, high domain authority, good content and strong reputations for consumer trust, the slots keywords represent an opportunity to generate a volume of qualified traffic from a fragmented and more open search environment. For the bigger brands, it’s arguably easier to rank in this section of the market than it is for smaller brands and affiliates – which have often at times taken significant share of the search market.

Despite the decline in search volume, which does mirror some other sections of the market, there are still opportunities to be had but, like much of the egaming sector, it appears as if those bigger and more trusted players do have something of a head-start.