CASINOFOX CASE STUDY
Casinofox is an affiliate website in the Swedish Unlicensed Casino sector. They approached SEO-Audits.io for an audit after subsequent traffic losses.
Casinofox – What Happened?
Casinofox is an affiliate website in the casino/gambling niche – so, incredibly competitive and at a greater risk of sudden traffic loses due to harsher algorithmic factors against sites in niches more prone to grey/blackhat techniques.
Casinofox had peaked in their organic performance back in early / mid 2021 with their key terms at position 1-3.
However this was shortlived – by the first round of page experience updates, they started to lose ground.
By the time they approached SEO-Audits.io they had lost most of their rankings.
How We Helped
So, Casinofox approached us, ordered a behemoth audit, from there onwards we began the audit process. We initially had to deep dive on search console data, segmenting out brand, segmenting out auxiliary traffic (non value / information intent) and focusing specifically on the money terms.
We did a full data benchmark for before, during growth and at decline – to ascertain click and impression gap – from there we could start look at where queries were lost, average position changes, device and location based changes and more.
Identifying Lost Ground
As part of the auditing process, we’ll identify where lost ground is, what that consists of, we can then start the website audit phase. We cross attribute query performance against content.
Grouping queries and then segmenting by intent, value and supporting SERP factors – we can start working out why losses have occured.
We perform click & intent cross attribution – from here we can start reverse engineering SERP changes – attributing things to core updates / general SERP shifts etc.
Getting Dirty with Data
We had to tear apart all GSC data including search appearance data to find where additional losses occured – turns out the clients content team had unwittingly removed a video that cost 1000s of clicks (this being one of many reasons behind click and position loss).
We tore apart every piece of search console data – from there we knew what we were dealing with from a data / loss / segment perspective.
Content – A Sad Story
A full content audit was undertaken – segmenting out content by performance, saturation, coverage, intent – identifying how much of the website offered value, how much was dead/weak and generating recommendations & writing briefs for correction.
The website was heavily saturated with ultra weak / dead pages – subsequently, this takes away value from the domain – impeding average positions for the smaller volume of performance pages.
A Step By Step Guide to Content
After the content audit – the client was given step by step actions for re-creating content – and to better understand content scope, intent and other coverage factors.
The SEO recovery was also driven by explicit guidance for the client and their internal resource.
Writing briefs were also provided alongside the audit so that the client had items to pass on to writers to action.
The True Link Authority
As part of the audit – we did a deep dive on links – a dirty subject in affiliate / casino / gaming industries. Our link audits tear apart links down to topical relevance analysis – saturation of relevant links against link velocity, anchor text balancing and lots more.
We identified a nuimber of artificially inflated DR links, weak links, lots of contextually irrelevant links, blogspot spam, non optimal anchor text utillisation and more.
More recommendations and guidance were provided.
The True Distribution of Equity
There’s so much more to link building than just link building – there’s equity distribution/feed through equity – there’s the relevance and topical trust flow data and more.
Turns out the client had a good looking link profile on the face of it (AHREFS data) – but a deep dive and segment of links using data aggregated from AHREFS, Cognitive and Majestic showed otherwise.
The domain didn’t have enough supporting links from topically relevant websites – the distribution of links was also insufficient.
Link Tier Ratios – Yes It’s A Thing
Turns out a lot of gambling/affiliate websites love juiced up links. Looking at tier ratios we can start to look at how competitor domains are juiced up compared to the client.
Turns out the client HAD an elevated ratio of links from tiered links – unbeknownst to them.
The overall tier ratio wasn’t too high – but was something to watch.
User Behaviour – A Telling Story?
We’re always interested in user behaviour factors – for the client we did a tear down of segmented engagement data by various demographics. We looked for correlation factors associated with initial page landing / exit, potential for pogo, elevated session duration by pop open tab functionality and more.
Turns out the clients content wasn’t overly engaging – but did it need to be for a site where atypical user behaviour is to find a site and exit through an affiliate link?
A Comprehensive Guide to Rectify
There was a lot of data for the client to digest – we were also aware that they might not have the level of knowledge required to decypher everything highlighted – so at the end, was a clear set of phases for the client to follow with specific instructions.
Casinofox – The Outcome
Casinofox are working on the recovery strategy at the time of this case study being published – there has been some recovery to date with key positions heading back towards page 1. The case study will be updated with the outcome – we are certain of a complete recovery due to the amount of issues found and proposed rectifications.
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