Spain Casino SEO: Ranking a Vendor for Top Casino Keywords in Spanish
Aphex Media is a full-service SEO agency. Our top management and SEOs have for a combined 50+ years been executing and getting results in hard niches, especially in the casino and gambling industries, together with other niches such as finance, crypto, health and other highly competitive niches.
Aphex Media has worked with many well known gaming operators and affiliates, along with companies from various other restricted markets on all continents. These campaigns operate under the guidance of compliance officers and legal teams to produce above expectations and build long term client partnerships.
Through the years we have been able to work directly with a number of well-known brands, some of them listed here:
- Ninja casino
- Enlabs (various brands)
- Betsson Group (various brands)
- LeoVegas Group (various brands)
- Tonybet
- Casumo
- KafeRocks – now part of GiG (various brands)
- Outplayed
- Buff.game
Client Background
Our client is a fairly new casino vendor (founded in 2023) which has established a lot of traction in Europe, through a number of major sport and event sponsorships.
Although the vendor has a strong brand presence, their SEO performance with regards to non-branded SEO traffic was fairly low.
The client hired Aphex Media to improve their search visibility over a number of months.
Challenges
The client had the majority of their SEO traffic coming from brand queries. While this is generally a good thing, even for SEO, there still was a lack of traffic coming from non-branded keywords.
The client came to us in the last quarter of 2023 and was looking for growth in money keyword organic traffic.
Goals and Objectives
The primary goal of the client was to get more high-intent traffic and conversions from non-branded organic search keywords.
Keywords they wanted in top positions included such as:
- Casino dinero real (real money casino)
- Tragaperras online / espana (slots online)
- Ruleta online
- Juegos casino
- Live casino
- Casino online
- Casino VISA
- Casino paypal
- Etc
etc
There was already some traction for these keywords and / or their long tail variations, but not enough to bring in any traffic
The good thing is that because the client was an SEO vendor, there were some aspects of user intent queries that could be achieved on the site itself. Anything to do with games is an intent which can easily be hit by a casino vendor, whereas an affiliate would have to take a different angle in that regard.
Website Details
Age of site before campaign
1 year
Domain type
Brand
TLD
.es
Industry
Casino / Gambling
Language / GEO
Spanish
Geography
Spain
Client
Casino Vendor (name withheld)
Goals
Increase organic traffic through top rankings of high intent money keywords together with general improvement of relevant traffic to the website aimed at conversions
Challenges
Low-authority, no keyword rankings, primarily branded keywords ranking
Services Provided
Keyword research, on-page SEO, link network, link planning, viral marketing
Time to Rank
8 weeks
Results
Initial results came hard and fast a few weeks (8) after starting the campaign
SEO Strategy
Given that the client was looking for traction on some of the hardest keywords, our work was cut out.
Aphex Media had to deliver a solid SEO strategy which was able to bring in a good ROI as quickly as possible.
Our first step in most projects we undertake is ensuring that the site is ready for ranking, without any issues holding it back.
As with the first step in any project, we performed a full SEO audit, which includes a technical SEO audit and backlink analysis.
From the audit we could see that the major issues:
- Incorrect and insufficient on-page optimization
- A large link gap when compared to competitors
- Over-optimized anchor text ratios
All of this had to be fixed before we could start to see good results.
Implementation
As soon as we signed the contract, we immediately went into high gear and started executing.
The issues revealed by the audit had to be addressed as quickly as possible, so we started with the on-page work as soon as the audit was completed, together with the start of an aggressive link building campaign to close the gap against existing competitors.
Links we built used a variety of anchors to ensure the over-optimized external anchors were fixed.
Other run-of-the-mill technical SEO issues such as 404 errors were fixed as necessary.
Link Building
The link building aspect of this site was a crucial part of our implementation. Because the site was fairly new, it hadn’t accumulated a lot of authority which comes with a brand which has been around for longer.
This is why the link building had to hit the site hard and fast.
There were two aspects that were necessary here:
- Power
As with other high-competition, high-reward niche, there was always going to be a strong presence of competitors with high-power links and hidden PBNs that we had to assume were there even though you couldn’t immediately detect them.
We therefore push with heavy-hitting powerful links directly to the money pages to push as much power to the money pages as possible, together with a percentage of links going directly to the root domain.
Aphex Media manages Instalinko, a full outreach link-building service and marketplace with more than 50,000 domains in its inventory. We therefore had access to a large number of Spanish language healthy links.
It is typically hard these days to find good links in languages such as Spain that have all the components of being a good link.
The casino niche in non-English language typically has a limited number of links that can move the needle.
But given the contact networks that Aphex Media has built over the years and our current extended inventory, we had no lack of Spanish language, or .es domains to get links from.
The SEO campaign started pushing out links on an on-going basis, as budgets permitted.
We started to push out some of these links on an on-going monthly basis, as budgets permitted.
- Anchor Text Optimization
The second aspect that needed to be handled was the over-optimization that was present in the backlinks sent to the site.
We performed two things in terms of link building:
- We built more links to the homepage using branded anchors
- We built a variety of brand and brand / keyword anchors to the money page
While the casino niche is typically very aggressive when it comes to anchor text ratios, Aphex Media has seen time and time again that this can result in over optimization.
Therefore, although we do get aggressive with link-building in general, we try to keep a more branded approach to the link building aspect. We do believe that in general, the on-page SEO should be doing the heavy lifting when it comes to keywords being targeted.
Below is a screenshot of the anchor text ratios a few weeks after the dilution exercise started. This is still not an optimal balance, but it is becoming more skewed towards anchor as opposed to keyword anchors across the board.
Viral Boosts
Another of Aphex Media’s strategies for the casino niche is the viral boosts technique. This simulates a web page going viral on social media.
This strategy gives more legitimacy on a piece of content getting a bunch of links all at once. It also does a couple of other more important things from an SEO perspective.
- It quickly boosts rankings of a page by causing an algorithmic revaluation of SERP results.
- It shortens the SEO cycle by causing the links to get their power faster, taking days instead of months.
When used in combination with the other SEO strategies that Aphex Media deploys to each client, one can quickly see results much faster than the typical SEO campaign. While most SEO campaigns get results in a matter of months, Aphex Media SEO campaigns typically see results in a matter of weeks or even days.
Results
These are some of the results that Aphex Media is achieving only a few weeks into our SEO campaign.
We can clearly see that the site has taking an upward trajectory, which will keep on increasing as more of the links and other strategies keep taking effect.
Here are some screenshots of results in rankings, share of voice and overall website traffic.
Notice the bump in share of voice literally a few weeks after we started working with the site (from December 2023).
From Google Search Console with 28-day comparison, we can quickly see that there is a marked increase in impressions and clicks and a general increase and upward trend in both search impressions and clicks.
One needs to note that most of the increase is happening on the top tier money keywords, including casino online and other hot money keywords.
While this might not seem overwhelming, one needs to note that this is a few percentage points increase in the space of a few weeks. The positive trendline is more important here than the actual numbers.
Once the keywords start hitting positions 3, 2 and more importantly position 1, there will be a dramatic increase in the numbers.
Most importantly, such keywords at the top positions generate a significant amount of conversions, in a hard Tier 1 geography.
Client Testimonial
The SEO team of the site had words of praise for the Aphex Media SEO team.
“Aphex Media has quickly changed the trajectory of the site in a matter of weeks. Already, in the first few months we have seen an increase in the numbers coming from our more important target money keywords. Aphex Media have come in aggressively with results and we’re looking to see where this partnership will take us”
Want to get similar gambling seo results?
Here at Aphex, the gambling, casino and gaming industries are our bread and butter. We have worked in the industry for several years and we can get solid results at a good ROI for our clients, as you can see from the above case-study and other case-studies.
If you want to get results similar to the one above, fill in the details on the form below to schedule a 1-on-1 call with one of our top SEO consultants. We’ll discuss your long-term plan for your site, and together we will define a plan for making your site a strategic, money-making asset, with a budget that makes sense for you.
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