In the iGaming industry, the traffic and revenue of gambling platforms are closely related, which is an indisputable fact. The number of visitors directly determines how many players your gambling platform can attract to play games, which in turn converts into actual revenue. It can be said that traffic is the lifeblood of the gambling platform and the key to the successful operation of the platform.

Whether you are already operating a gambling platform, are about to enter a new gambling market, or are already in this market, as an operator of a gambling platform, you should analyze the traffic of your competitors. This will not only help you understand the current situation of the market but also provide you with inspiration and ideas on how to increase traffic.

In addition, it is also a crucial step to combine with the marketing strategies of existing (iGaming) gambling platforms and optimize and develop your own strategies to increase traffic. In this way, you can learn from the experience of other successful platforms while maintaining your own characteristics, thereby improving your competitiveness and making your gambling platform stand out in the market.

What is website traffic?

Website traffic refers to the number of people who visit a website within a specific period of time (a day, a week, a month, or a year). This is the main metric for evaluating the overall effectiveness of your (iGaming) gambling platform's promotion and the situation of specific pages, as well as analyzing competitors. Through traffic analysis, (iGaming) gambling platforms can discover growth channels and make adjustments to the gambling platform, which helps optimize promotion strategies.

How to Research Competitor Website Statistics, Audience, and Traffic Sources

When operating as an (iGaming) gambling platform, it is very necessary to understand the strategies and operating modes of your competitors. You need to know the measures they take to attract and retain customers so that you can develop more effective strategies. However, before we start analyzing the traffic and user behavior patterns of competitors' (iGaming) gambling platforms, we should first have an in-depth and comprehensive understanding of our own website. We need to know the strengths and weaknesses of our website in attracting and retaining users, as well as its performance in user experience and service. Only in this way can we better understand the strengths and weaknesses of our competitors and develop more targeted and effective strategies.

Website creation history and domain age

The history of a website has a significant impact on its ranking on the search engine results page. In fact, the history of a website and the age of the domain are both important factors that search engines consider when determining rankings. In this regard, there is a general view that the older the domain name, the more trust the search engine has in it. This is because, in general, older websites usually have richer content and a more stable user base. Therefore, this principle applies whether on Baidu or GOOGLE. So, if you are considering building a new website, or optimizing an existing one, then understand and consider these factors.

Index Page

The number of indexed pages is an important indicator of the size of a website. This number not only represents how big your website is but also reflects which search engine your website is mainly optimized for. For example, if a website has significantly more indexed pages on Google than on Yandex or Baidu, this may mean that the administrator of the website considered Google's user base more when optimizing the website. They may consider the needs and habits of Google users more in the process of designing and optimizing the website, so as to improve the ranking of the website in Google search results and attract more Google users to visit their website.

The number of pages on a website is not a guarantee of quality

Some website pages may reduce the user experience because they are not optimized, contain outdated information, or do not provide valuable content to users. As a webmaster, we should not only pursue the number of pages but also pursue high-quality content that can truly meet user needs and provide valuable information. Only in this way can we provide a better user experience and make visitors willing to return after browsing our website content. We should always put user experience first and continuously update website content to meet user needs so that our website can stand out from the crowd.

Web page loading speed

For web users, the loading speed of web pages is very important. If your website takes too long to load, users may get impatient and choose to close your website and look for other faster websites. Therefore, having a fast loading speed is undoubtedly the lifeline of any online business. This is especially important for businesses that rely on users' online activities, such as online gambling. In this case, users often need an instant response, so the speed of loading directly affects their gambling experience, which in turn affects your business. Therefore, in order to maintain user attention and loyalty, improving the loading speed of web pages is crucial.

User Analysis

The analysis of website traffic involves many different indicators. The analysis of these statistical indicators can give you a deep understanding of the various situations of website visitors, thus providing you with clear direction and telling you where you need to optimize and adjust.

By deeply analyzing the time and behavior of your website users, you can not only obtain user information about your website but also understand various information about the website, such as:

• Which channels drive the most traffic to your website: By understanding these channels, you can market and promote more effectively.
• Geographic location of users:This can help you understand which regions your users mainly come from so that you can carry out specific marketing and promotion activities for these regions.
• The device the user is browsing the web on: This can let you know if your website needs to be optimized for mobile devices to improve the user experience.
• Age and gender of users:This can help you understand your main user groups so that you can develop products and services that better meet their needs and preferences.
• The time of day when users are most active:  For example, what time of day, day of the week, and time of month. This can help you determine the best time to publish content and conduct promotional activities.
• Most viewed pages:This lets you know what content your users are most interested in, so you can provide more similar content to attract and retain users.

The concept of unique visitors

In website traffic analysis, there is a basic but important thing, that is, unique visitors. This "unique visitor" is actually each website visitor with a unique IP address. In a period of time, you can count how many unique visitors there are, so that you can know how many people visit your website during this period of time. If you happen to be the operator of a gambling website, you should take a look at these data about unique visitors.

• New User:A person or IP address that visits your website for the first time.
• Session:A session is when a website visitor views multiple pages during a visit. Generally speaking, the number of sessions is higher than the number of users, because the same user usually generates multiple sessions during a visit.
• Sessions per user: The number of times the same user returns to your site in a given period of time. The more sessions per user, the more value they are getting from your site.
• Pages per Session: The number of pages a user visits during one session.
• Session duration:The average time spent on the site.
• Unique Page Views:The number of times a web page is viewed by unique users.
• Time on Page:The amount of time spent on a specific page.
• Pages per Session: How many pages a user interacts with during a specific session.
• Average time on page: Measures the average time that users stay on a specific page.
• Bounce rate: A measure of website visitors who leave almost immediately after viewing a page. It is used to measure visitor satisfaction with your website content. If your website has a high bounce rate, it may be a sign that your website content is not properly optimized.

Traffic sources/channels

Take a look at the various traffic sources for your gaming platform or website so you can see how players find and click through to your site.

• Direct traffic:This type of traffic comes from friends who have bookmarked your website or typed the URL directly into the browser address bar. They usually visit your website frequently.
• Search traffic: If someone enters a keyword into a search engine like Google, Baidu, Yandex, etc., and then clicks on your website from the search results, this is called search traffic. If your website ranks high for a certain keyword, you are likely to have this kind of traffic.
• Referral traffic: This type of traffic comes from links on other websites, blogs, or social media platforms. Whenever someone clicks on these links, they are taken to your website.
• Advertising traffic: All traffic brought by online advertising activities is counted as advertising traffic, such as PPC ads, banner ads, etc. As long as someone clicks on these ads, they will be brought to your website.
• SMS/Email: This type of traffic comes from people who visit your website by clicking on a link in an email. They are usually subscribed to your newsletter or other email marketing campaigns. If you can send out valuable content regularly, you can attract more traffic from emails. The same is true for SMS traffic.

Analyze the competitive environment

After you have conducted an in-depth and comprehensive assessment of your gambling website and its audience traffic, the next step is to look at what your competitors are doing. Studying and analyzing the experience and practices of competitors can help us avoid making the same mistakes in future operations so that we can better grasp the dynamics of the industry and make us invincible in the competition. At the same time, it is also necessary to regularly study and analyze market share information, which is very helpful for us to position the market and adjust strategies. By deeply analyzing the websites of competitors, we can find out our own shortcomings and then improve the current marketing strategy to adapt to market changes and the needs of gambling players.

Why is competitor analysis important for SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a very important part of the online gambling industry, and analyzing your competitors' traffic is even more necessary. This is mainly to see what SEO strategies your competitors use, learn from their methods, and then find out how to surpass them. By comparing their websites, you can find out their SEO methods and see which methods are effective and which are not, so that you can develop a better website strategy.

The main purpose of SEO is to attract natural traffic to the website, and the best tool to understand the traffic of competitors is statistical data. Statistical data can help them more accurately determine whether various methods of attracting traffic are effective, providing an important reference for website optimization.

Using competitive SEO analysis to process real-time statistics is the most accurate method, which can help iGaming platforms determine which promotion methods are effective in specific categories, regions, and specific times. At the same time, a deep understanding of how search engines work can predict the possible results of various strategic solutions determined by analyzing competitors and seeing which methods have made them successful. In this way, a more targeted and effective SEO strategy can be developed based on this data and information.

How to Find Competitors?

When you are researching online gambling (iGaming) competitors, you can use tools such as SEO rankings, keywords, business categories, or product lists to find competitors. However, this may not be comprehensive enough. You have to dig deeper and explore their domain names, not just keywords. Why? Because domain names can provide you with a lot of valuable information and can more accurately reflect the information of competitors. Therefore, when you screen your competitors, you can refer to the following suggestions:

1. You need to organize and assign a researcher or team to search and identify your competitors.
2. Select the region you want to search in. For example, if your online gambling site is targeting Vietnam, you should not analyze the gambling markets in Canada, Ireland, or Thailand, as these regions may not fit your business needs.
3. You need to enter the search query of your target keyword in each group and note the top 10 websites that rank in the search results. This is very important to understand which websites are influential in your online gambling field.
4. Pay special attention to websites that frequently appear in the search results list. These websites are your main competitors. Make a preliminary list of competitors for subsequent analysis.
5. Evaluate the essential parameters of your chosen competitors and filter out the ones you deem unnecessary. This can help you understand your competitors better and identify their strengths and weaknesses.
6. Repeat this process until you have a shortlist of your competitors. You can then conduct an in-depth analysis to help you develop a more effective strategy.

Not all competitor websites will have the same structure and categories. In most cases, there will be one competitor per category. If your website already has traffic, use Ahrefs to find competitors by entering the desired domain in the search.

Analyze competitor websites

Once you’ve narrowed your focus to a few key competitors, you’ll need to start studying their websites in detail. A better understanding of their business models and strategies will enable you to compete with them more effectively.

How to Analyze Competitor Websites?

When conducting a competitive analysis of your website, you need to pay attention to the basic conditions and characteristics of your competitors, which may have a certain impact on your website traffic and results. Here are a few key areas to pay attention to:

• Site Type: Determine how similar your site is to your competitors’ sites. If you compare your site to completely different types of sites, the comparison may not be very meaningful.
• Domain Zones: Determine what domains your competitors are using and how many domains they have. Gain insight into their influence in the market by understanding their domain usage.
• Website Age: Find out how long your competitor’s website has been around. Older websites may have an advantage in search engines.
• Growth Trends: Study how fast your competitor sites are growing. New sites that are growing quickly can provide valuable information about how they became successful. This information can help you better understand market trends so you can develop more effective strategies.

If you have only a few (e.g. 3-5) of your competitor websites left, don’t rule them out anymore. You need to keep at least a few websites for analysis and comparison. Especially new websites that are growing rapidly and study their optimization techniques. On this basis, you will be able to identify leading competitors and conduct a more detailed analysis of various aspects of their SEO.

Technical equipment analysis

One of the first aspects to consider when analyzing a website is its loading speed. Fast loading times play a key role in user experience and can impact your website’s ranking in search engines.

The robots.txt file is an important tool for managing the indexing of your website content by search engine robots. The presence of a robots.txt file on your website lets you know which pages are hidden from search engines and how your website is structured.

Server response codes provide information about the status of a request when accessing a server. Analyzing these codes for your website can allow you to determine how well your website interacts with search engines and user queries. However, the presence of duplicate pages on your website can negatively impact its indexing and ranking in search engines.

At the same time, more and more users are using mobile devices, and there are three main types of mobile versions of websites.

• Adaptive designis a unique design concept that enables a website to adjust itself to provide the best user experience based on the resolution of the device it is being used on. This design approach is particularly suitable for various mobile devices, such as smartphones or tablets, because their screen sizes and resolutions vary.
• Some brands choose to create a dedicated mobilesite. The main difference between this type of site and the main site is its size, download speed, and its convenience and simplicity. Mobile sites are usually designed to be smaller and download faster to be easier to use on mobile devices.
• A mobile app is a program that you can download and install on your smartphone. These apps often replicate the brand name, visual design, and everything else of an online gambling platform, but they may offer fewer features. For example, some mobile apps may just be slot games and not include all the features of other gambling platforms.

External links

External links refer to links from other resources on the Internet to a specific website. They play a key role in improving the authority and credibility of a website. The more external links there are, the higher the website is likely to rank on the search engine results page (SERP), thereby attracting more user clicks and visits. However, it is far from enough to focus only on the number of links. The quality of the links is equally important, or even more important. A high-quality link, especially a link from an authoritative and well-known website, can convey higher trust and credibility, thus having a greater impact on improving the website's search ranking.

There are generally the following types of links:

Backlinks 

Backlinks are hyperlinks that point to a specific website. They are essential for search engine optimization (SEO). Backlinks are mainly divided into natural links and artificial links.

Natural linksare when users browse the Internet and find something good, such as a product, service, or content. If they think it is good, they will share it with friends, colleagues, or their fans. This kind of link is a genuine recommendation and is related to personal preference. Search engines like it very much. Because it is a spontaneous behavior of users, it proves the value of the website content to search engines, and improving the search ranking is just around the corner.

Artificial links are DIY links, which can be purchased or exchanged with other websites. This type of link does not consider the value of the content, but only whether it can improve the search engine ranking. Although artificial links can also improve the visibility of the website, search engines can generally see this type of link, so the value may be discounted.

SEO links, also known as paid links, are created and placed by experts to improve your website's search engine rankings. They can be either rented or permanent.

• Renting links means placing a link for a specific time and paying for it during that period. This method may be cheaper and allow you to quickly gain a large number of links, but they are often placed on sites that contain a lot of spam, which can negatively impact your site. Additionally, if payment is not received or the lease expires, the link may be removed, which can definitely affect your site's ranking.
• Permalinks are paid links that remain on the site permanently and are placed in articles or posts on quality websites. They are therefore considered more valuable because they have a natural flow of content and are placed on websites that search engines trust more.

When search engines process links from websites, they consider links from websites that are related or similar to your website's topic to be more valuable. The value of such a link is mainly based on its relevance to your website's topic. However, even if we know this relevance, the specific details of this algorithm are still unknown, which makes it complicated to understand and use this algorithm. If a link comes from a website with a similar topic to your website, then the search engine will consider this link more natural and therefore give it a higher value. (For example, if your website is about the gambling industry, then a link from a computer game or other gambling-related website will be considered a better match for your website content and therefore be considered to have a higher value).

Google's algorithm is constantly improving, and it is very familiar with identifying purchased or low-quality links. The algorithm analyzes factors such as anchor text, link context, and how the link is placed to determine whether it is natural. It also considers factors such as the dynamics of link quality growth, and the quality and authority of the website to identify unnatural links. It is also generally believed that natural links can improve the ranking of search pages more than artificial links.

What is an anchor link?

After clicking on the link, the user is directed to another page. Analyze which anchor texts and phrases competitors are using to drive traffic to their websites. Researching, understanding, and utilizing these links is essential for our betting platform and website optimization.

In the web environment, we can see many different types of anchor links. Specifically, there are the following:

• Active and inactive links: Active links are links that users can click directly and be taken to the linked website, allowing users to quickly and easily access the target website. In contrast, inactive links are URL text that must be copied and pasted. They do not have the function of being directly clicked. Users need to manually copy these links and paste them into the address bar of the browser to access them.
• Direct vs. Indirect Links: Direct links are similar to active links in that they take users directly to the linked website by clicking on them, allowing users to reach the target website without going through any intermediate steps. Indirect links, on the other hand, first lead users to a redirect, usually taking them to an introduction or advertising page, and then redirecting them to the target website from there.
• Graphic links: Graphic links are links formed by pictures or other visual elements. They combine visual elements and link functions. When users click on these visual elements, they will take users to a certain website. This type of link is usually more attractive in terms of visual design and user experience, which can effectively attract users' attention and guide them to visit the target website.

Why is website content important for a website?

The key to SEO is the keywords and phrases that users type into the search engines. Using these keywords in your content will give search engines a more accurate and direct understanding of your webpage content, which will improve the ranking of your webpage in the search results. In addition, if your content is unique and personalized, it will attract the attention of search engines because it is different from other content on the Internet and may be ranked higher in the search engine rankings. In order to meet the requirements of search engines, content should be informative and relevant, and also consider the interests and needs of your target audience. The main goal of search engines is to provide users with the most relevant and useful search results.

The content should also be organized and easy to read. By using formatting elements such as tables, lists, and headings, the content structure will become clearer, which will improve the user experience. This optimized content structure can improve user behavior, such as keeping users on your page longer and reducing the likelihood of them leaving. In addition, if you add multimedia elements such as pictures and videos to your content, it will be more attractive and easier for people to understand your content. By optimizing pictures and using relevant media, you can further improve SEO results.

A high-quality, well-optimized text is the key to successful SEO promotion. Because it not only meets the technical requirements of search engines but also improves the browsing experience of users, making them more willing to stay and interact on your website. Therefore, we should regard the creation of high-quality, well-optimized content as an important part of SEO work.

Tools and services for analyzing online gambling platforms and websites

There are many analysis tools on the Internet, both free and paid. TC-Gaming lists some commonly used website analysis tools for you:

Similarweb:Provides traffic data, traffic sources, audience demographics, and other important metrics for your site, giving us insight into your site’s performance and user behavior.

Semrush: Provides extensive keyword analysis features, organic and paid traffic estimates, and competitor research tools. These features allow us to fully understand our website's performance in search engines, as well as our competitors' strategies.

Serpstat: Helps with keyword analysis, organic traffic estimation, and tracking search engine ranking positions to analyze our SEO performance. This tool can help us optimize our SEO strategy to improve our search engine rankings.

Ahrefs: In addition to providing data about link building, it also provides data about organic search, content analysis, and other aspects of SEO. This tool can help us better understand our link-building strategy and help us optimize our SEO strategy.

Majestic: Provides metrics about links, indexed pages, and other parameters to help us analyze our SEO performance. This tool can help us better understand our link strategy and how our pages perform in search engines.

Whois: A tool that provides information about domain name holders, registration information, and other relevant data. This tool can help us obtain information about our competitors so that we can better understand their strategies.

Seogadget: Analyze various SEO metrics and improve our website visibility in search engines. This tool can help us optimize our SEO strategy to improve our search engine rankings.

Conclusion:

After carefully analyzing your competitors’ websites, you can gain valuable information from them to help you fine-tune and improve your own website. Dig into their strategies and find out where they fall short so that you can fill those gaps. Find out if they have kept up with recent technological advancements and industry changes, and continue to optimize your website according to current gambling market trends to drive more traffic to your gambling platform.

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