iGB Affiliate 43 Feb/March 2014 | Page 21

TRAFFIC SEO, DESIGN AND CONVERSION CASE STUDY CASINOBONUSESTODAY.COM SEO consultant and affiliate coach, John Wright, runs the rule over the rebranded casino affiliate site, CasinoBonusesToday.com, to see how changes to the site have impacted its SEO, design and conversion. CASinoBonUSEStoDAY.CoM was launched on October 31, 2013, and was rebranded and redesigned from the previous casino portal, grem.net, which launched in 2010. The changes to the site were fairly drastic but were done for many reasons which cover SEO, design and conversion. The site wasn’t performing up to expectations and with the changes to Google’s search engine, it became clear a re-work of the site was necessary to give it a better chance of success. The original idea of the casino portal was to have it as a generic casino site that covered many aspects of online casinos; you could call it a casino guide for starters, which there are definitely hundreds of in existence. For a site like this to be successful and compete, it has to be very good and for this reason, I recommend that most new webmasters focus more on niche topics as a means of getting started and having some type of short-term success in gaining search traffic. So, let’s dig deeper into the work that went into the new portal and the reasons behind the decisions to change things. SEo Domain switch Switching from an old domain to a new one was, perhaps, one of the tougher decisi