TRAFFIC
Content
Design
The new design of the site encouraged
more content on the pages; the less content
the site had, the less appealing it looked.
An example would be the casino reviews.
Rather than leaving it open to just blocks of
paragraphs without titles, the content now
has dedicated sections. Any time a casino
review is now being produced, it makes it
difficult to have a review that is too thin on
content, where the previous site was full
of thin content.
Since the new USP of the site was to
focus on casino bonuses, this is another
aspect of content where more bonuses
create more content throughout the site.
The bonuses themselves act as more
dynamic content that can keep the review
pages, homepage and bonus pages more
up-to-date. So, if fresh content is important,
then the backend and design encourage all
pages to be constantly updated.
The design was the main focus behind the
changes to the site, starting with the USP
and building out from there. As much as
USP is important, so is conversion and
it helps to have previous analytics data
to know what the users were doing; or
rather, not doing. For a site that has more
information and more directions to offer
players, good navigation is important, so in
comes User Interface/User Experience (UI/
UX) design. The important pages of the
site are the homepage, casino review page,
blog posts and bonus listings. Perhaps the
toughest part of the design work I carried
out was trying to make the site feature-rich,
providing good value but not having too
many features to the point where things
get cluttered. Since the site is about casino
bonuses, this is what users might expect
to find when they are on the site, so this
is what they can find no matter what page
they are in.
phones at all. In the last three months of
the original site, the traffic was nine percent
mobile with a bounce rate of 72.5 percent,
an average of 1.7 pages per visit, and an
average time on site at one minute 10
seconds, which is fairly short, and half the
time users spend on the desktop version.
The new site currently has the same
percentage of traffic, a lower bounce rate
of 58 percent, time on site slightly higher
at one minute 22 seconds, with 2.29 pages
per visit. The new design is responsive so
at least mobile users have an easier time
viewing and reading the content, and
navigating to other pages. There is still
more work to do
in terms of targeting mobile phone
users over tablets, but at least employing
responsive design is the first step towards
converting the traffic.
responsive design
Social media
Mobile traffic is probably more important
for a sportsbetting portal than a casino
portal, but it is still traffic nonetheless, and
you want to make sure you are converting
it. The old site wasn’t formatted for mobile
Some elements of social media are
incorporated into the site but more has to
be done to make it easier for users to share
more pages. The plan for social media is to
use it as a means to acquire followers, as
rich snippets
Some rich snippets were previously
integrated into the site, but on a minor
level. What has changed are Google Plus
profiles for the authors of the articles, fivestar rating for the casinos and video rich
snippets which are currently in production.
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iGB Affiliate FEBRUARY/MARCH 2014