TRAFFIC
and when you are trusted, you are able to
rank with minimal link building. Yes, I know
it sounds bizarre (ranking without links) but
we have several clients/own sites which are
absolutely kicking it in the rankings because
they follow this model around high quality
links and great engagement.
●●Search Traffic Landscape
Firstly, I’ve done my best to pick out
the top phrases which are most relevant to
each sector. It’s easy for instance to pick a
random phrase like “options”, but people
aren’t looking for “binary options” trading
solutions when doing that search.
Secondly, I’ve added up the search
volumes for each of the 53 territories and
done the same for cost per click by volume
(see Figure 1).
Analysis
Sports betting is high traffic and medium
revenue, casino is medium traffic and
higher revenue. Forex is quite interesting,
as whilst being relatively small compared
to casino and sports betting, it’s sizeable
enough to be fairly lucrative. Binary
options, however, is just thin…
Now let’s see which domains do well in
forex and binary (please bear in mind that
the figures used are the cost-per-click by
volume numbers).
Immediately, you can see from Figure
2 how forex.com dominates. Wikipedia is
close behind, and then there’s everybody
else. Binary is just very thin, with
Opteck.com being the only operator with
a decent amount of traffic, and even then
it’s small compared to what you get in
forex. For comparison, the same data
has been provided for sports betting and
casino. Notice how no one site dominates.
Having no dominant site is a
characteristic of really competitive
verticals, where there is so much effort
put into ranking that no one site tends to
rule everything, because different sites
Figure 1: Search volumes and CPC for top phrases across 53 territories
600,000
6,000,000
500,000
5,000,000
400,000
4,000,000
300,000
3,000,000
200,000
2,000,000
100,000
1,000,000
0
Betting
Vol
Casino
Forex
Binary Options
0
CPC x Vol
Figure 2: Domain market share
Forex
% Share
Binary
% Share
forex.com
26.80%
wikipedia.org
27.16%
wikipedia.org
12.16%
opteck.com
16.26%
fxcm.com
5.99%
investopedia.com
12.26%
forex.fi
4.85%
top10binary.net
9.80%
youtube.com
4.54%
forbes.com
9.11%
investopedia.com
4.35%
sec.gov
9.11%
xe.com
2.73%
binaryoptionsdemo.com
2.11%
forexbank.dk
2.15%
bancdebinary.com
1.71%
dailyfx.com
1.71%
binaryoptionsedge.com
1.41%
ig.com
1.60%
nadex.com
1.37%
Sports betting
% Share
Casino
% Share
paddypower.com
11%
nbso.ca
6%
williamhill.com
10%
bovada.lv
6%
bet365.com
9%
goldennuggetcasino.com
6%
sportsbet.com.au
5%
sunnyplayer.com
6%
betway.com
5%
gsn.com
5%
wikipedia.org
4%
paddypower.com
5%
betfair.com
4%
wikipedia.org
5%
ladbrokes.com.au
3%
casinoeuro.com
4%
sportsinteraction.com
3%
williamhill.com
3%
skybet.com
3%
spinpalace.com
3%
iGB Affiliate Issue 52 AUG/SEP 2015
21