TRAFFIC
WHY DO BINGO AFFILIATES
RANK SO BADLY ON GOOGLE?
Bingo affiliate sites occupy just 32% of all generic organic search results but refocusing on branded
terms isn’t the answer, argues Phil Blackwell of Lindar, who analyses the data to find out what’s
happening and how affiliates can fight back.
THERE’S AN AVERAGE OF 90,500
SEARCHES for the keyword ‘bingo’
in the UK each month. That single
keyword is more popular with players
than ‘bingo sites’, ‘online bingo’,
‘bingo games’ and ‘new bingo sites’
combined (57,800).
Why is this relevant? Because not
one affiliate site ranks within the first
100 organic results. The SERPs are
dominated by operators.
In his recent article, ‘The Great
Brand Phrase Goldmine’ (iGB Affiliate
issue 61), Nick Garner talks about the
need for affiliates to target branded
keywords as “operators are increasingly
dominating generic phrases”.
I can’t help feeling that this is a defeatist
approach. My own experience of organic
click-through rates to affiliate sites from
branded search terms suggests the branded
opportunity is limited at best and inefficient
at worst.
Back in December 2015, I used traffic
data from Google Search Console to plot
a branded click-through rate curve for one
of our affiliate sites. It revealed that 94%
of branded keyword traffic went to position
one (usually the operator in question)
and PPC adverts.
Can affiliates really compensate for the
loss of exposure to 90,500+ generic searches
with just 6% of branded search traffic?
And what’s more, why should we have to?
To discover just how bad the generic
keyword situation is now, in May 2017
I examined the top 100 organic results of
20 popular bingo search terms in the UK.
Our process
Using Google Keyword Planner,
I compiled a list of sample keywords
consisting of the highest volume generic
bingo phrases and their lower volume
direct variants. I defined these as ‘pure
generics’ and ‘modified generics’.
Pure generic keywords – a pure,
usually singular, search phrase with
objective general intent, often very high
volume, e.g. ‘free bingo’, ‘online bingo’.
Modified generic keywords – variants
of the clean generic keywords, usually
pluralised and containing modifying
terms that narrow the user intent, such
as ‘best’, ‘new’ and ‘sites’.
The keywords were then uploaded
into AWR Cloud and organic ranking
reports for Google UK on desktop and
mobile were requested.
The resulting data was then sorted,
“ My own experience of organic click-through rates
to affiliate sites from branded search terms suggests
the branded opportunity is limited at best and
inefficient at worst”
filtered and analysed to provide the
insights that follow.
The keywords
Here is the full list of keywords studied,
along with average monthly search volume
in brackets. Pure generic keywords are
defined in bold.
● online bingo (12,100)
● bingo UK (720)
● bingo online (4,400)
● online bingo (12,100)
● bingo games (18,100)
● bingo sites (22,200)
● online bingo sites (1,600)
● new bingo sites (5,400)
● best bingo (720)
● best online bingo (720)
● best bingo sites (4,400)
● free bingo sites (2,400)
● free bingo (14,800)
● free bingo games (9,900)
● no deposit bingo (9,900)
● free bingo no deposit (8,800)
● no deposit bingo sites (1,900)
● mobile bingo (720)
● bingo mobile (90)
● mobile bingo sites (590)
The results
Affiliate sites occupy just 32% of all
generic organic search results
Of the 2,000 ranking positions analysed
for all generic bingo keywords, just 32%
were occupied by affiliate sites, compared
with 63% by operators.
iGB Affiliate Issue 63 JUN/JUL 2017
9