How we recovered Sports Betting website traffic drop for 1 year

We started by building a comprehensive strategy to restore traffic to the website and remove the Google penalty.

In this plan we set main goals:

• To remove the algorithmic Google penalty
• To improve Website Performance
• To improve the quality of the website
• To increase the organic traffic to the site

Then we proceeded to achieve these goals.

We have created a constant cycle of monthly tasks to create complete control over the process:

• Technical audit / mindmap /
• Server .log file analysis
• Internal Link Analysis
• Render analysis
• Site redesign
• Speed optimization

We have also created our own tool for analyzing and evaluating the strength of internal links.

Comprehensive content audit

1. We conducted a comprehensive survey and analysis of keywords, phrases and questions used by potential customers. All phrases were organized into main semantic cores and sub-cores.
2. We used these semantic cores and sub-cores and created a document about the structure of the current content of the website.
3. As a result: the current content has been expanded and some additional sections have been added.
4. The main part here are Bonuses and Mobile applications. During the research process, we found that bonuses are very popular and attractive to the user, mobile applications too, so we decided to make a special section of the website enriched with information – how to use bonuses, how to install mobile applications, what features they have, etc.
5. We found many orphaned pages with poor or zero content. They have been combined or removed and their addresses redirected accordingly.
6. The content of almost ⅔ of the pages has been expanded and enriched.
7. All pages were semantically optimized one by one.
8. The entire internal link structure was redesigned with natural anchors realized between the pages.
9. 100 bookmaker reviews with over 5,000 words of content based on Content Marketing Strategy were written.
10. More than 100 bookmaker reviews of more than 3,000 words have been written.
11. Over 50 betting guides with over 3000 words based on the strategy have been prepared.
12. Unique content for each page
13. Predictions for each football match are prepared every day
14. Use interactive elements on each page created specifically for the purpose
15. Custom design for each page according to the bookmaker.
16. Summaries and ratings added.

Link profile analysis

1. User-generated spam – About 500 spam comments posted on the website’s pages have been removed.
2. Manipulative structured data, tagged content invisible to users, and in violation of Google’s guidelines have been removed.
3. Over 1,500 unnatural inbound links have been disabled – an aggressive link-building tactic, such as buying link or link schemes. The website was the victim of a massive Black Hat attack
4. 10 links of unnatural origin have been removed
5. 725 pure spam links were also disabled – links from sites with huge amounts of scrapped content, meaningless content, or repeated violations of Google’s guidelines.
6. 20 links from websites without design or poorly designed were also disabled.
7. 15 directory links have also been removed.
8. About 120 links from malicious pages have been submitted to Google Disavow

Technical improvements

1. Technical audit / mindmap /
2. Reduced 1,022 errors to 3 errors
3. FCP – from 2.9 s to 1.8 s
   FID – from 249 ms to 34 ms
   Speed index – from 3.1 s to 1.0 s
   Time to Interactive – from 5.2 s to 1.1 s
   First Meanningful Paint – from 3.5 s to 0.9 s
   First CPU Idle – from 3.9 s to 0.9 s
4. 1257 duplicate titles have been corrected
   12,152 broken internal links were fixed

As an effect we received the following:

• Clear link profile
• Other high-authority websites in the link profile.
• Good ratio between different anchor phrases.
• A much better established brand.

The effect of the planned and implemented measures led to this result:

• From 27K to 238K clicks
• From 2.25M to 22.3M impressions
• From 22.4 to 12.7 average position

406.22% more users
403.65% more sessions
529.33% fulfillment of goals
From 1,333 to 3,152 registrations

After implementing our content marketing strategy and semantic plan, our client’s site achieved Featured Snippet results:

Traffic trend from the beginning of the project until January 2020:

Keywords trend from the beginning of the project to January 2020:

Our entrusted project is in a highly competitive niche, the site is large and this required in-depth analysis and large-scale measures to improve its traffic, improve its quality and restore it after the algorithmic Google penalty. We are glad that one year of serious work gave its significant results and led to a serious growth in all parameters, subject of this case study.