SEO Tracker: Closely fought market leaders in growing online bingo market
In this month's SEO Tracker, Stickyeyes analyses search trends for online bingo
Having lost the lead to Gala Bingo in the online bingo market when we last analysed the search results back in October, Mecca Bingo has started the fightback.
But as the igaming sector continues to see increased interest as a result of the lockdown, the story pre-lockdown was of a buoyant bingo market that was already seeing increased levels of interest and competition.
Mecca and Gala battle for leadership, leaving rival operators trailing
There is little to split the two leading operators in the market in May 2020, with both Mecca Bingo and Gala Bingo competing aggressively for traffic.
There are fewer than 900 clicks between the two brands, with Gala Bingo just edging its rival with a visibility of 28,929, compared to Mecca Bingo’s 28,001 from the 319 biggest non-brand keywords in the online bingo sector.
Gala Bingo edges its rival for the number one position for the keyword “bingo”, the biggest keyword in the market, which accounts for 75.5% of its organic non-brand traffic. Mecca Bingo competes on the basis of holding rankings for more of the keyword set and by having more top three rankings – 57 to Gala Bingo’s 40.
But the gap between the leading two operators and their competitors is striking. While the affiliate site WhichBingo competes on many terms to be the third most-visible brand, Mecca Bingo’s visibility from organic non-brand search is almost 3.7 times that of the third most-visible operator (and the fourth most-visible brand overall), Foxy Bingo.
Wink Bingo loses ground with declining visibility
The May 2020 rankings represent a marked difference from those when we looked at the bingo market in October 2019.
Back then, Mecca Bingo still led the way but this time it was Wink Bingo that was chasing the brand down.
When we look at ranking data from Searchmetrics, we see a notable downward trend in Wink Bingo’s organic visibility. From mid-October, the brand’s visibility has dropped by more than 45%, according to the ranking monitoring tool.
Looking more closely at the decline, it appears that the brand has dropped position significantly on some key traffic-driving terms.
The brand has fallen off the first page from position five for the term “bingo” to position 13, reducing the traffic from that term alone by 4,841, but has also lost a number of previously held number one rankings.
The site has fallen from position one for terms such as “bingo sites” (position five), “bingo games” (nine), “free bingo” (six) “free bingo no deposit” (two) and “bingo free” (five). The drops on these five keyword terms alone contribute to a loss of 7,510 clicks combined.
Bingo benefits from lockdown, but market was showing growth before Covid-19
Like much of the igaming sector, Google search interest in online bingo has shown a sharp increase during the Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdown that has been imposed on the UK. Bingo search interest is at its highest level since on record, according to Google Trends (data going back to January 2004).
What is interesting is that interest in bingo search terms dipped in the two weeks immediately before the UK was placed into lockdown, only to rise sharply following the announcement of ‘stay at home’ instructions issued by the UK government on 23 March. While dips in March are typical for the bingo sector, the scale of the dip was larger than usual.
But the bingo market was actually experiencing significant growth in search interest prior to the Covid-19 outbreak. From the middle of 2018, the topic of bingo has seen significantly higher levels of interest in the UK.
So, while the reality of the UK being largely house bound will undoubtedly create a seasonal peak, that comes against a backdrop of higher engagement with bingo generally. The level that the market returns to as and when lockdown measures are eased remains to be seen but expect the online bingo market to remain a buoyant one.