SEO Tracker: Gala and Wink rise to the top of the bingo market as Mecca falls away

When we last looked at the UK bingo search market, back in June of this year, it was Mecca Bingo that was dominating the market – and by some considerable margin. But just over four months on, the story is somewhat different. So, what has gone on?

Firstly, lets go back to June 2019 and look at the state of the search results for the biggest 319 keywords in the UK market.

Back then, Mecca Bingo was generating a search visibility of 24,120, way ahead of Wink Bingo and Gala Bingo, which were the next most visible brands with visibilities of 17,789 and 17,402 respectively.

But back in our June column, we noted that the brand had both an erratic set of search rankings, and a heavy reliance on a small number of high-volume keyword terms. More than 90.5% of the brand’s traffic was coming from the keyword term “bingo” and despite being the most visible brand overall, it’s average ranking was the third lowest among the top 10 brands.

Mecca Bingo ranked for just 56% of the keywords in our sample and many of these were relatively low rankings. The brand held position one rankings for four keyword terms (“bingo”, “how to play bingo”, “bingo time” and “bingo rooms”), which was much lower than its competitors. By comparison, Gala Bingo held 14 position one rankings, Wink Bingo 35 and the affiliate site WhichBingo had 114 position one rankings.

Fast forward to October 2019

Four months on, and Mecca Bingo has slid from first to fourth position in the market, while both Gala Bingo and Wink Bingo have grown to the top of the search results.

Gala Bingo now ranks in the coveted position one for the keyword “bingo” but where Mecca Bingo relied on this term for over 90% of its organic search traffic, the keyword provides just 77% of Gala Bingo’s 28,260 clicks, making the brand much less exposed to ranking changes in the future.

Wink Bingo, with a visibility of 28,238, is only marginally behind Gala Bingo and is even less reliant on the keyword “bingo” – just 39.6% of its traffic comes from its position two ranking for that term. It does however generate traffic from across the keyword set. The brand has 342 rankings across our keyword set (including multiple rankings for some keywords) but it is the strength of these rankings that is also notable. Wink Bingo holds 95 position one rankings and 243 rankings in the top 10 – no other brand in the market has more position one or top 10 rankings.

So, what has gone wrong for Mecca Bingo?

The principle reason for Mecca Bingo’s fall is the loss of that position one ranking for the term “bingo” which, as we noted back then, accounted for over 90% of its organic non-brand search traffic.

The brand has slid to position three for that term and, while it represents a drop of just two places on the search results page, it represents a loss of just under 13,200 clicks from that keyword alone.

We commented at the time that while it is understandable that brands focus their efforts on those high-volume keyword terms, particularly in a market like bingo where one keyword is disproportionately prominent, it is an approach that has risks. In competitive and often scrutinised search markets, brands need to mitigate the risk of search ranking changes by diversifying their keyword rankings. Not only is it important to ensure that traffic isn’t overly impacted by even a small change, it is an approach that is more reflective of a natural, and therefore trusted, SEO strategy.

Wink Bingo has shown that a sustainable and diverse keyword strategy can reap the awards. While the difference between first and second position for the keyword “bingo” is around 10,600 in terms of visibility, the difference between Wink Bingo and Gala Bingo is negligible. Wink has managed to make up that deficit by driving traffic across the keyword set and, in doing so, de-risked its SEO strategy for the long-term.