Sporticos.com website presents football statistics, as well as the best types of results found on the internet in an accessible and attractive way. The website is visited by more than a million users every month, generating over 2 million visits. It is visited by representatives of all countries of the world and is most popular among users from Western Europe, Africa, and South America.
Our cooperation aimed to increase the visibility, search results, traffic, and revenues of the English version of Sporticos, making use of organic traffic.
We’ve conducted a data-driven SEO analysis using our own unique technology solution WhiteDog. Our tool analyzed a set of 78 155 keywords prepared by the client. The analysis included both the service itself and the verification of the position and placement of respective competition for the presented list of phrases. We considered the English-language version of the website and also the United Kingdom as the location.
Jakub Drozd, CEO of Sporticos
With the support of Whites, we have finally focused on a precisely segmented section. By very specific numbers, they showed us where we are, where our competitors are, and where we should focus in terms of growth.
The client defined the set of phrases. It included the following types of queries:
We have studied the frequency of occurrence of particular services in the TOP 30, TOP 10, and TOP 1 results.
Sofascore, Sporticos and Transfermarket were among the most frequently visited websites in the examined list.
When we checked only the TOP 10 results, it turned out that Transfermarket dropped in the ranking of websites from the 3rd place to the 12th place. It shows that this site has its indexed content responding to many phrases, but very rarely breaks through to the top 10 queries.
In the case of the first position in the search engine, the competition was limited to 2 players — Sofascore.com and Sporticos.com. For a better illustration of these results, let’s see a chart of positions for Sporticos.com and Sofascore.com
The data suggest that Sporticos is a leading service for defined positions, and the only player who’s still ahead is Sofascore. Also, Sporticos takes first place in 1 out of 3 cases. At the same time, the monthly number of organic visits from the UK did not exceed 70 thousand.
Do we misjudge the potential of the popularity of this category in the search engine?
Quick verification with external tools (Ahrefs & SimiliarWeb) showed that Sofascore generates about 20 times more traffic from the search engine than Sporticos (on the British market). Of course, our client’s competitor was also gaining traffic for thousands of phrases outside of our analysis, which was because it covers a wide range of sports. However, we decided to look again at the phrases from our list.
We decided to divide the phrases into different categories. We were mostly interested in two groups of phrases (one containing the word prediction and the other live stream). Here is the distribution of positions for the most popular websites:
The schedules presented above indicate that Sofascore is the leader in live streaming phrases, and sporticos.com is the leader in prediction phrases.
Phrases containing live stream are more often searched, as well as have greater business potential. (Explanation: one of the conversion points is an offer, where creating an account with a bookmaker gives the possibility to legally watch an online streaming of selected soccer matches).
We took a closer look at the results of the phrases which included live streaming.
Here we made further hypotheses and assumptions:
In our analysis, we paid a lot of attention to the distribution of the tag to the first factors. In the beginning, we checked how many times the words from our pool (live, stream, live streaming, streaming, watch, online, video) appear.
The chart shows that the highest positions contain an average of 2 or more words, and in the case of further positions, this frequency decreases. Sporticos is more like a service from position 11-20 than a top 3.
In the case of live, almost all services have the word live in the first place of the Title tag. (over 99%).
In the case of stream, the frequency of occurrence in the Title is lower, and the differentiation is mainly for the first position (50% of the results) compared to the lower positions (about 20%).
It’s worth noticing that not all the phrases from our list differentiated the results, e.g., the occurrence of the word online did not differentiate the results.
One of the SEO rules says that the greater the distance between a word and the beginning of Title, the less meaning it has. How did this apply to our analysis?
The chart for all the results shows that the closer the word is to the beginning of the title, the greater the chance of it appearing in the results. However, the differences are not significant. In the case of Sporticos, this correlation is the opposite and is because our client’s service more often reached the top positions for longer phases (from the long tail of the query).
As you can see, in the first position, there were on average shorter results (12 words) than on the other positions (16-17 words).
According to our hypothesis, the co-existence of related keywords can have a positive impact on the main phrase on search engine rankings. Therefore, we analyzed for phrases containing live stream or other keywords (watch, online, video, live streaming, live, streaming, streaming).
We can see that for top positions, the occurrence of keywords is much more frequent. In the case of Sporticos, there are significantly fewer of these words.
And what was the frequency distribution of the most important words for this group, i.e. live and stream?
The graphs show that in both cases, more frequent use of keywords took place in the case of the highest positions in search results. In the case of the median, TOP 1 values for Sporticos were above for live and below for stream.
Based on the analyses, we created a set of recommendations for optimizing Sporticos for phrases containing live stream, e.g.:
The changes were implemented for all language versions on 28 April 2019. The effects exceeded our expectations – precise changes gave us the effect we had hoped for – and the website improved its position in the most important business category of phrases, thanks to which we were able to significantly increase the value of organic traffic.
Legend:
blue line – May 1, 2019 – May 31, 2019
red line – Mar 31, 2019 – Apr 30, 2019
Legend:
blue line – Apr/May 2019
red line – Apr/May 2018
Jakub Drozd, CEO of Sporticos
In our prior SEO activities, we wanted to cover too many threads at once, which unfortunately resulted in scores below our expectations.With Whites, we set the playing field carefully and focused our efforts exactly there. After just a few days, the results showed that the shot was accurate.
The presented effects are just the first positive signals. The definitive conclusions can only be drawn based on a longer period. The analyzed data inspired us to engage in further SEO activities aimed at long-term strengthening of the phrases which contain live stream. We will be implementing them successively in the upcoming months.