Success Story / House of fun
A Social Gaming SEO Case Study: Ranking a High-Intent 100k Volume Keyword in the Top 3 for a U.S. Company
1100 Keywords
Ranked in 1st-3rd places
“Free Slots”
Search term ranked on 1st page with a monthly search volume of 100K+
+40K
Overall monthly organic traffic increase
About House of Fun
House of Fun is one of the leading brands in the U.S. for social gaming, specifically free casino slots. It is a part of Playtika, one of the most recognized names in the gaming industry, with 27 million monthly users across their collective of online games in social networks, mobile apps and standalone websites.
Why House of Fun Approached eTraffic
House of Fun is one of the leading brands of Playtika, a global powerhouse of social gaming. We’ve been working with Playtika since 2018, initially on their Slotomania brand.
Since we delivered strong results for Slotomania, in 2019 Paytika offered us to take over the SEO for some other brands – including their slot machine brand, House of Fun.
A different agency was doing SEO for House of Fun, but wasn’t able to capture the top rankings that House of Fun was hoping for in the social slots space, and organic traffic wasn’t pouring in as expected.
In light of our strong performance with Slotomania, Playtika entrusted us with delivering the same results for House of Fun.
The Challenge of the Free Games Market
The online games market – also referred to as social gaming – is populated by big brands with even bigger companies behind them. Especially in the U.S., it is a very crowded market, though one that attracts millions of players.
Within the online gaming market there’s a strong segment of social gaming – a segment that started in the social networks and expanded outwards to the larger online space.
Social games are highly attractive since they have an extra added value – they incorporate social features into the games (features that are ‘borrowed’ from social networks) and allow users a much richer experience than just player-to-screen interaction.
A social casino, such as House of Fun, is a social game which allows players to play casino-based games. Although inspired by real money casino games, gambling in a virtual currency means that there is no chance of actual loss or gain.
Because these online slot machine games attract millions of players across the world, big companies spend a lot of money on marketing.
Competing with those funds-rich companies is a serious challenge, though one that we are always happy to accept.
eTraffic have been a long time partner of ours, and we have steadily increased our scope of activity with them. They don’t bombard us with endless reports, instead, they deliver very good results across all Playtika brands that they handle
Sagi Dekel, Group Manager – Marketing, Playtika
The Gaming SEO Strategy that eTraffic Tailored for House of Fun
After conducting keyword research, ranking analysis of the main keywords and competitors’ sites and referring domains mapping, we were ready to tackle this challenge, armed with comprehensive data.
We see SEO as an almost scientific process, and what’s science without data?
The results of our research told us one thing in a very loud voice – the focus of the SEO strategy applied until this point for House of Fun was not focused on the best keywords. Instead, it targeted low-intent keywords.
Our research indicated that the House of Fun website was ‘mature’ enough to target the more lucrative high-intent keywords and search terms, so we went with that strategy at full force.
Utilizing our in-house analytics platform, we devised a gradual organic exposure strategy that went from long tail keywords to high-volume keywords.
How We Integrated Organic Website Exposure Into the Overall Social Gaming Marketing Strategy
The arching online marketing strategy that House of Fun wanted to pursue was to strengthen their dot-com asset – the main website – as opposed to their mobile applications available in Google Play and the AppStore.
To achieve that we first turned to content.
The site was not fully optimized regarding content, which is a sore point when you want to establish a strong organic presence. Based on our keyword research, and together with the brand team of House of Fun, we wrote from scratch engaging and informative content for the website.
Content that was both SEO-driven and followed the brand’s tone of voice.
We put up dedicated landing pages – rich in content – for each of the keyword clusters we identified, and created a supportive site architecture based on complex internal linking.
Results of Our SEO Gaming Campaign for House of Fun
KEYWORD RANKING
We were able to capture top rankings for a sizable amount of high-intent, high-volume keywords.
Our pride and joy keyword is “free slots” – with over 100k searches per month – that we ranked on the first page of search results.
More than 1,100 keywords ranked between 1st and 3rd place of organic search results in the U.S. AND more than 3,000 keywords on the first page of search results.
ORGANIC TRAFFIC
More than 50k of organic traffic per month generated to the House of Fun website.
About eTraffic, an SEO Success Company
eTraffic is an online marketing agency focused on organic exposure.
Based in Tel Aviv, it has been serving leading companies as well as aspiring startups in various industries since it opened its doors in 2010.
Our proven track record demonstrates unique capabilities in gaining organic exposure for online assets through the utilization of our in-house analytics and monitoring platform combined with extensive experience in SEO best practices.
We are uniquely situated in the U.S. social gaming market having worked with multiple companies in one of the most competitive industries for SEO.