Case studies · 3 min read
Google is testing this site for “igaming seo”. Here is the Search Console data
Impressions went from 211 to 1,138 in a week. Most of the new ones came from the head term. Here is what the data shows.
Last week, Google started showing this site for “igaming seo”. Not on page one, and not for long stretches, but the jump in the data is hard to miss. In the week of 2 November, the site got 1,138 impressions in Google Search. The week before, it got 211.
I run SEO for iGaming companies, and I tell clients to read the first months of Search Console data as Google testing the site, not as a verdict. So here is my own data, with the same reading applied.
What changed in one week
Almost all of the new impressions went to three pages. The homepage went from 39 impressions to 388. The articles page went from 31 to 299. The directory went from 5 impressions on 2 queries to 222 impressions on 29 queries, many of them agency and consultant searches like “igaming seo agency”.
| Page | Week of 26 Oct | Week of 2 Nov |
|---|---|---|
| Homepage | 39 | 388 |
| Articles | 31 | 299 |
| Directory | 5 | 222 |
Impressions in Google Search, from Search Console, read on 11 November 2026.
The query behind most of it is “igaming seo”. Over the last four weeks it brought 463 impressions at an average position of 17.8. That is page two. Ahrefs puts the term at about 1,600 searches a month in the US with a keyword difficulty of 11, so it is a small term by casino standards and a big one for a site that is a few months old.
Why I read this as a test
The average position for the whole site moved from 35.4 to 29.0 in the same week. Clicks went from 3 to 20. Those are small numbers, and I would not build a strategy on one week of them. What matters is the pattern. Google is trying the site on a broader, more competitive query and watching what searchers do with it.
I have seen this pattern on client sites many times. Impressions jump on a head term, the position sits on page two, and then one of two things happens. Either the site earns enough signals to stay, or the impressions fall back within a few weeks. A new page or a single link rarely decides it. The site as a whole does.
The last confirmed Google ranking update was the September 2026 spam update, which finished on 8 October. I wrote about how that rollout ended. Nothing confirmed rolled out that week, so this jump is not an update effect. The November 2026 core update started on 10 November, after the week in this data, and I cover it separately.
The mistake the data showed me
The same report showed something I don’t like. Two category pages rank for the same link building queries: /category/linkbuilding/ and /category/link-building/. Both sit around position 75. Google can’t tell which one I mean, so neither ranks.
This is the kind of cannibalization I flag in client audits all the time, and it happened here because a category got created twice. The fix is boring. Keep one, redirect the other, update the internal links. I did that this week: /category/linkbuilding/ now redirects to /category/link-building/.
What I am doing next
- Publishing the long guide on iGaming link building, so the category has a page worth ranking. “igaming link building” gets about 300 US searches a month and Ahrefs shows a difficulty of 0.
- Linking the homepage and the articles page to each other more clearly, and to the iGaming SEO guide once it is published, so Google sees one page that answers “igaming seo”.
I will post the numbers again in a few weeks, whichever way they go. If you want to see how I think about tool data versus real data, I wrote about why Ahrefs estimates are a poor base for business decisions. The Search Console numbers above are the real ones.
