Breaking Into a Competitive Market: How We Launched a Betting Site from Scratch — and Made It Rank

How We Launched a Betting Site from Scratch

June 18, 2025

Client Overview:
Industry: Online Betting & Casino
Market: Serbia
Goal: Achieve competitive SEO visibility within 6 months using a brand-new domain

The Challenge: Zero to Competitive in Six Months

Launching in a saturated SEO niche is tough. Doing it on a new domain, with a development partner that can’t accommodate SEO needs, is even tougher. That’s exactly what this client faced in early 2021.

Their goals were clear:

Enter the highly saturated Serbian betting market
Build a multilingual website
Get measurable traction within six months

But from day one, we knew we were navigating one of the most complex SEO setups we’ve encountered.

The Technical SEO Minefield: What We Were Up Against

Angular Framework Challenges

The site was built on Angular — a JavaScript framework that introduces serious rendering issues for Google. Without proper server-side rendering, Googlebot may never even see the content, much less index it.

Separate Mobile and Desktop Domains

Instead of a responsive design, the site relied on m.domain.com for mobile and www.domain.com for desktop. That forced us to manually define mobile/desktop relationships in a way Google could understand.

Multilingual Setup

Multilingual sites require accurate hreflang tagging to serve users the correct content version. With a non-standard site architecture, implementing this without technical support was a challenge of its own.

Our SEO Strategy: Practical Solutions That Work

Server-Side Rendering with Prerendering

To make the Angular site crawlable, we implemented server-side rendering using Prerender.io — a cost-effective tool that delivers fully rendered HTML to Googlebot and users alike.

Clean URL Structure

We adopted a child URL structure:

/mob/ for mobile
/desk/ for desktop

This ensured logical separation without relying on fragile subdomains.

Sitemap and Hreflang Integration

Since HTML options were limited, we used the sitemap.xml file to:

Define mobile/desktop alternates
Declare hreflang annotations for each language
Align with Google’s official m.domain guidelines

Our Link Building Strategy

Phase 1 – Topical Relevance

We used Ahrefs’ Link Intersect tool to identify and replicate backlinks our competitors had — making sure we appeared in all the right places.

Phase 2 – Domain Authority Boost

To accelerate domain trust, we launched a PBN campaign using:

Home page links
Branded anchor texts

This helped close the authority gap with top competitors more quickly than organic growth alone could allow.

Content Wins: Outranking the Competition With Real Text

Our research showed competitors had thin, iframe-loaded pages with almost no crawlable content.

To capitalize on this:

We created original, keyword-focused copy for each landing page
Applied TF-IDF optimization to align with what Google expects
Embedded content using WordPress widgets to bypass dev limitations

The Results

Organic Clicks

220% increase within the first 6 months

Rankings

17 out of 24 tracked keywords reached Page 1, despite launching on a brand-new domain.

Conversions

Improved visibility translated into steady conversions for high-value keywords in the betting niche.

What This Means for You

If your business operates in a saturated market — betting, crypto, SaaS, or e-commerce — this case proves that you don’t need a perfect setup to succeed. You need the right strategy, the right technical execution, and a team that knows how to adapt.

Even with a difficult dev partner, complex architecture, and zero SEO history, we helped this client compete — fast.

Ready to Build an SEO Foundation That Performs?

Whether you’re launching a new domain or revamping an underperforming site, our team builds with SEO baked in from the start.

Book a free consultation and let’s talk strategy.