The first part of any chess game really comes down to recognizing certain patterns of setup or attack, which with lower level bots will be pretty basic and the same. You can do well against people at least in the first parts simply be expanding your knowledge of know openings and how to deal with them, especially the ones that are designed to trap you into an early checkmate. Often times those are the worst to deal with online until you can see what they're doing and counter them, and many of them will resign to avoid actually getting into a deeper game.

Even if the ELO is different, in theory after many games and enough consistency in your gameplay you should settle out into a level where you're finding mostly equal players. If you do sometime fall lower, again in theory better playing should bring you back eventually.