The iGaming industry is one of the most difficult markets to get into successfully. Many online casinos are popping up almost as often as daily, each one wanting to get in on the action. For this reason, they employ SEO strategies to win over their customers and send their competition packing. This requires a lot of time and money investment, as SEO is known to be incredibly tough within that field. Still, as costly and time-consuming as it is, a well-thought SEO strategy can land you incredible results after a while.
But what are the elements of a great strategy for online casino? Read on to find out.
What is SEO in short?
SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is the practice of making your website more visible to the search engine of your choice. The most popular, by far, is Google, and that’s what the majority of SEO efforts targets.
SEO can be divided into two categories:
On-page — this concerns everything that is happening on your website. On-page means page speed, content, images, user behaviour, and many more factors, each of which has an impact on your ranking.
Off-page — these are all of your efforts outside of your website. Elements like link building, social media marketing, guest posting, social media marketing, and influencer marketing are all within the realm of off-page SEO. Still, the primary component are backlinks, which are links from other sites that point back to your pages. As of today, it’s one of the most powerful ranking factors.
Why is SEO for iGaming so important?
Your business is based in its entirety online. Practising SEO can increase your traffic by making you far more visible and, as such, drastically improve your revenues. All of your competitors are doing it, and it’s pretty much necessary for you to do too if you wish to be successful.
User Experience is also an element of SEO as it’s soon going to become a full-on ranking factor with the Core Web Vitals Google algorithm update scheduled for May. Since providing an enjoyable experience for your customers lies at the top of your priorities, it’s only fair to utilise other elements of SEO to your advantage as well.
Global iGaming competition is one of the fiercest, and so, perhaps, in the beginning, you should focus more on a localised user base. Instead of aiming at international customers, make an effort to spread locally — SEO makes it possible.
As an example, let’s take a brief look at the organic traffic generated by one of the major players, Unibet:
This is a screenshot from SEMrush, and as you can see, Unibet generates almost a million visits from potential international customers via organic traffic. What’s more to say?
What are the elements of an SEO strategy for online casinos?
Buy an aged domain
A new domain is way harder to rank. If you’re ready to splash out a couple of thousands of dollars on a domain that already has some links, then you’ll give yourself a head start. Not to mention that the already-existing domains often have great, relevant names which can facilitate ranking.
Analysing your competition
Look into what your competitors are doing in terms of SEO and try to mimic them. With appropriate backlink analysis software, you can dive deep into the strategy your competitors employ. You’ll be able to pinpoint the domains they have their links on and act on that.
Still, backlink analytics is not the end of the road. Look into their site structure, what keywords they rank for, and how present they are in terms of PR and social media.
Keyword research
Instead of going after the top dogs in the industry who rank for the most competitive keywords, try going for long-tails. Long-tail keywords are usually ones that have a lower search volume and are far easier to rank for. The gambling industry is constantly evolving, and so is Google. See, 15{a7758c3706987b952e6c06b8e84de22b0478c6ec9e4b4c13f69a9ea693861278} of queries are ones that have never been entered before, which makes for a great opportunity.
On top of that, old queries that were once the major driving force behind the traffic of the top dogs have lost in popularity. As such, you should go ahead and target these novel, low-volume keywords, at least in the beginning, until you manage to build some authority.
On-page optimisation
Most usually, on-page optimisation starts with devising an appropriate site structure that’s easy to navigate and contains the most important keywords. Then, you can go ahead and start writing blog posts for your platform. That way, you’ll be able to target a much broader range of these precious long-tail keywords and build a topical authority. Make sure that your posts are as relevant as possible.
Talk about industry-related news, create guides for each game, and write lists of tips and tricks. Still, while you write that to rank, don’t forget that the user should be the top priority. The content has to be useful, digestible, and high-quality. Equally, each one of your posts should be optimised, meaning that it should contain appropriate headings, SEO title, images, and meta description, as well as the right keyword density.
Link building
Link building is a field of off-page SEO. It’s an incredibly complex aspect, for which there are multiple techniques. Still, the most frequently used, albeit risky, solution that most casino owners use are paid links. I’d advise not to do that as it can land you a penalty. Instead, focus on sites where you can guest post and create a great internal linking structure on your website.
User Experience
Online casinos are well-known for the ever-evolving User Experience to provide the best form of entertainment possible. Tailored to the needs of the customer, the interface often displays the most played games and online betting sports disciplines of each visitor, which is based on data. Make sure that your software is of the highest quality to ensure that your site has a low bounce rate and a high dwell time, both of which are ranking factors.
