So you and your buddy have decided to start building your casino platform, only to realize that when it comes to traditional ways of advertising, you don’t have many options.
After all, advertising through print or TV for online gambling is disallowed in most countries, unless you hold a local gambling license, and even in most cases, this is an arduous feat.
Pay Per Click or PPC might sound like another route to take. But however, this option has many restrictions and complications and may turn out to be quite a costly solution.
The more consistent and stable option at this point is SEO. Not only is it the most practical solution when it comes to creating a casino marketing strategy, but it also helps your site increase traffic and attracts more players to your casino.
The great thing about SEO is that it can help you target your audience.
Senior Content Writer at NoDepositQuest, Connor Bates delves into the importance of SEO quite perfectly:
‘As with anything in life, consistency is key. Because it takes a great deal of effort to get organic search visibility, rankings, and traffic, creating fully-optimized content is fundamental.
With that said, providing an exhaustive and all-encompassing definition of content – one on which all marketers would agree – is virtually impossible. However, one thing everyone can acknowledge is the fact that content needs to provide relevance and usefulness to its target audience.
Implementing the right SEO strategy to create meaningful content is where the challenge comes in. And while it’s not an insurmountable mountain, admittedly, it does present some obstacles at times.’
Important Elements to Remember
It is important to bear in mind that a strategic long-term strategy requires patience. Ranking highly on Google for high-quality keywords is tough and takes time to bear fruit. A rise in organic traffic growth will not happen overnight: it can even take years.
Organic traffic has become an essential part of any online business. According to research carried out in 2019, 53% of internet traffic comes through organic search. The importance of an SEO planning strategy, therefore, should never be discounted.
If your SEO is not done the right way, Google reserves the right to block your website.
It can also track keyword stuffing and in general, it is very strict with the gambling industry since certain keywords might turn up on queries targeted at other audiences, such as children.
Casino SEO is costly. The webmasters will require more money to publish it than they would for other niches because they require backlinks from authority sources (well-trusted newspapers and blogs with a high volume of traffic).
They know about the particularity of the business, and how highly competitive the market is, and some of them steadfastly reject any gambling-related hyperlinks onto their website pages.
It is also important to avoid Private Blog Networks like the plague. While PBNs may seem like an easy way to generate traffic, what they do is try to publish as much content as possible, even though most of it is not high quality at all.
A PBN is a network of websites created only to link to another website and improve its organic search visibility. The ‘feeder’ sites will then pass equity back through the main site, boosting its authority and ranking power.
PBNs can be easily tracked down and flagged by Google or other Search Engine Results Page authorities.
Since these are websites with very low authority, all your money and effort would have gone into making them rank, which ultimately might vanish once they are pulled down from the ranking.
Tips to Optimise your SEO Content
As previously mentioned, optimizing content for SEO purposes takes a fair amount of effort, and requires a lot of trial and error. Below are 5 suggestions on how to augment your online casino search engine results and increase traffic.
1. Keyword Research
Keywords are essential elements no matter what niche or industry your content is for. However, when it comes to online casinos and gambling, the more in-depth the research, the better.
With the right tools and resources out there, you can find keywords that could help you rank higher. Google Analytics, AhRefs, and SEMRush are your friends when it comes to SEO.
It is also important to avoid keywords that are already overused and which you won’t rank for, like ‘casino’ and ‘betting’. Try aiming for long-tailed keywords that your specific target audiences would still query online.
One complexity that comes with keyword research is keeping up with top keywords in the business whilst understanding that customer preferences change over time.
Online searches remain a fickle business. Trying to remain on the first page of SERPs like Google and Bing is tough competition so checking keywords more than once a day is important.
You also need to be aware that since Google is already highly suspicious of the intentions behind online gambling sites, you need to make sure you do not stuff betting-related keywords in your articles.
When using backlinks, add naked URLs (a hyperlink that uses the URL itself as the anchor text) and brand names if available.
2. Update Former Content
Make sure you dedicate the time to go over your old content and update it accordingly. Sometimes this counts more than just creating and putting out fresh new content every day.
Revising old content, especially in a constantly evolving industry like that of online casinos and gambling, is indispensable. Betting odds change, casino games are updated, and old articles require repolishing and revision.
Once SERPs crawl your website and realize it has been revised and updated, your site will get a boost in its rankings.
You can also update your old article with hyperlinks to new articles you created, or to products and services you have recently added to your website. Pages leading to nowhere or pages that are not UX-designed simply do not rank.
The easier your site is to use and the more seamless it is to find articles and pages on it, the higher the chance your end users will stick around for longer, thus reducing what is known as ‘bounce rate’. They will also be highly likely to come back.
3. Link Building
Building links is essential to ranking but Google and other SERPs are highly finicky when it comes to the standards of links you are highlighting in your content. Make sure these are not low authority as the consequences to your business could be devastating.
Linking to authority sources is essential as this garners credibility for your site and helps Google and other SERPs know that you are making a conscious effort with your content. This sends a positive message to Google and in turn, it affects your SEO rankings positively.
4. SEO Structures Site
The loading time of your website needs to be fast.
When dealing with a highly-saturated market like online gambling, a decreasing loading time is what separates the chaff from the wheat.
A 2018 study suggested that 53% of users will leave a site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. It is essential to have a clear understanding of how long the loading time of your site is.
You wouldn’t want a user to opt for your competitor instead, simply because of your site’s loading time.
Some tools such as Page Speed Insights can help with this. This is a Google app tool that won’t just help evaluate your loading time but can also make suggestions on what to do to lower it.
Having clear on-page SEO on your landing pages also helps.
5. Answer Query Questions Quickly
Queries entered are related to keywords looking for informational, navigational, and transactional knowledge. Therefore, answering ‘How to’ questions (informational), ‘When’ or ‘Where’ (navigational), or ‘How Much’ (transactional) also helps your SEO ranking.
All you must do to find the most searched queries is to go to the Google main page and type certain queries related to online betting. You could type, for example,’ How do casinos…’ and you will immediately have several different kinds of questions people have queried in this aspect.
What you could also do is add an FAQ page related to these questions and make sure that your content answers such questions directly. This will increase your chances of appearing on the front pages of Google or any other SERP for that matter.
While these five suggestions to help you improve your SEO rankings are merely scratching the surface, the benefits of SEO for the online casino industry cannot be undervalued or underestimated, especially given that this niche is usually shunned by traditional modes of advertising.