Who’s the King of iGaming SEO?
In the past 20 years iGaming has evolved into a dominant industry that will be worth as much as $94 billion by the end of 2024. Many states across Asia, Africa, and South America have embraced the iGaming market and are contributing to its fast growth and popularity, but this poses two important issues. First, in countries like Asia or Africa, where the industry is not well regulated, but the spending capability accounts for more than half of global online gambling revenue, finding providers that customers can actually trust is more important than in the regulated markets, where there is less risk of unlicensed operators deceiving their customers. What follows, is a need for a specific SEO approach to match the high competition and promote those brands that have clean records and none of the risk.
Content is King More Than Ever
The biggest challenge is to secure links. Outlets that are not usually ready to host gambling-related content on their website need to be persuaded to make links and share your content. To accomplish that, your content needs to be so rich and worthwhile that the fact it links to iGaming sites becomes completely irrelevant. So the trick is to pinpoint all valuable connections and crossovers with various industries that will boost your visibility. The value you add to the story is the core of successful link building. You need to create a situation in which publishers simply must link to your website or the coverage of the story won’t be complete.
This ?content is king? SEO mantra is more important than ever also in terms of new Google updates that definitely put quality over quantity. Not only will they penalize grey and black hat SEO tactics, but you also need to come up with white-hat strategies that are far more relevant and targeted. Google’s AI gathers information and processes it on a daily basis and ranking has become far stricter and more specific, meaning there’s no more room for lazy SEO. You can have millions of links out there, but it all comes down to who you’re linking to and from and their quality.
For example, a review of the Americas Cardroom site on an established review page can earn you a valuable link to boost your SEO.
Step by Step
To overcome the above-mentioned challenges, you mustn’t skip any part of the process. The first step is not keywords, but the creation of the list of topics. When you have the topics, the second step is to use one of the SEO tools to come up with the popular short-tail keywords associated with them. Still, these short-tail keywords are too competitive to be ranked highly on Google, so the next step is to use the tool again to identify long-tail keywords that dig deeper into the topics. This is where your optimization for specific keywords really starts.
The whole point of this process is to create more entry points, targeting various interests of the users within one topic. You need to use subtopics that explain further all the concepts present in the main ones. Google sees pages that dig deeper into the interworking of general topics as best answers for queries and therefore ranks them higher. If the content is more specific you’ll target more specific needs of the audience and ultimately convert bigger traffic into leads.
Understanding the Differences
The best thing about the iGaming industry is its diverse audience base that you can utilize through affiliate marketing. We already showed how you can target different preferences and tastes of users, but all that effort is futile if you don’t understand the cultural and national differences. Reaching out on a global scale is not something that happens overnight – you need to invest time in demographic research and analytics.
When you’re working in more than 50 countries and even more languages, targeting the right people is not an easy task. Poor Spanish over the phone or lousy machine-translated email will break every deal with the publisher. All the relationships need to be built from the ground up – this is the foundation of outreach.
In the end, never pitch as a sales executive. Always adopt a tone of a fellow writer or journalist. If a publisher gets the feeling you’re looking for a partnership just for personal gain he’ll be put off no matter how valuable your content is.
For the most part, it all comes down to the value and depth of the content, combined with the demographic knowledge and social skills.