Player Acquisition in the Online Casino Sector - Top 3 Considerations

The UK igaming market is bigger than ever. To put this statement into context, the sector totalled £4.7bn in the period from April 2016 to March 2017. According to the UK Gambling Commission, this represents a 10.1% rise on remote gross gambling yield (GGY) in the corresponding period in the previous financial year.

Competition within the market is therefore fierce, however, competing with the big casino and betting brands is achievable. We have experience of this. The big brands may have larger budgets for gaining brand recognition and a plethora of natural kudos from their multi-million pound celebrity-endorsed marketing campaigns, but SEO gives the less recognised brands the opportunity to compete in this very popular space.

So what do you need to do to be able to compete? In this article we outline the main components of a strong SEO strategy. In our experience, it’s important to address them all to have your campaign performing at a competitive level.

Technical SEO refers to making sure every aspect of your website can be crawled and fully understood by a search engine.

Most sites have some type of technical issue, which means by fixing yours and making your website the best it can be, can usually give you the upper hand. Technical SEO is the cornerstone to strong visibility in this sector. When we audit a site we analyse every aspect of the site, from its structure and categorisation, to crawl issues, site load time, duplicate content and many more important elements.

One of the most common issues we have encountered has been the use of inaccessible javascript driven pages, that look great for the user, but are far from great for the search engine.

In this guide the analogy of a train is used - it doesn't matter what the carriages look like (the website's graphics and content), if the engine (technical SEO) doesn't work, nobody will get on the train.

Our technical expertise in this sector for finding and fixing common issues has skyrocketed sites to the top of the results for exceptionally popular keywords.

Content marketing refers to the technique of creating and sharing valuable content that doesn’t explicitly advertise your brand, but it helps brands to position themselves as a go-to source of information. The purpose of this is to attract attention from potential customers, as well as influencers within the sector. As a result, a website can gain a natural stream of relevant backlinks and referral traffic. All factors that contribute to strong visibility in the search engines.

One of the main challenges in igaming SEO is the reluctance of influencers to link to gambling sites, which is why it’s crucial for content in this sector to be incredibly shareable. Putting responsible gambling at the forefront; survey results, data driven infographics and press releases are amongst material that works. You must tap into subjects that are popular, worthwhile and of great interest to both your audience and influencers, and make it attractive enough that it’s almost impossible not to link to when covering a story / topic.