The Power of Link Building in iGaming

The True Power of SEO in iGaming 

SEO and iGaming – two phrases that have been often thrown together over the years, harnessing both fear, and power. Throughout my career I’ve spoken with many consultants, affiliates and even operators who immediately dismiss SEO and very rarely with those that embrace SEO: 

It is impossible to compete. 

Large operators have huge budgets.

We don’t have the teams the competition has.

Sound familiar? Maybe you’ve said it yourself, or maybe SEO just isn’t “your” thing. While there are obviously many different avenues to generate new player traffic, SEO always tends to be left at the back of the pack. With the iGaming Goldrush coming to America, do you really want to be left behind?

SEO for All Aspects of Online Gambling

As I mentioned before, most individuals working in iGaming promotion tend to stray away from SEO. Yes, big operators tend to have larger budgets, and likely a larger team. But, does that mean you can’t compete? The honest answer is that it depends (a typical SEO phrase 😊 ).

If we take a look at the search query “play slots” on Google it looks SUPER competitive; a Keyword Difficulty of 75, the top 10 results are domains with serious backlink profiles and, as mentioned, they are big brands. 

Now, what if we shake things up a bit and look at “play slots online for real money”? Very generally speaking, long tail keywords are easier to rank for. In this case easier than “play slots” but still rather competitive. The important take away is this: having a powerful SEO strategy. 

Sometimes the best play isn’t always leveraging your own website, but taking advantage of the authority of a trusted publication. I won’t share the #1 result for “play slots online for real money” in this article directly but take a look yourself, and after a few seconds of thinking you should be able to put together what has been done, for relatively little cost.

The largest take away I can emphasize from this one single example is that just because an SEO campaign in iGaming can look daunting, it doesn’t necessarily have to be. Throughout every industry on this planet there are companies with huge capital (monetarily and other) that do a poor job of competing, and it is no different in iGaming. Throwing infinite resources at marketing isn’t always the answer.

This, in my mind, is why there is such an apparent lack of competition in the iGaming space. 

An Industry of Followers, not Leaders

Looking at the SEO community in general tends to reveal that many no longer think for themselves, yet follow a regurgitated diet of the basic terms such as content, technical, on page, off page, schema, blah. What has resulted is an industry of “professionals” largely following the same strategies and vastly lowering the bar of competition, with those brave enough to think for themselves reaping the rewards. 

As Head of Account Services for Reach Creator I see it way too often (we specialize in linkbuilding for iGaming). Everybody wants the same iGaming content on their affiliate or operator sites. Everybody wants to build links the same way. Everybody wants to do what their competition is doing, because apparently the competition is doing better than them. The thought process is fundamentally broken. 

Many years ago we had a large operator approach us to help them build more, quality links. We engaged them and were met by many of the same obstacles we still face today. After a lot of back and forth we finally got our point across that we have no interest in doing what everybody else is doing, but we do have a better idea. 

Let’s do a linkbait (now well copied over the years by other operators and affiliates) on the psychological effects of online gambling. They were perplexed. They were upset. They couldn’t understand how this could possibly be a good idea for their brand (yet, everybody promotes responsible gaming, right). They finally agreed to move ahead with it.

Our team put together a fantastically researched piece, conducted outreach, and bam – dozens of links from psychological publications, mental health blogs and other news platforms that none of their competitors had, and we didn’t even have to pay for the links. See the difference between that strategy, and buying crappy, blacklisted links that every link vendor on the market sells to iGaming clients? (Yes, we sell paid links, and are happy to do so for our clients, but I guarantee you our QA process is other worldly). 

Why Linkbuilding, Why Now?

Earlier in this piece I mentioned what I call the iGaming Goldrush. The American market is opening in a way that it never has been. Yes, there will certainly be challenges and hurdles with regulations, restrictions, etc but that doesn’t mean there isn’t money to be made for those willing to put in the time and do the work. 

If you’re an affiliate already working in the iGaming space why aren’t you getting ready for the American market? It can be as simple as getting a website up with zero offers and ready to go when licensing and regulation becomes more clear. In my opinion, getting the site up is the easiest part and what takes the most time is linkbuilding. Having a portal ready to go in the geo of your choosing before the competition even thinks about it is strategy number one.

Has SEO been something you haven’t dabbled with yet? Don’t fret, we live in a time where just about everything you need to know is available for free, and if you’re still nervous or your skills aren’t where they need to be there are trusted vendors to help you achieve your goals. With linkbuilding this can be a bit tedious and perhaps even a black hole.

If you choose to work with a vendor it is very important to know what you’re buying. We currently work in a link market that is extremely over saturated as 4-5 years ago everybody wanted to get in on the money train of “outreach”. This has resulted in just about every vendor selling links off the same list (which is never what outreach was really about, but that’s a story you can buy me a drink over), and most of the time these links don’t even pass Page Rank. 

It is hard put an exact value of a link but there are tons of quality screenings you can work with to increase the value:

1. Review how often the site links out and who they are linking to. Do these outgoing links make sense? 
2. Is the site setup/working just to sell links? It may pass page rank today, and maybe not tomorrow. The choice in this arena is yours.
3. Metrics are boring. Tools such as AHREFs, MOZ and the like all estimate Page Rank in their own way but at the end of the day the metric is a made up number. Most likely people are buying junk links with “great” metrics anyway.
4. I don’t understand the whole “site must have amazing traffic to pass page rank” fad that has been going on in the SEO world the past few years. Plenty of great websites and blogs only have 1k-3k visitors (estimated, of course!) per month and are great places to get links from.
   1. But.. the caveat is understanding traffic and its correlation to the site itself. What if the website only has 3 pages of content, but they’re the best pages on X topic and only the top 10 websites in the world link to it, resulting in the site having 2500 traffic. Most SEOs would tell me the site isn’t worth getting a link from.
   2. I digress. Let’s say a site has 2500 traffic but has 3800 Referring Domains on AHREFs or whatever other tool you like to use. Would you want a link from this site? I probably wouldn’t but .. it depends. We live in a Google world where bad links are generally just ignored and no longer penalized. The major question is: Why the hell would a site have 3800 RDs and end up with relatively zero traffic in comparison. These are the questions you need to be asking yourself when buying links, or having them “built naturally.”
5. At this point I could have 69 bullet points, but I’m sure you’re starting to see the bigger picture. 

In all, I truly believe there is tons of opportunity to use SEO in all facets of iGaming. There is no need to reinvent the wheel, but we need to start thinking about how the wheel actually works and not the fancy lug nuts, polished rim lip and fancy tires to cover it up that seems to distract most of this industry.

Garrett Graff is Head of Account Services at Reach Creator, a linkbuilding agency that has been specializing in iGaming SEO for over a decade. When not building links he enjoys spending time with his son, participating in power sports and listening to music.