Marketing and advertising for any sort of casino or gambling site online can be a rather tough sell. Google and other search engines will typically make online casinos and games betting sites jump through several hoops in order to get listed, depending on their eligibility. This means that online gaming companies and operators have to pay a lot of attention to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) as the primary method for driving targeted, interest-based traffic to their site. Whether you are currently running an online casino gaming site or want to get one started in the near future and benefit from the growing popularity of online casino gaming today, here are some SEO and online marketing tips to keep in mind.
Content Summary
Create a Link Profile
Rebuilding Quality Backlinks
On Page SEO
Social Media Marketing
Affiliate and Influencer Marketing
Create a Link Profile
If you have an existing casino website, cleaning up your link profile is one of the most important first steps to take. Every site that links to yours will create a backlink, which are used by search engines to determine how popular your site is. However, it’s not just the number of backlinks that are taken into consideration by search engines, but also the quality of the sites and blogs that they are posted on. If search engines view the sites where your backlinks are posted as spam sites or otherwise low-quality, the links will often be doing more harm than good to your site. While a few low-quality backlinks here and there are unlikely to harm your site in any big way, you’ll need to make some changes if you are looking at only low-quality links.
To fix this problem, the first thing to do is get a list of the backlinks to your gaming site. You can do this with tools like AHREFS or Majestic to pull the information together and compile a report on the quality of the sites where the backlinks are listed. You can also run reports on your competitors to get an idea of where they are getting backlinks from and what to aim for or avoid. Once you have an idea of where the low-quality backlinks are coming from, you can contact the sites directly to ask them to remove the links or use Google’s disavow tool to tell Google to ignore them.
Rebuilding Quality Backlinks
Once you have dealt with any low-quality backlinks that are pointing to your casino gaming site, you will need to rebuild your backlink profile with high-quality links. You can make this process easier and faster by hiring a reputable SEO company.
Considering there’s a range of options online for anyone searching for an online casino site, for example, natural backlinks pointing to your site from reputable casino comparison sites like Online Casinos can often carry the best weight, so it’s a good idea to get in touch with comparison sites to improve your chance of appearing by offering affiliate programs and other incentives for high-quality sites to create backlinks on your behalf. Online Casinos offers reviews and guides for a wide range of gaming sites listing features like games available, new player bonuses and more. Appearing in news sites or having your site linked to by popular blogs in your industry can also be helpful.
Bear in mind that this is a slow process and you usually can’t expect to see much difference in your Google ranking within the first year.
On Page SEO
Along with tidying up your backlink profile, it is important to ensure that your gaming site’s on-page SEO is clean. This is done in two parts. You’ll need to make sure that your site’s code is easy for search engines to read and delivers all the necessary information. You can use several free tools such as those available from Moz to analyse your site or hire a skilled SEO specialist to take a look. Secondly, you will need to check your site’s design. If your site is not easy to navigate or does not work well on mobile devices, you are going to experience SEO problems. Several SEO factors that Google looks at involve how customers behave on your website. If visitors are not sticking around for a long time, Google will assume that your site is not providing them with what they need or is difficult to use, which ultimately impacts your ranking.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing can both boost and complement your SEO marketing efforts for your gaming site. Being active on social media is expected of most companies today and players will assume that you have active social media profiles that they can visit to get the latest information from your gaming company and get in touch if they need assistance. By posting regularly on social media, you don’t just have the option of engaging with your customers, but you can also improve SEO by providing Google with more pages to index that are related to your site. This can be helpful in the early stages of rebuilding your backlink profile especially since despite your site not appearing in the top search results for some relevant keywords, users may still be able to find you through social media results.
Affiliate and Influencer Marketing
Using affiliates and influencers to promote your online casino site can give you a huge advantage regardless of how well your site is performing in the search engine results pages. Affiliates will often run blogs, websites, and YouTube channels where they review and promote companies in their niche, so it’s a wise idea to find popular, reputable affiliates who can review your site and suggest it to their readers or viewers.
Influencers are an even more powerful marketing force today; these are users with a large following on social media who can sway their audience in the direction of certain brands. Working with an influencer puts your casino site in front of a large and interested audience without involving Google and SEO.
With online casinos growing in popularity, anybody looking to start a new gaming site needs to have solid online marketing strategies in place for success. Along with SEO, it’s important to consider digital marketing methods that get your brand in front of your target audience and grab their attention.
