One of the most important skills around in the iGaming industry is SEO. That stands for search engine optimization for the exec reading this that is still trying to figure that out.

Why do I think SEO is such an important skill that more industry people should know?

The simple answer is that it affects every company in iGaming. If more executives at least understood the fundamentals of ranking a website, they might be in a better position to make better hires and make strategic adjustments with their budgets.

One reason why management doesn’t always buy into SEO is because their SEO team are great at ranking websites, but not the best at selling it to you, the owner.

For a long time in iGaming, the most successful iGaming SEO consultants have been the best at selling SEO but the worst at ranking websites. Sad but true as some of the best SEOs in iGaming are just affiliates and some agencies also have their own sites. These people don't really need your money.

Thankfully things are changing and I think we are seeing better SEO consultants than what I remember in the past.

My SEO journey

I’ve been involved in SEO in iGaming for over 15 years and here’s a short summary of my experience:

• Doing SEO for my own casino affiliate sites
• Becoming an SEO consultant
• Affiliate coaching
• Interviewing SEOs on the Affiliate BI podcast
• Doing SEO for StatsDrone, my affiliate SaaS product

I’m currently working on our own B2B SEO for StatsDrone and my deeper understanding of SEO comes from networking and interviewing SEO pros.

I’ve done SEO consulting in the past for a few affiliate sites and I’ve also hired SEO agencies like this one to sharpen my skills and have some work done on some sites too.

Success with SEO

The most successful companies in the iGaming space are very proactive when it comes to SEO.

When we look at successful iGaming affiliates that do SEO well, we can think of these companies:

• Game Lounge
• Blue Window Ltd
• Better Collective
• Paradise Media
• Gentoo

When we think about who are the most successful iGaming operators in the industry, these players come to mind:

• Betway
• PokerStars
• Bet365
• FanDuel
• Glitnor
• Yolo

It is very easy for me to reverse engineer their success using SEO tools like Ahrefs and Sitechecker.pro. With these tools I can deconstruct their go to market strategies and map this over time.

iGaming affiliates: the driver of traffic in the industry

One of the reasons why the affiliation segment is so valuable and powerful is that they are the sites that are essentially the gateway of players through search engines.

Building search traffic isn’t easy and takes time. Affiliate sites already have existing traffic and new content that they create is indexed quickly. This is partially why you can’t just launch a new site and expect it to get any real traffic in Google or other search engines. They are established entities that have traffic and their history is important in the eyes of a search engine.

The image below is an SEO tool called Ahrefs which shows me all sites linking to any site and it estimates the keywords they rank for and what volume of search traffic they get. It is also an excellent tool for affiliate managers to help them find new affiliates.

Ahrefs

Even B2B companies like SOFTSWISS invest a lot into SEO and it is one of the reasons why they have immense success.

Last but not least while we are talking about players. Players are looking for guides and recommendations and ideally they want this in the form of forums and reviews. Reviews that are not written by the operator themselves so this emphasizes why affiliates hold so much power over operators.

This is why a site like BigWinBoard is doing so well in search engines. It is popular with players and Google’s algorithm knows this.

I actually believe that all the game providers and casino software companies should partner with more affiliates. We are starting to see proof of this with game makers wanting to be featured on sites like AskGamblers and BigWinBoard.

How can I trust any SEOs in iGaming?

I’ll share a very short story and I won’t disclose who the buyer was or the iGaming SEO consultant but the buyer was a friend. The buyer told me they spent 20k GBP for 6 months, paid all upfront, and didn’t see any results. When I did a quick audit of their work, I was horrified.

That SEO consultant was essentially buying cheap links on Fiverr and did minimal on-page SEO work. I showed my friend who I could buy those exact same link packages on Fiverr for just hundreds of dollars and the look of defeat on his face said it all.

His site did close and that is another failed business because of a bad SEO. It is this fear that stops people from hiring SEOs in the first place.

Another sad story, one of my casino affiliate friends paid 5k GBP/month for a UK SEO agency where they absolutely tanked (not ranked) his site. They likely used his site to experiment some unproven SEO tactics that are ones that my SEO friends today would never advise.

They basically used Google translate for 7 other GEOs and created canonical pages for each of those languages. So for example there was a version of the site targeting Zimbabwe in French, German, Spanish, Italian and multiplied this by 200+ countries. It was a hot mess and it caused real damage where the site owner had to eventually sell the business.

Here are two more short stories on design and how it can affect SEO and conversion rate optimization.

One friend spent $70k on a website design with a design agency. The new site looked better but the conversion rate dropped by 5x. They couldn’t figure out why. My quick answer was this agency doesn’t understand both affiliate marketing and conversion rate optimization. Their SEO didn’t improve either but the design did all the damage.

Another friend had a company redesign their site and although the SEO actually did improve by around 10-20% in more traffic, the conversion rate dropped by 3x. Everyone was shocked. My answer to this is this is an extreme example of AB testing.

Most designers are not product designers nor do they know anything about conversion rate optimization. This is why I now highly recommend product designers for a site design as I also believe they will actually contribute to your SEO efforts.

Who are the best iGaming SEO agencies?

I’m not here to tell you who the best iGaming SEO agency is the best but my job here is to be helpful. I don’t do SEO consulting but I work with a lot of amazing SEOs in affiliate marketing and I’m interviewing two SEOs a month on the Affiliate BI podcast.

Some iGaming SEO agencies I know personally

• Gain Changer
• SeoProfy
• GH.Agency
• Aphex Media

Some notable SEO guests I’ve had on the Affiliate BI podcast

• Sean Bianco [Gain Changer] (🏆🇲🇹excellent SEO strategist and Maltese!)
• Victor Karpenko [SeoProfy] (🏆excellent at site recovery)
• Fery Kaszoni [Search Intelligence Ltd] (🏆 probably the world’s best link builder)
• Kira Khoroshilova [Diary of an SEO] (🏆excellent at international SEO)
• Dragan Berak [Gentoo / AskGamblers]
• Lily Ray [Amsive]
• Steve Toth [SEO Notebook]
• Jabez Reuben [The Blueprints]
• Karl Hudson [Searcharoo]

That reminds me I need to get Dirk Schembri and Ivana Flynn on my podcast. 

Learning SEO for iGaming

There are 2 paths for learning SEO and I’ll explain why SEO is a bit different in iGaming compared to other industries.

Path 1: You learn the fundamentals of SEO

Path 2: You master the skills of SEO

Learning the fundamentals of SEO

The reason why this is important isn’t so that you actually do the SEO work for your company. It is important so you can understand how SEO impacts your company so you can make better decisions on hiring and approving of budgets.

Search traffic of Bet365 according to Ahrefs.

Take a look at the search traffic of Bet365 according to Ahrefs, which is a prominent SEO research tool. These are the SEO metrics of Bet365:

Monthly search volume: 39M+ Monthly search impressions: 421M+

Referring domains: 15k+

If you had the fundamentals of SEO, then you might not be able to create a strategy to attempt to compete with Bet365, but you’d at least be able to understand a report if someone explained why they rank so prominently. That is their product, their content, their history and their links all contribute to their dominance in search engines.

Mastering the skills of SEO

If you think you want or need to master SEO, there is a different path to take if this is either very important for your current job or you want to move deeper into this space.

Is SEO dead?

No, SEO isn’t dead and never will be. In fact, the skills you learn in SEO can be applied to other search engines like YouTube and you can use these skills to gain traffic in other social marketplaces like TikTok, Instagram, X, LinkedIn and Reddit.

Mastering the skills takes a lot of studying and more importantly, trial and error. This is why I keep saying I prefer SEO professionals that have their own sites because they’ve put their skills to the test. As the saying goes, never trust a skinny chef.

Now the next dilemma, you don’t want to be ripped off by a bad SEO. You also don’t want to be ripped off buying a useless SEO course.

So which SEO courses are the best?

I’m going to suggest IMG Courses which stands for Internet Marketing Gold. They describe themselves as like Netflix but for SEOs.

What iGaming conferences can I learn SEO?

Speaking at iGaming Club alongside Staffan Engström from Fieldstream.ai

Most of them you’ll find SEOs speaking on the topic but I’d recommend you find a way to speak to them in person. A few great events you can meet some iGaming SEO professionals:

• SiGMA Europe
• iGaming Club in Malaga
• NEXT.io Valletta
• iGB Affiliate in Barcelona
• CasinoBeats in Malta

So John, can you help me with SEO?

I don’t do SEO consulting but if you find me on LinkedIn, I’ll gladly put you in contact with an iGaming SEO that I trust.