The iGaming Super Show, the largest event of the year dedicated to the online side of the gambling industry, kicked off today at the RAI in Amsterdam. From the moment the doors opened this morning the venue was packed, with a huge expo floor featuring affiliate program, service provider and financial betting booths and four separate conference tracks.
Today’s AAC/FPE track featured a number of SEO speakers including Christoph Cemper of Link Research Tools, orange suit, shoes, glasses and all. Cemper emphasized the importance of link building despite the multitude of misinformation in the market on the subject and said link auditing and monitoring mistakes must be happening in your company right now.
According to Cemper, the following are the top 10 SEO mistakes webmasters and operators are currently making:
#10-Disavow & wait for google to take care of things.
#9-Disavow all the links regardless of their quality. Not all links are created equal, disavow only the risky ones by doing it yourself or hiring a professional.
#8-Looking at only one slice of your backlink profile. This is why many websites have never recovered from Google Penguin.
#7-Not monitoring the backlink profile after a backlink audit. Combine as many backlink sources as possible to look at the full picture.
#6-Stop building new links after you recover from a Penalty. Never stop building links, set up a link building outreach process in your company, don’t just hope to get links, do the leg work!
#5-Stuffing the anchor text with commercial keywords. Its OK in moderation and tempting because it works.
#4-Building just any links. Build high-quality links only, check if the links are relevant to your niche, low risk & high power & trust, otherwise don’t build them!
#3-Not looking at competitor’s backlink profiles
#2-Not checking the 404 pages after a website redesign or migration. If humans work on a website, there will be errors! Redirect to relevant pages with similar content.
#1- Not checking if the website still has a no-index tag. This one mistake can put businesses out of business!
This year’s Executive Summit within the Super Show has a theme of “disruption” and will be running over both days of the event. Executive Summit speaker, Nigel Birrell, CEO of Lottoland, talked on how his company has disrupted the lottery sector.
Birrell opened up his presentation by illustrating just how large the lottery market has been and still is today. According to Birrell, global lottery sales were over 300 billion dollars in 2016, 60-70% of adults in Europe play the lottery, lottery is experiencing the strongest growth in Asia, Africa and LatAm and lottery is much bigger than casino and sports betting and certainly poker.
Lottoland is one of the fastest growing start-ups in Europe according to the Financial Times and Birrell confirmed his company has over 6 million customers across 10+ markets. “Lottoland is an insurance-based technology and e-commerce company which is changing the way lottery is played”, he said.
In terms of how Lottoland is disrupting, Nigel said their range of lottery products is greater than ever, they are offering new vertices such as instant win games for lotto players, the margins are greater, they are offering new channels in terms of online and mobile offerings (72% of Lottoland’s traffic is on mobile) and bigger payouts due to Lottoland’s unique betting insurance.
Of course along with disruption comes challenges and Birrell pointed out how first movers such as Lottoland can be targets of incumbents who dislike legal and licensed competition, for example, take into consideration some of the shots Lottoland has taken from UK National Lottery operator Camelot.
While exploring the busy expo floor today, we came across Yossi Barzely, Head of Business Development of Pragmatic Play, alongside a “live dinosaur”. When asked why in the world he hired a man to wear a dinosaur costume around the iGaming Super Show, Barzely said the dino was there to represent a new prehistoric-themed slots game Pragmatic Play has recently developed. He praised the Super Show for attracting a number of iGaming operators, the exact audience a B2B software provider such as Pragmatic Play would like to get in front of.
Kevin Reid of the recently re-branded 1X2 Network also took advantage of the Super Show to reveal his organization’s innovative neon jungle game. Reid accepted a speaking slot at the Super Show’s brand-new “IGNITE” track, a platform designed to highlight the latest innovations in our industry and for 1X2 Network, the exclusive reveal of their new game and the innovation behind it, merging keno with a slot for its bonus round.
