Let’s look at a question, which has come up several times this week with casino clients. I thought it would be worth sharing with readers at Calvinayre.com – As we know, casino is one of the toughest businesses to crack since the player values so high and the competition reflects this. We’re seeing an increase in the number of previously pure play casino operators expand their offering into sportsbook. This approach has become a standard component to the recommended strategy at Media Skunk Works because of the benefits to natural search.
Single wallet providers are able to easily cross-sell casino to sports betting players
Okay, so this is quite obvious. It may be true that sports players are not as valuable in the casino, as a player who arrived with casino search intent, i.e. they’re sat with their credit card in their hand having just Googled “Online Slots” – It’s estimated that a true casino players is typically 2.5 to 3 times more valuable than a cross-sold sports player but the first opportunity for a sports CRM manager is to hedge sports book losses by getting winning players into the casino as quickly as possible.
Sports betting and sports in general have a mainstream appeal, which enables an opportunity for content creation, social engagement, sharing and numerous other wonderful things that are just not possible with casino. When’s the last time you shared that you’ve lost your shirt on the blackjack table.
Let sports be at the centre of your content driven link strategy
Your content strategy (yes, that’s right! I said it) allow me to say it again, in case you weren’t listening…Your content strategy will determine how risky your link strategy will be. Sports content and fanatical team supporters make all the difference. A site with a well written, journalistic sports news feed will help the performance across all other products. For this to be effective you need to be publishing newsworthy content based on daily sporting events that is both timely and accurate.
At Media Skunk Works we found that such a high quality, news led, content strategy has repeatedly allowed clients to perform extremely well for high value casino phrases at a fraction of the usual required investment. The approach makes the acquisition of links easier because you’re posting information which fans will love to link to. This also helps ensure your link profile retains organic and safe.
Remember: inbound links to news articles allow the distribution of link juice though your site’s main navigation and footer link. This boosts the overall performance of the site, including other product areas, like poker, casino and bingo.
WordPress makes life much easier, fixes many of your SEO challenges
A high quality sports news site will provide a work around for your betting platform woes. If you’re having problems making the simplest of changes to your sports betting site, simple things like adding title tags for example, don’t worry, you’re not alone. This is an age-old problem, which has been around for as long as I can remember.
Operating a WordPress (could equally be Drupal or another CMS) news site will provide you with the flexibility of a WordPress CMS, easy to customise and optimised for Search Engines. Suddenly you have the capability to make SEO related changes without incurring the kind of software development costs, which have previously held your sports book or casino platform back.
For instance, most sports betting platforms (by default) don’t have a page, which may be nominated as “the SEO landing page for Cheltenham”. You will also now be able to nominate such a page and maintain the same URL, year on year.
A rising tide raises all ships
According the original paper by Larry and Sergey: The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. (a great bedtime read for anyone with an interest in SEO), the links which connect the web and form Google’s approach to identifying the best results for a given query, also apply to the pages within a domain in the same way that they apply to pages which are linked across different domains.
As the number of pages within your news site archive grows, so does the strength of your internal domain authority. Your domain’s authority will grow with each piece of content posted on the site. This growth in domain authority applies to the domain as a whole and will therefore be inherited by your casino, poker and bingo sections.
This approach doesn’t only work, it works very well in all instances and I’m yet to see a casino site fail to benefit from a great sports news section.
In summary your casino needs a sports book…
- …so that you can cross-sell to sports punters
- …so that you can get cheaper and more natural looking links
- …to help make life easier when fixing SEO issues inherent in gaming platforms
- …to benefit from the overall domain authority passing this benefit back to casino
Paul Reilly is the founder of Media Skunk Works. An Innovation Lab based at the University of York. He specializes in large scale, business critical link building for the iGaming industry and uses big data to avoid the many traps set by Google.
