SEO Watch: International SEO
In the wake of new licensing regimes, Nick Garner of 90 Digital explains how to obtain obtain natural search traffic in a changing international environment
Back in 2006 the relatively immature world of online gambling was hit by the US lockdown. If you were around back then, you will remember the anxiety so many brands felt as they had to pull out from the US market. Since then thereâs been a steady escalation in the number of markets that are either locked out or demand a local licence to operate.
The UK is of course the latest in a long line of markets that have become inaccessible to operators not prepared to go through the licensing process. What weâre seeing on the agency side are the tier 2+ operators scrambling around looking for ways to reach into more accessible markets like Canada, Netherlands and Australia. As a result, I have been revisiting some of my old data to double check and make sure everything is on track with our clientsâ international SEO strategy.
Iâve done international for many years previously but SEO changes fast so one has to keep on top of the analysis and research side of things. For those of you who want the punchline quickly: if you want to maximise international reach, build one website and architect it around language instead of countries.
Reconciling a website to one territory may see it rank well locally but internationally you will lose out. From my data, the winning sites internationally are the ones which donât focus on one country territory but instead focus on a particular language per part of the site. If your core language is English, build the main website in English, use something called HREF Lang tags to state the site is in English and get on and acquire really good links along with having a great, engaging website. The same applies for other languages.
Digging deeper
Method: we have a tool which scrapes Google on request in any way we like. We can scrape Google and never get busted by them, which is very useful when youâre doing a large-scale analysis.
I picked out the top 20 key phrases by value and relevance in the UK for casino, bingo, poker, sports betting and binary options. I then queried 53 local English-speaking territories which Google covers for the top 20 key phrases per egaming vertical. I then used the cost per click values from the UK as a way of giving me a relative value for localised egaming traffic i.e. casino traffic from Antigua. I accrued roughly about 165,000 data points.
I then aggregated all of this data ordered the domains by sites which have a combination of high rankings, traffic and value of traffic for the keywords I was researching. From that I was able to get a global power list of sites who rank across all countries which speak English.
Insights
Site structure: websites that rank in competitive countries like the UK will rank more or less equally well everywhere else where there are the same language search results. To me, this is very counter-intuitive
because the general idea is to build a local domain or localise a domain to a particular country and work that really hard to get rankings. In theory localising one country at a time should be easier than a blanket approach. It makes no sense to create 15 local websites when one powerful site will rank in every single country with the same language.
Site content: one of the other things people go on about is how you must have lots and lots of content on a website. Thatâs not necessarily a smart thing to do.
If youâre in a very competitive short tail vertical like casino, the winning websites prove that you donât need large amounts of content to rank on these ultra competitive phrases. In fact, sites like casino.betfair.com have no useful on page content for Google, yet they rank page 1 UK for âonline casinoâ. The only words they have are the title tag phrases: <title>Betfair Casino – £300 Welcome
Bonus | Play Casino Online</title>
Iâve seen this in other verticals like bitcoin casino and exchange betting where the top ranking sites only have title tag content to work with and yet rank really well on their core money phrases. Essentially, I see that Google works with what it has and if there is very little in the way of keywords, itâll just focus on the few words it can make sense of.
Links
There is a massive disparity between ranking sites and the link proï¬les. Broadly what Iâm seeing is where verticals are competitive and undifferentiated, link acquisition seems to be the main thing separating winners from losers.
But, Iâm seeing lots of instances where brands are not aggressively acquiring links and yet still rank. As some of you who have read my columns will remember, Iâve talked a lot about engagement being a core ranking signal: click through rates from search results to a particular webpage and dwell time on that webpage.
Wrapping up
So, in short if you want to rank in egaming, then concentrate on acquiring really good links (i.e. links with high majestic trust ï¬ow) and at the same time work on brand differentiation and engagement. Once the links get you rankings, the engagement is what keeps you there and helps you rise further up search results. Then, if all goes well on engagement you can ease back on link acquisition.
Link relevance and country origin
Sites like Eurocasino and Bovada have been on a massive link acquisition drive. When I have reviewed them for this article, they seemed to break nearly every rule were told to believe. Here is the
truth:
⢠links donât need to be from local territories to rank locally,
⢠links donât have to come from relevant websites,
⢠anchor text does not have to be relevant to your money phrases
The fact is, you just need lots of page rank and user engagement to rank. Of course, these brands have taken a view on risk over reward and I guess they think itâs worth the risk to push natural search as hard as they can go before getting a penalty. Eurocasino/Bovada, if Iâm wrong please call me out on thisâ¦
Binary options
If you were at the Amsterdam affiliate conference, one thing you will have noticed was the number of operators hustling for binary options traffic. If you thought it was a bit like being in a Moroccan Street market, you werenât alone. So why the desperation? Well, if you look at the binary options table [see table 1] youâll notice something very interesting. These aggregated global share of search results show how badly the operators rank. Opteck.com seems to be the only operator getting organic search right.
As a personal observation, Iâve always felt operators in this sector have lagged behind traditional egaming when it comes to search marketing. In my opinion this sector is wide open. And I ï¬nd it odd how these operators put so much effort into chasing affiliate/paid-for traffic when they could just get on and sort out their SEO.
International SEO has always been important, but licensing in territories like the UK has pushed international up a gear. There are still loads of territories where you can market via natural search legally and with our agency, were seeing a huge uplift in activity on international.
Itâs easier than you might think, itâs just a question of how hard you want to push link acquisition on the black hat side and how much attention you give to brand differentiation and user engagement. Until next time, I hope your SEO goes well.