SEO Watch: Bootstrapping an egaming brand
Nick Garner, chief strategy officer at 90 Digital, explains the secrets to creating a successful SEO strategy on a budget
How do you get a brand producing revenue on a budget? Itâs a big question and one that I care about a lot these days because I have launched an online bitcoin casino called Oshi. So this is more an explanation of how Iâm going to plan out and execute my online marketing campaign over the next six months.
For background, I have been in egaming marketing since 2006 where I began as search manager for Betfair. I then moved on to be head of search for Unibet and, in 2012, set up my own egaming SEO agency 90 Digital.
Since this is egaming on a budget, the ï¬rst thing is to avoid paying substantial licence fees to trade in jurisdictions like the United Kingdom. So itâs important to look at territories which are âgreyâ, i.e. itâs not illegal to take customers from these territories, but there are restrictions around advertising. If youâre an SEO specialist like me, this is just ï¬ne because the plan would be to rank well on Google and not advertise locally.
The best resource I am aware of for knowing which territories are possible to market within is http://www.keytocasino.com/en/gambling-laws-around-the-world. html. While I donât give legal advice and Iâm sure they donât either, it gives you a very good idea of roughly which nations are suitable targets.
In my case, I looked at English-speaking territories, with good GDP and grey markets where there would not be any legal issues with taking on customers. Australia and Canada are examples cited by KeytoCasino. Because there are a lot of countries and legislation is constantly moving, itâs one area that I paid close attention to.
The website
In egaming SEO, there seems to be a heavy weighting on making a site perfectly optimised but not necessarily engaging. Itâs a huge mistake in my experience because, as mentioned before, engagement is now a massive driver for rankings.
Of course, itâs important the site is search optimised, but many sites which rank in egaming have terrible SEO, despite having great engagement, and so Google does its very best to rank these websites. Iâve come
across many instances where a website ranks in relatively competitive key phrases just from the title tag alone.
One thing that is important if youâre setting up your egaming business is internationalisation. I have done a lot of analysis on international SEO for egaming and it turns out that depending on the level of competition for a given segment, you will ï¬nd the same websites ranking for the same key phrases globally for the same language.
In other words, if you are in binary options, forex, Bitcoin, other niche segments, the top websites in these areas will rank globally for English language. Itâs worth pausing for a moment on this.
If you rank well in a competitive jurisdiction like the UK, even though you might not have a licence and you canât take customers, you will likely be ranking every other English language version of Google at the same level. The same principle applies to every other language like French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc. If you rank well in one territory, youâre likely to rank elsewhere for the same language.
Link acquisition
This is a huge subject but it’s ultimately best to keep it condensed for you. Google loves high quality links. But what is a high quality link? For SEO, that is a big question that we ask ourselves repeatedly. Fortunately, experience seeing what ranks and what doesnât is a good guide.
From what I can see, there seems to be an on-oï¬ switch for a link. In other words, links that come from trusted websites that have very good metrics are ones that will give you some beneï¬t. You donât need that many links from these good websites in order to rank well. Based on my analysis of thousands of websites, you probably need 40 or 50 links from high quality websites that are powerful in order to rank well in a particular niche.
I use majestic link tool for my link analysis, so there are metrics of the ones I reference with. Essentially, you are looking at 30 referring domains with a trust ï¬ow of between 20 and 40 and another 20 or so referring domains above trust ï¬ow to 40. For the actual links themselves, I would suggest you would need at least 30 links with trust ï¬ow of more than 10 per link.
If youâre not into technical SEO and donât use majestic, and all of this means nothing to you, thatâs ï¬ne â all you have to know is the links should come from trusted websites and come from strong pages within those sites, and then youâll do okay.
Again, another huge question. Google have Webmaster guidelines and they talk about link schemes: âAny links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Googleâs Webmaster Guidelines. This includes any behaviour that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site.â
If you acquire links in a way that blatantly contravenes Googleâs guidelines for Webmasters, youâre likely to get a penalty at some point. The catch is that in order to do it the ‘cleanâ way, it will be hugely expensive and time-consuming. Therefore, you have to take a view on how aggressively you want to acquire links.
For Oshi, my own casino, Iâm taking a relatively risk averse approach because I have a huge infrastructure for acquiring links that are editorially justiï¬able and sit within Googleâs guidelines. Yes you want to be more aggressive, there are new routes which can be taken that work extremely well and are very cost-eï¬ective. I would love to tell you about them here, but that would be a little incriminating, wouldnât it…?
If you do want to know more about all this, go hang out on some of the blackout forums like blackhatworld.com and blackhat.community.
What to expect when the links start coming in
It will take about three months for the link equity to start kicking in and from there, as long as the site is engaging, it should take another three months for momentum to start building up. Fresh domains have much more likelihood of being âauditionedâ on search results than established domains which have ranked in the past and no longer rank particularly well. For this reason, itâs always better to use a fresh domain.
Iâm a big fan of Google search console and Google analytics, although Google analytics wonât give you unique IP information from users, so it makes very forensic tracking diï¬cult. There are open source tools like piwik.org which are free and relatively robust. And most importantly, they will give you unique IP tracking, so you can see who is coming and from where.
Users from jurisdictions you canât accept is a big issue and one that could lead you to a jail cell. Essentially, itâs a case of having a blacklist of territories where you refuse to accept customers. United States is a good example. In these circumstances, itâs better to allow a user to engage with your website, but make it clear they canât become customers. This is because you need the site to be engaged with in order for Google to rank you. If you automatically bounce users straight out, if they are on your blacklist,
your engagement levels will be zero and that will aï¬ect rankings.
With a âbootstrap start-upâ online gaming brand, the idea is to have a narrow niche where you get global visibility on a small but relevant group of Google search results. In this way, you get the long tail of customers who are right for your brand. Once you get some revenue in, then you can start investing in licences for more lucrative territories like the UK.
As Iâve mentioned repeatedly, the key to doing well on Google in order is:
⢠great site engagement
⢠very strong links
⢠good on-site SEO
On costs, if you are just someone who has a good knowledge of egaming and a budget, I would say you would need to spend around £120,000 in the ï¬rst six months in order to give this some momentum. This is a very honest take on how Iâm planning to roll out my own casino. I do hope itâs been some help and if you need any advice, look me up⦠Iâm easy to ï¬nd: Nick Garner.