Data: Events and teams key to visibility after football season kicks off

With the Premier League and Football League opening weekends now well and truly behind us, Britain’s bookmakers are battling it out to make sure that they are in prime position to take advantage of the annual surge in football betting search volume.

Following a summer without a major tournament to keep punters occupied, search volume for football betting has lulled in the months since May but, as in previous years, has peaked once again as we hit August and the start of the new season.

So who is leading the way in the opening weeks of the new season, and more importantly, why?

Oddschecker leads the way

We recently focused our attention on the wider sports-betting market with our analysis, where we found that Oddschecker was the most visible brand by some distance so unsurprisingly, we see a similar picture when we look at the football market in isolation.

Behind Oddschecker, we see Paddy Power and Sky Bet are the most visible bookmaking brands, followed closely by William Hill. Below these three, we see a cluster of brands including Ladbrokes, Coral and BetVictor all achieving in the region of 1,500-2,200 clicks from football-related search terms.

Our analysis does show that Paddy Power, Sky Bet and William Hill in particular have lost visibility in the market compared to our analysis back in July 2016, and that all three brands are ranking for fewer keywords, but this is a reflection of the lack of major tournament in 2017.

Back in 2016, Sky Bet and William Hill in particular were the most visible brands for Euro 2016-related betting terms, ranking for over 120 keyword terms related to that tournament (those terms were a combination of generic and tournament-specific terms). By comparison, Oddschecker had around half the visibility of the two operators, and less than Paddy Power, during the tournament.

The importance of event keyword terms

The way that Euro 2016 was able to influence the search market last year highlights just how important event-based terms are in the sports-betting market – and especially in football.

Football betting offers far and away the most keyword opportunities within our index. Of the 989 keywords that we analyse in the sports-betting market, around a third related specifically to football and we can see from our analysis that the brands in the top 10 all have rankings across a broad range of keywords, rather than focusing on driving traffic predominantly from a small number of high-volume and competitive terms.

It’s then a case of how well those brands rank across that keyword breadth that makes the difference. While Coral may rank for 298 terms in our analysis, it only ranks in the top five for six of them.

By comparison, Paddy Power ranks in the top five for 207 of the 311 keywords that it ranks for (as well as ranking first for ‘football betting’), Sky Bet ranks in the top 10 for 210 of the 311 keywords that it ranks for (including position one rankings for a range of “team” and Football League-related terms that may be influenced by its sponsorship of the Football League) and Oddschecker ranks in positions one to five for 252 of 312 keywords.

For Oddschecker the task is slightly easier. As an odds comparison service, it has a very strong user proposition and it is now starting to dominate all of the key sports betting verticals. Much in the same way that price comparison websites have dominated financial services markets for some time, this USP also allows Oddschecker to offer genuinely valuable and trusted content – a big factor for Google as its algorithms manage this competitive market.