The importance of dedicated landing pages in football betting SEO
As bookmakers jostle for position ahead of the new Premier League football season, Stickyeyes highlights key search tactics critical to success
Football betting is one of the most commercially critical markets for online bookmakers and, perhaps unsurprisingly, is also an incredibly competitive market. There are almost 94,000 UK Google searches every month across just 379 football betting keywords, and competition is fierce. Almost 10,000 of these searches come from the phrase ‘football betting’, while 8,100 come for the term ‘Premier League odds’.
The level of competition is typified by the four leading brands in this market: William Hill, Sky Bet, Paddy Power and the affiliate site Oddschecker. Sky Bet is the most visible brand by an incredibly narrow margin, and this is due to top three ranking positions for 263 of the 379 main keywords in the market, including 122 position one rankings.
Behind these four brands, we have a cluster of bookmakers that, while having broad keyword coverage in the market, have struggled to achieve strong ranking positions for these all important terms. Ladbrokes, Betfair and Coral are all tightly clustered, ahead of BetVictor, BetBright and the affiliate site Betting Directory.
We see similar trends when we look specifically at Euro 2016, where William Hill, Sky Bet and Paddy Power led the way. Betting related keyword terms for the recent European Championships generated 151,990 searches during May, with the tournament contributing to a 60% uplift in search volume this summer. The term ‘Euro 2016 odds’ experienced 40,500 searches in May, so there was a clear commercial opportunity during the tournament.
Method in the madness
So why did we experience a largely similar search market in the Euro 2016 market as we are the generic football market? Well, brand equity, technical competence and content will all have a part to play, and there is a common theme that is true of those brands that rank highly - dedicated landing pages.
The football betting search market is largely driven by events. While generics make up the bulk of traffic as in many searches, competition, tournament and even match-level keywords drive significant value.
Looking into the brands that have performed poorly in this analysis, including notable brands such as 888sport, Stan James, Betfred and Unibet that aren’t within the 10 most visible, we have identified the lack of a static, indexable and optimised football betting page. Instead, many of these sites use a filter system that creates dynamic pages with a complex URL structure. This makes it increasingly difficult for search engines to understand the topic of the page.
This would seem to be a relatively straightforward issue to rectify, but the problem is usually a result of a restrictive content management system and complex site architecture. Many of the systems used by online bookmakers have understandably been designed primarily to fulfil betting transactions, with search engine optimisation less of a consideration.
Of particular note in the Euro 2016 market is the absence of BetVictor, which has effectively been replaced by bwin. BetVictor did have a dedicated landing page for the Euro 2016 tournament (as did bwin) but it does not appear to have been adequately optimised, and this has cost the brand position in the search market.
Similarly Oddschecker struggled to gain the same levels of visibility that it enjoys in the overall market, despite strong content related to the Euro 2016 Championships. This could be indicative of wider technical issues.
The likes of Sky Bet, Paddy Power and William Hill have been successful in implementing these event or market specific landing pages, and they are reaping the rewards with market-leading visibility in organic search.