Data: Football betting content marketing
Digital marketing agency Stickyeyes finds out why content remains key for online sportsbooks looking to dominate the search market
Fresh from the shock of Leicester City’s success, the bookmakers have been building up to this summer’s European Championships in France. And, for the leading betting brands, capitalising on this summer’s peak in traffic is a key challenge for 2016.
The bookmakers will once again be hoping for a bumper summer - although we’re unlikely to see betting reach the record-breaking heights of the 2014 World Cup - but which brands are leading the way in terms of getting themselves in front of their audiences? We took a look at the content marketing strategies of the leading brands to see who was in prime position.
Publishing volume and getting links
When looking at the volume of content and links, it’s not entirely surprising which brands lead our index; Sky Bet and Paddy Power lead the index, but for quite different reasons. For Sky Bet, its volume score on our scorecard is based heavily on not only the volume of external links that it has managed to achieve, but the speed at which it has been able to achieve links, measured as ‘link velocity’.
Link velocity is a measurement of how many links a domain achieves in a month, and can be indicative of one or a number of particular digital strategies designed to generate backlinks or other forms of link acquisition. It is likely that as Sky Bet is supported by a significant network of publishers it is successfully generating a large quantity of links, quickly, across quality domains.
Paddy Power, on the other hand, is the highest scorer when it comes to the number of indexed pages. This score is indicative of the quantity of the content it publishes on its domains, pointing to a large content marketing strategy. The brand also scores highly on the ‘average page views per visitor’, suggesting that the content is encouraging users to navigate their way through the site.
It is notable that Paddy Power actually scores lowest when it comes to link volume, but the volume of indexed pages, page views per visitor and link velocity outweigh this.
Ladbrokes also scores highly when it comes to publishing content, but less so when it comes to generating links from that content. Scores for link volume and link velocity are at the lower end of the scale, and the brand would need to address this to move up our volume score.
Content that resonates
But of course, publishing large volumes of content and generating links is only part of the story. What matters is how and when people are actually engaging with the activity that you do. Anybody can publish volumes of content, but content that works? That’s often a different story.
Betfair has the lowest ’bounce rate’ across the brands we analysed, and also has the highest ‘average time on site’ two key engagement metrics that have a strong correlation with high Google ranking. The site also performs well in terms of average linking page authority, suggesting the site is attracting links from quality sources.
Ladbrokes scores highly when it comes to on-page social shares, suggesting that while it isn’t hugely successful in attaining links for its content, it is at least generating quality content that is being shared across social media platforms.
Bet365 is a notable faller in our engagement index, having scored well in our volume index. This is due to poor bounce rate and average time on site, suggesting its content is not resonating.
Unsurprisingly, brands need to achieve a balance between their content quantity and content volume. Large volumes of unengaging content is a wasted resource. To turn content into a marketing opportunity, brands need to ensure their content engages and resonates with those audiences.