Data: Oddschecker leads the way with an event-focused keyword strategy

The absence of any major football tournament or athletics event means that we might not quite have the summer of sport that we saw in the European Championships and Rio Olympics-dominated 2016, but that doesn’t mean that Britain’s bookmakers have had an easier time in the online search market.

In fact, some big bookmakers have seen some significant drops in their organic search traffic year-on-year and, once again, it is the more agile affiliates that are deploying the right content to take advantage.

Oddschecker dominates the market, as William Hill and Paddy Power suffers

Last year, we reported how William Hill, Paddy Power, Sky Bet and Ladbrokes were all jostling for position at the top of the sports betting market, but in 2017 it is a very different story.

While William Hill and Paddy Power remain the leading bookmaking brands in the market, they have both lost significant levels of visibility according to our analysis.

William Hill, according to our analysis, could have lost as much as 9,723 clicks from organic search, while Paddy Power could have lost as much as 4,538. Other brands have also lost ground, including Betfair – which has fallen out of the top 10 most visible brands after losing 4,742 clicks.

That traffic appears to have been picked up largely by Oddschecker, which has seen its traffic grow by 18,419 in the same period – a 51.2% increase.

Other affiliate sites have also seen proportionally large increases in traffic. Freebets.co.uk is now in our top 10, after more than doubling its traffic from organic search.

Event keywords make a big contribution

While most bookmakers will naturally look to target generic betting terms, there is a wealth of opportunity in targeting individual sports, individual events and even individual teams and players as part of a sports betting SEO strategy.

Keywords within the ‘betting’ category (for example, “betting”, “online betting” and “sports betting”) naturally command the highest volumes of traffic, but these keywords are both few and far between, and highly competitive. While keywords in the ‘football’ category generate slightly less traffic, this is driven by a significantly greater number of keywords, and this is one example of where Oddschecker is using events and competitions to drive its visibility.

While Oddschecker ranks well for the major keywords, what makes the difference is position one for keyword terms such as ‘Premier League odds’, ‘Premier League relegation odds’, ‘Championship promotion odds’, ‘FA Cup final odds’, and ‘Premier League top 4 odds’.

While these terms may not alone drive high volumes of traffic, the lack of competition of these terms means that the brand can really cement its position in these terms, and then capitalise on highly targeted traffic.

We see a similar pattern in other sports categories. Oddschecker is in the top three for all of the American Football keywords within our sample data, including position one for ‘NFL odds’, it has 22 position one rankings for tennis keyword terms, primarily based around tournaments (such as ‘wimbledon odds’ and ‘french open odds’) or individual players (‘andy murray odds’ or ‘andy murray betting’), and in the darts market, it is the most visible brand despite only ranking fourth for the highest volume term, ‘darts betting’, due to position one rankings for all of the major tournament keyword terms.

What also isn’t fully reflected in our sample are fixture-specific keyword terms. These terms generate high volumes for a very small part of the year (typically only a few days) before volume drops to zero shortly afterwards, and this is where well-optimised event pages pay dividends for betting brands. Oddschecker, for example, uses highly optimised URLs for each event, whereas many bookmakers are still utilising poorly optimised URLs – usually the result of limitations within a CMS system.

The lesson is, as we have discussed before, to focus on content that captures the fast-paced nature of the sports betting market. Sportsbook is a market with an incredibly diverse range of keywords and keyword categories, many of which may only be prominent for a matter of days. However, regularly being in position for those keyword terms will pay dividends in the long term.