One-track mind: Lindar Media talks life after Two Little Fleas

While sports betting and casino affiliates have been upping their M&A game in recent months, those operating within the bingo vertical have been a little quieter. So when Lindar Media sold one of the industry’s best-known bingo affiliate sites for £650,000 recently, it certainly made a few people sit up and take notice.

The decision to dispose of Two Little Fleas, which was acquired by Latest Casino Bonuses (LCB Network), forms part of Lindar’s ongoing strategy of shifting from affiliate to operator. “From the get go the mission has always been about clean SEO that yields sustainable and scalable growth by producing interesting and relevant articles which in turn resulted in an outreach buzz,” director Oded Keinan said at the time. “We have over recent years moved from affiliate to operator and decided we should concentrate our efforts at creating Mr Q; the first fully responsive HTML5 bingo platform.”

Now Two Little Fleas is no longer part of its portfolio, the St Albans-based firm is now focused solely on one affiliate asset: OnlineBino.co.uk. EGR Marketing spoke to Lindar’s head of acquisition, Phil Blackwell, to find out how it’s diversifying away from SEO and why a one track mind will enable the site to flourish.

Phil Blackwell, acquisition operations manager at Lindar Media

EGR Marketing: Tell us a little bit about your role at Lindar Media and what it entails.

Phil Blackwell (PB): My primary focus at Lindar is the acquisition of players to OnlineBingo.co.uk via paid and organic channels. SEO traffic to the site has increased steadily since we relaunched last October and we are now actively looking to grow our player base from other sources, including email, Facebook and PPC. In addition to acquisition, I also product manage OnlineBingo and I am responsible for the introduction of new features, content and general improvements for users.

EGR Marketing: How did you come to work in acquisition/SEO?

PB: I didn’t really know what I wanted to do when I left school, let alone what SEO was. However, I’d always admired the competitiveness of marketing and studied for a degree in journalism while working part-time at a local garden centre. I was able to convince the finance director that it would be a good idea to sponsor a company Sunday league football team, and as a result, I built a small website to keep track of fixtures and results.

This caught the attention of the marketing manager and I was soon optimising the main company website to rank for terms such as ‘garden furniture’ and ‘barbecues’. The speed at which I was able to watch my work translate to sales convinced me that I wanted to continue working online. I later worked as head of SEO for a digital agency in Hertfordshire, planning and implementing search and content strategies for multi-national clients including Mothercare, eBay and Carphone Warehouse.

EGR Marketing: How big is the acquisition team at Lindar Media? Are you looking to expand it?

PB: Acquisition at Lindar is split between our operator and affiliate brands. Many of the responsibilities have been shared between various staff members up until now, but we are now actively growing the team to improve our efficiency.

I manage all acquisition channels, including SEO, for OnlineBingo, and we have recently hired another acquisition manager for our white labels as well as a new affiliate manager to work across all of our products. We expect these teams to continue to grow as our sites continue to develop.

EGR Marketing: How has the egaming SEO landscape changed since you first got involved in the industry?

PB: I have only worked in gaming for the last two years, so noticeable changes have been incremental at best. However, it became quickly apparent to me that many ‘old school’ search tactics were still working for a range of competitive bingo, slot and casino keywords. There are various reasons for this. Firstly, everyone is doing them so Google can only rank relative to the competition. The second, I believe, is due to an inherent incompatibility of new search strategies with the public taboo around gambling.

“It became apparent to me that many ‘old school’ search tactics were still working for a range of competitive bingo, slot and casino keywords”

It is very easy for experts to champion the use of content and PR to build links, but until you’ve tried to actually outreach for a gambling domain, it’s even easier to be ignorant of the resistance you’ll encounter. This is why so many brands clearly resort to tried-and-tested (and grey) tactics, such as redirecting third-party domains, exploiting PBNs and stuffing as many keywords as possible into landing pages. Modern usability metrics such as user experience and mobile responsiveness seem to take a back seat, while contextual improvements such as structured data are limited to basic review markup. We believe this is where OnlineBingo is different.

EGR Marketing: What makes OnlineBingo.co.uk stand out from other bingo affiliate websites?

PB: When we relaunched OnlineBingo last October, we were determined to put our users first. Unlike almost every other bingo affiliate, our site categories are sorted organically using pre-defined sets of filters and sorters that players can tailor to their needs. That means that our new bingo sites category, for example, contains only new bingo sites – not year-old casinos, not untested slot sites – just bingo sites that launched within the last six months.

This does, of course, make the site more difficult to monetise in the short term as an affiliate, but we believe that the process of sending players to sites that are actually best suited to them is best for us and our partners in the long run. Once we reach an agreement with a partner, we commission a full review of their site and the (impartial) ratings that come back across nine different metrics, determine where it will show in our index. It is not actually possible for us to override the placement or position of a site in a category, meaning players will only ever see the highest quality result at the top of any list.

EGR Marketing: Why did you decide to custom-build it from scratch?

PB: We decided to develop the site in-house to give us the highest degree of flexibility to add new features in the future. We are free from the limitations and security pitfalls of using open source software, such as WordPress, and instead have complete autonomy over our code and confidence in the protection of player data. We actually have three core systems powering the site, which is ultimately JavaScript-driven for the fastest load speeds and to allow effective distribution of dynamic content across various categories and pages.

EGR Marketing: Is everything we see on the site done in-house? Or do you have to freelance some aspects out?

PB: The only thing currently outsourced on OnlineBingo is the completion of full reviews to a small pool of trusted professional copywriters. All of our writers are experienced in the gaming industry and actually play on the sites they review. Aside from that, all site development (front- and back-end), acquisition, SEO, design and news content is completed internally.

EGR Marketing: Why did you recently expand into casino? What is the growth potential here?

PB: Casino is really a natural progression for the site from bingo and especially slots. There is obvious crossover of players between the different games, something which we’ve seen reflected in page views.

Our casino categories are still in their infancy and this is a section we are actively looking to expand in the next few months. There are probably a higher number of good quality affiliates operating in the casino market than bingo, but we believe we are well-placed to compete once our categories are established.

The Lindar Media team

EGR Marketing: You have also just expanded internationally? Why did you do this and what markets are you targeting specifically?

PB: We decided to expand our offering to selected Nordic countries at first to capitalise on the organic opportunities arising from tighter PPC regulations surrounding gambling advertisers. This has been quite challenging to manage given our .co.uk domain, but the process has actually further demonstrated the flexibility of our system. We now have the capability to instantly translate and launch any site category in any location, within a couple of hours. This includes all technical considerations which are handled automatically by our CMS.

EGR Marketing: What other acquisition channels are you focused on with OnlineBingo.co.uk beyond SEO?

PB: As I said earlier, while SEO has really been our sole focus for OnlineBingo to date, we are now exploring acquisition through email, social and PPC channels. This is a conscious decision to safeguard the site against any further monetisation of the SERPs by Google, and to better target and retarget partner promotions based on member data. A recent upgrade to our CMS allows us to negotiate channel-specific deals with partners and report back individually on their performance.

This will provide complete transparency on the source of our players to brands and help to calculate more accurate ROI on particular campaigns. Personally, and perhaps controversially, I believe that the effectiveness of SEO to drive ‘free’ traffic will decline in the future. SERPs are increasingly dominated by paid listings and the introduction of initiatives like AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) seem to be designed to keep users in the Google ecosystem even longer.

SEO will obviously still have a role to play in acquisition, but I think its influence will probably decline over time and that some of the quality metrics currently applied to organic results will be slowly migrated and incorporated within AdWords quality scores.

EGR Marketing: Does the sale of Two Little Fleas enable you to be more focused on OnlineBingo.co.uk?

PB: Yes. OnlineBingo is currently our only affiliate site and is benefiting from the increased attention it has received since the sale of Two Little Fleas.

EGR Marketing: What broader trends are you seeing with regards to online bingo affiliation?

PB: In terms of site development, there is certainly a distinct trend towards adding as much content as possible on landing pages in an effort to gain greater relevance to target keywords. This seems to have now been copied by almost every bingo affiliate ranking highly for the most competitive terms and appears to be quite effective. I would suggest that, compared to affiliates in other gambling verticals, the quality of experiences offered by bingo affiliate sites is generally quite poor.

The majority of the reviews you read on bingo affiliate sites are commercially influenced and sometimes even written by the operator themselves. There is a definite lack of transparency and real innovation in bingo which is counter-productive for all parties. How does sending the wrong type of player to the wrong type of site actually provide long-term value for anyone?

“Compared to affiliates in other gambling verticals, the quality of experiences offered by bingo affiliate sites is generally quite poor”

We ran an April Fool’s day experiment back in 2016 where we pretended to launch a new bingo site, Square Bingo, on proprietary software. We gave away very little in advance of the touted launch date – except a few puns – and were essentially an unknown company launching an unproven site on untested software. Yet, we still received promotional offers from various high-profile bingo affiliates looking to feature us in their listings. I’d like to see a greater emphasis on player satisfaction and a more sincere effort to protect players from potentially dangerous or low-quality websites, even at the expense of commercial interests.

EGR Marketing: What comes next for OnlineBingo.co.uk? What will you be focused on over the next 12-18 months?

PB: Recent upgrades to OnlineBingo have provided a solid framework upon which to further improve our functionality and offer for players and partners. Whereas the past 10 months have been about establishing the site in the SERPs and the wider affiliate market, I’d hope that the next year sees us capitalising on the changes we’ve made.

We have a huge list of new features we’d love to add right now, but we need to remain careful not to compromise the quality and stability of what we already have. I am confident that we can continue to grow the site’s user base and increase our value to our partners, through bespoke channel-specific deals and unique data-driven campaigns.