SEO Tracker: Oddschecker the clear favourite after the football season kicks off

The start of the football season is upon us and traditionally this is one of the key periods for bookmakers for customer growth, capitalising on new-season optimism and excitement, as well as getting those ante-post outright bets in the book.

But this season kick-off is one that has actually been a difficult period for the sector, as heightened levels of scrutiny, varied discussion on the marketing practices of bookmakers and lower search volume in the market have all had an impact on the level of activity in the search market.

The 2019/20 season is one that kicked off with the bookmakers under an increased degree of scrutiny. Many observers, both within the media and political circles, have started to question the role that gambling has played in the game. That has encouraged an increase in the level of self-regulation among some operators, with this year seeing the first season of the Remote Gambling Association’s self-imposed “whistle to whistle” ban on television advertising. Paddy Power’s much-hyped “un-sponsorship” of several clubs across the Football League and Scottish Premiership has been seen as something of a statement around the ubiquity of betting sponsorships in football.

Of course, online is still very much a key battleground for market share but even in that arena, the sportsbook operators aren’t having things their own way, with affiliate brands in particular taking notable market share and, in the case of Oddschecker, increasing their lead in the market for football keyword terms.

Based on the 319 biggest football betting-related keywords in the market, Oddschecker is the significant market leader when it comes to generating traffic from organic, non-brand search results. The odds comparison brand generates a visibility of just over 27,000 from those football keywords.

Oddschecker has demonstrated an ability to rank prominently for keywords across the entire sportsbook market but its ability to do this in the football keyword set is particularly striking. The brand has 436 ranking results, with 372 of these ranking in the top five positions.

The brand also has multiple rankings for various keywords across the sample. Many of these are competition-specific keywords (for example, ‘champions league winner odds’, where it ranks in positions one and two), as well as similar club-related terms.

The strength of Oddschecker is squeezing visibility from the sportsbook operators. The second-most visible brand and most visible bookmaker is Paddy Power, with a visibility of just over 10,000 – almost three times less than Oddschecker.

Paddy Power currently holds 119 top five rankings across the keyword set, compared with the 372 of the market leader. It does, however, lead the market on a number of high-profile terms, including “football betting”, “football bets”, “football betting odds” and “football bet”.

William Hill is the third biggest brand in the market, but the rest are left competing with a number of affiliate and comparison websites, including easyodds.com and profitaccumulator.co.uk, as well as the matched betting site oddsmonkey.com.

Lower search volumes reduce the opportunity and highlight the gap

One of the reasons for many of the brands in the market seeing a decline in visibility is the reduced search volume that we see in the market in 2019.

Search volumes for football-related keywords in August 2019 were 39% lower than in August 2018 and while this was arrested slightly by all-English finals in both the Champions League and Europa League, the lack of a major international tournament, ordinarily a key traffic driver, had a major impact on search volumes in the market.

Even though this reduction in search volume affects Oddschecker, it is also the brand that is most resilient to it. The scale of the number of keywords that the brand ranks on means that it is less reliant on those big keywords, with much of its 2019 visibility coming from keywords that are relatively stable in search volume from year to year.

Other brands relied much more on that high search volume generated by major international events, namely the European Championships and World Cup. As the football calendar goes through those fallow summers, the gap between those brands with broad keyword strategies and those with narrower keyword strategies starts to show.