SEO Tracker: Paddy Power the big winner at Cheltenham
In this month's SEO Tracker, Stickyeyes finds out who the big winners were in terms of search around Cheltenham Festival
The roar has died down and the Cheltenham Festival has passed having given us another year of great racing drama.
The biggest betting event in the racing calendar generates significant competition in online search, with both bookmaking brands, affiliate tipster sites, free bets and odds comparison sites all competing for both visibility and share of wallet during four days of intense racing.
So who, aside from Willie Mullins and Al Boum Photo after picking up a second successive Gold Cup, were the big winners when it comes to the Cheltenham Festival?
Paddy Power leads the market, overtaking Oddschecker
We took a snapshot of the search market for the 105 biggest horseracing betting keywords on the eve of the first day of the Cheltenham Festival. This gives us an indication of who was ranking where at the moment that the main volume of activity would have started to come in.
What it shows is that Paddy Power is the leading brand in the market, generating around 16,900 monthly organic visits from those keyword terms.
Paddy Power achieves this by ranking in the number one position for a number of generic and Cheltenham-specific keyword terms, including “race betting”, “racing betting”, “horse racing betting”, “cheltenham betting”, “horse bet” and “horse betting”.
Where the brand did lose visibility however is in the keyword term “Cheltenham races”. This is not a term that would necessarily generate betting intent but where the brand ranked in position seven for this term 12 months ago, it ranked in 16th this year. That drop was down to being out-ranked largely by news sites, with heightened interest in the event this year amid concerns that it may have been postponed due to potential restrictions on public gatherings.
This makes Paddy Power the most visible bookmaker by some considerable margin – the next-most visible bookmaking brand Betfair (owned by Paddy Power) with an estimated 3,536 monthly visits from these keyword terms.
Betfair narrowly leads a trio of bookmaking brands that are generating similar levels of traffic, with William Hill and Sky Bet generating 3,490 and 3,115 monthly visits from these keywords respectively.
Oddschecker falls behind on racing terms
Historically we have found that Oddschecker tends to lead the market considerably when it comes to sportsbook markets, but it seems that Cheltenham and racing have proven to be a more difficult market for the brand.
While the brand does have strong rankings, it ranks outside position one for some prominent terms, including, “race betting” (position 3), “racing betting” (4), “cheltenham betting” (2) and “horse racing betting” (3), coupled with Paddy Power’s strong performance, which puts it in second place for this section of the betting market.
The brand still finds most of its strength in “odds”-appended keyword terms, as well as generic betting terms and other sports-related terms – particularly football
Affiliates find the going tough
In previous years we have seen affiliates come in to steal not insignificant amounts of traffic from the bookmaking brands, yet they were notably absent in this year’s search results – perhaps a reflection of how Google’s EAT policies are better rewarding established, trusted brands and domains over affiliate sites that appear suddenly on a seasonal basis.
Only two affiliate sites appear in our top 10; those being horseracing.net and betting-directory.com, ranking just below established publishers Sporting Life and Timeform, and ahead of Racing Post.
Much of the traffic for horseracing.net comes from page one rankings for odd-appended terms not just for Cheltenham, but for other racecourses across the UK. Betting Directory gets a significant proportion of its traffic from just one keyword – “grand national odds”.
Paddy Power also ranks prominently on Grand National terms
Between this analysis and the time of writing, the 2020 Grand National became one of the UK’s prominent sporting postponements, but it is worth noting that when it comes to keyword terms relating to the National. Paddy Power’s approach was also paying dividends.
Of the six Grand National-related keywords with the highest search volume, the brand ranks in position one for four of them and in position two for a fifth. This puts it in a very good position for the big Aintree event should it be rearranged for a later date.