How tearing down silos can increase commercial performance

For egaming affiliates, understanding and working with Google plays a key part of our business. To successfully acquire new depositing customers, it is essential to rank at the top of the Google search pages among attractive keywords in order to get users to click through to your site and supply traffic to your partners. To be competitive in this SEO game, you need to give the users a top-class user experience and make sure you meet their demands as this ultimately will lead to the best Google rankings. Where organisations previously assigned this responsibility to dedicated SEO teams, today leaders in organisations need to tear down silos and foster cross-department collaboration to have a chance to outperform competitors.

Google is definitely not a sleeping giant – it keeps updating and reorganising the way it crawls websites to determine which sites are to be trusted and which deliver relevant content, and hence which sites should be listed first in the search results. All of this is to increase the quality of their users’ experience. As a result, affiliate actors aiming to be ranked at the top need to be agile to act on any changes in Google algorithms and methods. However, what fewer affiliates might not have identified is the need to also optimise internal communication flows and work processes across departments to commercialise on the opportunities of SEO.

Having an agile organisation is key

This agility has always been a core part of the organisational setup at Better Collective. We simply do not believe in silos. We have recognised that to top the SEO game and commercialise on the opportunities on-site, the close collaboration between departments to share insights and act on these insights is essential for the business.

A concrete example that secured the aforementioned award is the collaborative work between our teams’ organic performance and digital intelligence on the SEO campaign that was set to optimise results on the Brazilian facing sports betting website www.sites-de-apostas.net/.

Recently, the site saw a +214% organic traffic growth, which, when viewed in isolation, seems rather impressive. However, the conversion rate for tips remained below 2%. To capitalise as much as possible on this organic growth, our teams initiated an iterative analysis process that involved an intense collaboration between the two teams and which ultimately ensured that new SEO and user experience elements were implemented, which among other things included an updated user interface. The results speak for themselves: Sessions on site increased by 45%, conversions increased by 135% and conversion rate by 62%.

The SEO campaign case thus proves that rather moderate UX improvements can have a radical impact on commercial performance. By working intrinsically together between SEO and UX specialists to improve the commercial value of betting tips, you can truly benefit from combining SEO & UX research.

Facilitating an innovative culture

Affiliates hold a key role in the egaming value chain that implies that we always need to be on our toes to follow the technological development. We cannot set ourself in a position where we are satisfied – if we do so we are outpaced by skilled and hungry competitors. We therefore always need to aim for a better performance and be curious about new ways of doing things. This is why the ability to facilitate a culture that fosters and embraces innovation, out-of-the-box thinking and cross-department collaborations determine whether your company will be successful or not in the long run. This is what makes this industry so challenging and, most importantly, interesting.

Jesper Søgaard is the CEO and co-founder of Better Collective, the world’s leading developer of educational platforms within the egaming industry.