Navigating Google’s switch from search engine to publisher

Interactive featured snippets, FAQ rich snippets, People Also Ask boxes – as affiliate marketers we often try to grab whatever piece of Google’s real estate that is currently being offered. But with a dominant search engine slowly transforming into a de facto online publisher, the key strategic question for many new on-page SEO tactics may very well be: “Is this a future opportunity or threat to our business?”

Affiliate SEO within the egaming search landscape nowadays requires an increasing amount of research and performance analysis. While conducting some type of keyword research to inform ourselves of search demand, many SEOs still stop at the meagre data we’ve got left called “search volume,” before starting content production. Some go further and try to understand the search intent behind the search terms.

But Google’s results nowadays truly form a landscape – one that is constantly shifting, becoming richer and offering new search result types. The landscape, if you really want to maximise your marketing efforts, needs to be at the centre of your research. If you plan to step up your betting tip coverage, Google News may be vital to reach good traffic levels. A bookmaker review without proper schema.org mark-up may appear unserious. A promo page that never gets to answer the featured snippet may rank highly competitively but ultimately never drives much traffic.

Ever since Google rolled out the Knowledge Graph back in 2012 and, later, the featured snippet, they’ve consistently racked up their content scraping and surfacing. Nowadays, that includes live match scores, sports news, whole team line-ups, promo codes and bookmaker comparisons – content that make up the bread and butter for most affiliate businesses. In many cases, there are still major traffic opportunities, but the data trend is clear: fewer organic searches lead to any clicks at all from the search results.

Interactive search

What betting punters see when they search in Google is an increasingly contextual, interactive and instant-serving platform for all queries. For affiliate marketers, a complex playing field has emerged, where performance evaluation and constant experimentation need to guide the SEO content strategy. For one query, merely displaying particular commercial or branded content high up on a search result page may fulfil necessary KPIs. For another, similar query, gaining a snippet may result in actual net loss in traffic for that same ranking page.

Failing to properly evaluate the landscape and the impact of visibility for different types of search results may end up harming the business long-term. Plus, there might be another good reason to at least remain somewhat hesitant, before stripping down your website functionality to jump on the AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) train or trying to claim all FAQ real estate in the SERPs. Many of the latest SERP features are often surprisingly unhelpful.

For example, the question “what is bonus code?” is not just a questionable use of the English language, it often shows up in a People Also Ask box for queries where the user obviously knows what a promotional code is all about. When Google decided to also add the FAQ rich snippet to its results, recent searches have become inundated with FAQ lists of various relevance. Are most questions best answered by 10-20 new questions?

With Google continuously pushing a new mark-up to better understand the content it evaluates for ranking purposes, and SEOs fervently catching up to supply Google’s growing ecosystem of services with a hope of gaining impressions, the potential for website or app clicks is no longer guaranteed. The complex scraping and display of content directly in Google’s services are here to stay, offering various degrees of marketing opportunities and risks. So, rather than just deciding for or against, say, content mark-up – maybe the bigger question for affiliate marketers in the coming years will be: how do we ultimately build products and platforms that attract loyal users, with few or no intermediaries?

Alexander Rehnborg is organic performance team lead at Better Collective.