What's moving search results?A snapshot of what is driving major iGaming SERPS

• Lead Blueclaw’s operations, including our Technical SEO, Development/Design & Online PR/Outreach teams

• Trained journalist, and have worked in PR, Social Media and Digital for seven years – worked in and around search marketing for a large proportion of that time

• Contributed to a number of iGaming industry publications, including GPWA Times and IGB Affiliate

Joel Turner Operations Director

@joelturner

BlueclawFounded in 2005, Blueclaw offers Content Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC) and Social Media Marketing; developing campaigns that build online visibility and sales.

Based at offices in Leeds and London, our team comprises of on and off-site SEO specialists, PR executives, copywriters, designers, developers and PPC consultants.

We have worked with a number of leading iGaming operators and affiliates for the last five years and continue to work with some of the industry’s biggest players.

www.blueclawsearch.co.uk

• Its been a tough few years for iGaming affiliates and operators

• Penguin and Panda updates coupled with waves of manual spam actions have left many demoralised

• Some big name operators are still labouring under penalties

• A lot of affiliates don’t know which way to turn, and many are nervous after spending years removing penalties from sites

• The tool brings together data from industry-standard tools Majestic.com and Buzzsumo.com –amongst others – to produce a comprehensive market comparison report that takes into account rankings, links and social metrics.

• This unique combination of source data enables marketing teams to see where they need to make improvements to catch-up with or overtake their competitors in organic search.

• Majestic.com is one of the biggest crawlers of the web

• Uses its own metrics to assess the value of domains and URLS

• Crawls over 2 billion new URLS each and every day

• Citation Flow is a number predicting how influential a URL might be based on how many sites link to it

• Trust Flow is a number predicting how trustworthy a page is based on how trustworthy sites tend to link to trustworthy neighbours.

• In Spring 2014 Majestic.com announced the launch of Topical Trust Flow

• Works out the proximity of a page/domain/sub-domain to one of nearly one thousand categoriese.g. Arts/Television, News/Weather

• Hugely useful in understanding a marketplace and what links a site should be obtaining to fit with competitors

• Buzzsumo.com is a relatively new social media analysis platform

• It allows you to discover socially successful content in particular niches, and social media influencers, bloggers and journalists on a similar basis

• Provides snapshots of the number of times domains/URLs have been shared socially across popular networks

• The tool creates reports with several major sections:

• Overview page• Market comparison Traffic Lights• Visibility analysis• Off-Site Equity Analysis• Topical Equity Analysis• Opportunity Analysis• Social Analysis• Conclusions• Analysis Key Phrases and opportunity

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• Since the launch of MarketScout Blueclaw hasdeveloped a series of reports exclusively for IGB

• These have focused on a number of markets withinthe iGaming space, as well as specific keywordsand SERPs

• To date we have looked at Forex, Binary Options,Bingo, Horse Racing, Poker, Blackjack and Lottery inthe UK SERPs.

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• During the course of the reports we have noticed a few trends…

• Exact and Partial Match Domains are still hugely powerful

• Key indicators of off-site SEO success can now vary widely

• Fresh, regular content can be just as powerful as link-building

• Building a strong social brand can positively impact search rankings

• Staying on topic is important when it comes to link-building

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Exact/Partial Match Domains

Exact match domains

• The influence of Exact Match Domains and Partial Match Domains seems to wax and wane

• Moz.com’s Mozcast shows the influence of them changing over time

• My personal opinion is that Google knows exact match domains are highly likely to offer relevant (if not always quality) content

• When other algorithmic tweaks exclude sites (like Penguin updates) the SERPs have to made up of something

• The EMD update in 2012 certainly did not kill them, but possession of an EMD or PMD alone is not enough to rank.

Exact match domains

Is bigger better?

• Bigger used to be better in terms of link profiles. More links = better rankings

• Now it more obvious than ever that high authority links are exponentially more valuable than lower quality links

• Looking at certain search verticals from a link profile perspective can be confusing, and show significant variation in numbers

• Link-building is no longer an arms race in the traditional sense

Link profile comparisons

The role of on-site content

• We see a number of affiliates performing well simply on the basis of the content they produce

• Fresh, high-quality content on an architecturally sound site can be a winning combination

• A number of new generation affiliates, who are new to organic search are performing well on this basis

• They have built big brands socially to market their content or offers – but paid little attention to traditional link-building activity

Fresh content

Social media impact

• A strong social media presence can now be a powerful ranking factor

• Expending time building a brand on Twitter in particular can pay off in search

• The influence of social media is a brand-building one, still hard to assess the importance of metrics around domains

• A number of newer affiliates have made their businesses on social media, but their influence on networks such as Twitter is now being felt in the SERPs

Social impact

Remain on topic

• We believe this does matter, if Majestic can make this assessment with some accuracy – so can Google

• The original incarnations of Penguin were very much focused around anchor text ratios

• Newer versions of the algorithm, or a future spam detection algorithm could well look far more closely at the theme of referring domains

• Links from completely unrelated niches, or which contribute to a pattern that doesn’t fit with the vertical should be avoided

• Does the linking domain seem as if it should have a relationship with your domain?

Remain on topic

Conclusions

• Even the most competitive verticals are open

• There is lots of opportunity – think about the limitations of operators and analyse the successes of other affiliates

• Google wants to provide value to searchers and must return something for queries

• It has also decimated the link graph in iGaming, meaning PMDs/EMDs, on-site content and social brand building are more important

• It may dislike affiliates, but they play an important role in the iGaming SERPS

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Questions?