iGaming SEO Guide 2025

Show: Revenue Optimization with StatsDrone
Episode: iGaming SEO Guide 2025
Host: John Wright
Published: Tue, 26 Nov 2024 09:57:00 +0000
Duration: 11:16

Speaker labels are a two-speaker split from pauses (host vs guest). Timestamps are `[HH:MM:SS]` from the episode audio. Light ASR; names and brands may need a pass.

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[00:00:00] John Wright: and welcome to the affiliate bi podcast today i'm gonna talk about iGamingSEO it's a topic that i've written a little bit more about in the times of Malta i did an article there recently which seemed to caught the attention of a lot of people i'm getting a bunch of people sending me DMs in LinkedIn and other social channels asking for help so i just want to take this time to just talk about iGamingSEO what it is look look out from a point of view of going well if you're an outsider that wants to come into iGaming what does this whole space look like if you're on the inside

[00:00:37] John Wright: and you want to improve your affiliate business or operations i'll give you a bit of tips and tricks on that but let's start at the beginning i've been a self-taught SEO for nearly the past 15 years i've had some help along the way with a bunch of different SEO mentors i've done some SEO consulting on the side and where i've been able to grow as an SEO is by doing this this podcast where almost half of the guests are SEO pros that i get to ask them any question i want and then last but not least i've been applying a lot of these SEO practices not for affiliate sites but for

[00:01:15] John Wright: Stadthrone which is a SaaS company and there's a lot of things you can kind of take in parallel about going okay if we're going to apply it apply it from B to B to B to C what does this look like

[00:01:27] John Wright: and there's a lot that can be kind of copied over for the people that want to get into the iGaming space one common thing i hear is that it looks too challenging you probably need a lot of money to get in there and in some cases that's not incorrect but i believe if you've got a good work ethic you'll be able to find your way inside so one thing that is clearly missing is kind of like a guide on online gambling the entire industry the niches or niches however you want to call it

[00:01:59] John Wright: regulations what do players play etc you can kind of reverse engineer some of this by looking at what affiliate sites are out there but personally i don't think this research is too difficult i mean the best thing you could do say i'm an SEO and who do you need to talk to maybe affiliates as your potential competition don't want to kind of share some of those insights but if you start talking to affiliate managers and if they actually see a potential in you they might actually give you some of their insights as to what are they seeing on the market like you know what what's working what's not working and what's trending you know we're we're seeing a lot of affiliate

[00:02:37] John Wright: sites seemingly get hit up by google but then there's definitely not a slowdown in the industry overall it's that we're seeing a big change in what google is rewarding for not just content but what's working and what isn't working so i want to take a step to talk about a couple things that i think are not quite working the way they used to back in up until a year and a half ago you could just create ordinary casino reviews, slots reviews, sports betting tips and kind of generic content like that that doesn't cut it anymore because everyone can produce this and you're not bringing

[00:03:16] John Wright: something new to the table what i do consider as things that are new to the table are products

[00:03:23] John Wright: forums user generated content and i even think podcasts as an alternative channel and to extend what a podcast is you could even apply this to creating youtube videos and streaming for example

[00:03:37] John Wright: you know i think these are alternative channels and i think what is a summary of what i see the change in google is that we're seeing google use a lot of real signals from people aka social networks as part of their signal for how are they going to do this ai content overview and give you an answer for something i think a lot of these answers are coming from people um that's why every time i talk about sites like ask gamblers and casino meister as i've done

[00:04:06] John Wright: recently people they get gravitated they're like why are these sites doing so well and why did a company like gen two say that this was an important thing for us to acquire in the portfolio i don't think it's a mistake i think was very calculated and i actually believe that forums is one still one of the easiest things to tap into yeah it's going to take a bit of time to get one off the ground but i mean i've got friends that they're just setting up reddit forums for fun and yeah it doesn't take long to get these things off the ground i'm going to pivot a little bit to talk about link building most people that i talk to that do link building in iGaming they almost

[00:04:42] John Wright: always say that you pretty much need to do this with the budget it's close to impossible to do link building without spending any money i do know some people that are very creative and how they build links and they're able to do it with no budget at all but it's pretty rare that you see someone that has success in with an affiliate site that has done this without any spend on link building usually if they they understand that they're able to get this off the ground without spending money on links a lot of the times they get they get kind of excited when they do actually have a budget and they're able to invest that back into uh into their affiliate sites so

[00:05:18] John Wright: i do think link building unfortunately it's still kind of like more a pay-to-play type of thing but there's definitely creative ways in which you can build links and i think that's actually what a lot of affiliates are missing out on um not in the the bad sense where it's like okay let's create another awards as a means of generating um you know to build links but i think there's just clever ways that people are just kind of overlooking and everyone's just trying to copy the the previous playbook that worked for everyone else i'm going to talk about a quick topic about products i don't think there's enough products in affiliate marketing in iGaming in particular and what is

[00:05:55] John Wright: a product well a casino is a product sportsbook is a product but what is this from the affiliate side um i think casino meister and ask gamblers these are products because one they're a forum which is a product and two they are also casino complaints which is a product and i think some of the things that are now trending up uh like if we just pivot and go let's go from the casino space to the sports space we're seeing a lot more of these different types of cool betting apps odds comparisons um like you're just getting products uh within you know a certain type of uh niche or segment and a lot of these products i mean they're super easy well maybe not super

[00:06:35] John Wright: easy but you can actually put these things inside of an app which again not only is it a product but it's also another channel for you to uh rank to rank on so in terms of like well what if you want to learn SEO or kind of if you think SEO is going to be an important thing for your career in iGaming whether you're an affiliate or working on a game provider or an operator side i i don't think there's enough people learning SEO and applying it within iGaming um but one place that i recommend if anyone wants to get started uh there's there's no shortage of courses and i think that's actually

[00:07:11] John Wright: a big problem in SEO is that there's too many places to get started there's actually amazing communities out there that don't cost anything but usually at some point you're going to run into a wall that's like you got to pay to play you got to kind of learn uh one place i'm just going to simply recommend as it's not the only place you need but it's the place that i prefer to send people to it's called IMG courses which stands for internet marketing gold it's run by Kyle Roof

[00:07:39] John Wright: there's some amazing courses in there and it's a great way to get started and learn advanced stuff learn some of the fundamentals of SEO especially getting comfortable with things like google search console which i'll admit i've spent minimal time on search console in the last couple years up until maybe the past year where i've interviewed a bunch of SEOs and they said there is a lot of gold inside google search console and a lot of SEOs they they overlook it when they really shouldn't so yeah check out IMG courses they call it i think the the netflix for SEO i think it's a great single place to get started i could probably give you another four

[00:08:18] John Wright: more courses but i'm just going to keep it simple and just keep it at that so yeah what is the the big problem that we we used to have in the iGaming space in regards to SEO we almost have it today but i think the industry is changing a bit i know in the past 10 years there'd be a lot of people that they became the people known for SEO but what i felt was they were the best at selling SEO but they never were people that actually had affiliate sites and practice it on their own so there's this whole ethical dilemma of like well you shouldn't be running affiliate sites

[00:08:53] John Wright: if you're taking customers or clients on because you're kind of gaining some of that insights but the truth is if you actually knew what you're doing you'd be i see an opportunity here you would definitely run your own affiliate sites so i'm gonna side with the people that run affiliate sites it's like practice what you preach um you know don't trust a skinny chef i think it's important to you know practice and you know build your own affiliate sites um sure it's um you could say there's a conflict of interest but at the same time some of these people can be very professional about how they work they admit a technical conflict of interest but they're

[00:09:30] John Wright: basically saying hey how am i going to make this so it works for you so everyone's not getting the same playbook um so i think uh there's now some amazing SEOs that um you know i've had the opportunity to meet to chat to work with that are in the iGaming space and i'm probably going to forget a bunch of names but i'll just list a couple of them um sean bianco uh from gain changer uh adrian borg from uh afx media uh victor carpenko from SEO profi and i know there's a couple more that i'm going to miss out on but um those are some uh go-to people that i really trust uh

[00:10:06] John Wright: dirk chambray i'm going to give a shout out to dirk um evana flinn um there are a few more but i won't name their names but i haven't worked with them yet so just because i haven't said them doesn't mean i don't recommend them but maybe that's uh their chance for for them to get on the affiliate bi podcast and have a chat about iGaming SEO so i hope this was helpful uh once again you can find me on linkedin we'll put that in the show notes and more importantly send me a dma dm if you want to get some help on iGaming i will not do the SEO work for you because i don't do consulting anymore but i'm more than happy to give you a bit of time and go what do i

[00:10:44] John Wright: think you need or who is the best person that i know would be helpful for your situation whether it's learning SEO or more importantly if you need to hire someone for a project and get something off the ground. ...bipodcast i'd like to take this time to ask for a small favor to leave a rating and review wherever you listen to your podcast that helps us expand our reach to rank higher in podcast directories and reach more listeners