iGaming SEO with Sean Bianco from GainChanger

and this is like flipping the affiliate model on its head right to an extent because like you speak to any affiliate at least until last year and the model is okay I want to rank on a keyword get someone on my site and I want them to click out as quickly as possible because gosh darn it if they don't click out as quickly as as possible I'm going to end up with a lower conversion rate and I want them to select one of those sites click

go and then convert on that website and then it's done right and maybe I have some programmatic I can retarget them I do some smart stuff with telecoms providers yada yada but that was the model before but now we're going to a different kind of model over time we're going to an attention model and realistically I mean right now what would my advise advise B to Affiliates um so don't just have one asset you're going to have one asset do the best job that you possibly

can to build a brand like from the domain name into um the kind of authors and personalities that they have and cont Day ride I'm John Wright and you're listening to affiliate bi the business intelligence and affiliate marketing podcast brought to you by stat welcome to the Philip bi podcast today we're chatting with sha Viano who is the co-founder of Game Changer and he works on product marketing SEO affiliation and paid media and I know we got lots to chat about today uh Sean welcome to

the show John it's a real pleasure to be be here I mean we've I've been seeing you online for a while then we had the pleasure of bumping into each other in person but to share some words and it's great that we managed to get this done so quickly so glad to be here quick turnaround but yeah it was a great uh seeing you speak on various SEO panels recently I mean I've seen your name uh pop up over and over again so um what what

where I want to start with is the conversation we had where I was explaining the software that we work on and I was explaining the stuff we were trying to do in adtech and what I knew was interesting was that in less than five minutes you connected the dots very quickly you basically said wait a minute if this adte gets off the ground it could become like the Google AdSense of affiliate marketing and you know I knew you had a sharp mind when you got that

in five minutes and that took us years of iterating that idea and kind of going where can this go like what does this look look look like yeah on you know it's it's all about um just brainstorming and trying things Bing in a lot of things and seeing what could possibly work and it also took me back so I mean when we started Game Changer way back our initial intention was to make it a software company but we were just two guys without any funding building

stick and stone software as I like the C you know where you have to like go and mess with the code to get things done and we're actually building software which helped operators find Affiliates and contact them and helped seos find websites which could help them rank on Google and contact those websites and acquire backlinks from them so when we bumped into each other and you told me about what you're doing uh instantly it took me back to that stage at the very very beginning when

we're starting off um and yeah I mean back then we just didn't have uh not only the technology team but also the smarts U um and let's say Market Intel so as soon as you mentioned that this is something which you took on board and you're pushing it I'm like okay so I've seen over the years as we moved over to an agency okay and that's where we focus so we are an SEO agency hyper focused on SEO I still had that in the back of

my mind as I saw things progressing so instantly as soon as we connected number one I think that you're great guys and you're doing a fantastic job so I can only put my thumbs up for what you're doing on on STS drone it's it's it's great and I mean even back then there were people in the space I wouldn't say that they were I mean they were good at certain things but I wouldn't see that they were the best and there were things that I mean

even just from the conceptual point of view that can be done from connecting operators not with affiliate but with audiences right so that was the idea uh so there are those Affiliates traditionally how it work the speak to let's say any any operator or rather they're quite difficult to get a hold of you know and people have these great websites with loads of traffic forget just you know sending out sending out an email and getting reply it just doesn't work that way so that's when events

come in personal relationships and all of these other aspects so you know back then it was thinking about okay so we're going to be scraping to look at collecting data help identify backing that could have an impact on search engines and doing a lot of work around that at the same point in time we're scraping data about or rather collecting data rather than scraping right I mean from different apis uh from let's say uh different affiliate websites how do we manage to connect the dots between

what people are looking for in this data and how do we help them get the result and then you can start look to the audiences and when you're collecting all of that data you can also start looking into compliance and how that fits in but the really really nice thing about this is that when you have a lot of data which I believe that you have right now I mean you have a great power right now and you can take it any which way so you

can even start tracking as an example different data points across different uh different positions of Google and trying to understand different serps different languages and different keywords what's having having a positive and a negative impact on those particular keywords and Everyone likes to say they an SEO Guru by this backlink because it has a Dr of x amount so much traffic and so forth but in my opinion the only real source of information which counts is Google itself it's my opinion and I mean we're just

going into a rabbit hole here right but um when we started talking I just you know instantly came back to this this notion which I had a while back which was this system is broken okay so it just doesn't make sense and I mean I'm I'm completely focused on game Chang but this is such an interesting system broken system that you are solving right now you know and I mean you can speak for it I guess also but I mean the data sources don't match so

I imagine that every single operator that you work with has a different definition of what a registration is or a lead or qualified lead or a sales qual IED lead or an FTD or it ggr is it ngr you know so like I'm pretty sure that you have to deal with with a lot of customization and I don't think there's one size fits all so even the fact that you solve that problem which matches data points on your system as a central location versus multiple systems

in the background that's incredible um in itself it's it's something which instantly got me thinking that you guys are the real deal and and and uh you know when you represent operators and Affiliates and you're trying to milk the most money out of it effectively I mean it's it's kind of like the thought process this is a completely broken system you know it's a it's a power struggle of operators complaining that they're spending too much and they don't have profitable deal and Affiliates saying that operators

are screwing them over right so there's no transparency either so you know the whole the whole notion that Affiliates are starting to win or have been for many years introducing fees for writing reviews about your website then they start thinking about how to have positions that you pay for not just based on the performance and having fixed fees then on top of that you have to pay a CPA a hybrid and all of these things you know it's a free market but it's not really free

because it's relationship based right so if I were to go out and try and let's say there's a hot affiliate that's you know controlling I don't know a large portion of Theo Afric in a particular region maybe they have I don't know 20 30 sites I mean they pretty much control the market and you know know know sometimes it's very relationship based and that's prone to its own um risks uh when you have to deal with relationships um and and how those can be manipulated and

how maybe sometimes the relationships might not be the most profitable for the people who are managing them um but these things happen anyway so in my opinion that's just way too much human and not enough machine okay um and it's it's a lot of opinions it's a lot of structures and so forth and I think that's the value of let's say say say potentially calculating the market based on interest on a free market basis rather than on a relationship basis and then this is where we

started talking right because you also start getting a let's say when you have the control of the market and the flow of traffic and is coming up through a few different people it also opens up the and creates the opportunity for a lot of fraud also right um and these are all things where you know where you have I mean a lot of problems which I believe need to be fixed I I believe that you're handling them um and you're thinking about them but it also

creates the opportunity for a transparent Network where you can buy positions against other people based on demand demand rather than someone waking up in the morning and saying you can get this position just because I don't know you yet so yeah that's where we started from right yeah and it's interesting because you're talking about audiences we're talking about trying to make more data- driven decisions and you know I I like your approach to thinking about okay where am I going to get started you know not

necessarily an SEO but you start asking questions and I think a lot of people don't ask enough questions going uh what is the answer to anything like you know which percent of Affiliates are using a postback or dynamic variable or you know what are these interesting market segments or what's the player value estimation of of anything in igaming in different markets and I think when you start looking at these questions that's when you see companies uh come out of the woodwork like us for what we

do on the affiliate side or blask with um you know the marketing analytics side or even humble you know doai you know and just trying to go how do we get these answers and I think it's interesting to tie full circle into affiliate marketing going well what what's working today and what's not working I think we know what's not working is basic affiliate sites that have just review data or just basic data that everyone else has and then I I I like to think of the

way you think which is what problems can we solve what are questions we can answer these become products so I want to lead That Into You Know another Rabbit Hole or say what do you see is working and what's not working today in affiliate marketing okay so I mean I could give you the cookie cutter approach um CU like there is or I could give you let's say uh the broader approach okay so like when we're talking about my expertise it's mainly on mainly on SEO

I do have expertise in other areas also but I still do believe rod I still do not believe but you can see it visibly that Google controls not only a large portion of traffic that's coming from organic searches but just traffic in General on the internet so I mean if you're buying ads on websites where do those websites get their traffic from you know so people yeah there you go so you have people who are bidding on AdSense and other AD networks on programmatic advertising on

websites where people are going either direct okay they have it bookmarked but most of the time they first search for the brand in Google or another search engine so the way that I see this going is I and maybe I'm biased over here because I'm a hyperfocused SEO is based on what's happening right now in the market from the SEO side of things and I mean we do know that there have been a supreme amount of update going done over the past couple of month and

I mean it's quite interesting to see that in some cases completely legitimate websites which are building great eat have the right entities and authors legitimate people that they're not faking right um are getting destroyed the legitimate News website okay are getting destroyed and then on the other side the stuff that Google's fighting is starting to get promoted higher so you know I mean there's a a huge uh contradiction in the approach versus the results in some cases and I mean there is no SEO without I

think let's call it gry hat I think if anyone uh has search engine optimization in their title or in any kind of their skills effectively they are breaking Google's guidelines right um so effectively Google doesn't want you to manipulate its guidelines so if your pure purpose in life is to manipulate the guidelines uh sorry to manipulate the search results then you are effectively breach of their terms and conditions right and can get your website in some trouble but we're all doing that right and I see

that right now while some of the blackest tactics are being rewarded and others are being completely destroyed and legitimate businesses so I had a person completely outside of igaming you know just landbased operation had a normal website ranking on their brand decimated removed from the search results completely results completely and I mean when we're looking at why this is happening I mean goog hasn't changed much in 20 damed yes okay so they're pretty much stagnated um for such a long period of time and it's obvious

why right because their mission is to organize the information on the internet as best as they can and provide the most relevant answer to people's question and they been doing this for a very very long period of time and if it ain't broke don't fix it I guess but now we're been put into the situation where they're get starting to get panicked by other systems which are coming into place such as open AI such as perplexity and all of the other let's say um Target Target

compers and they're also starting to get you know put under pressure with an antitrust law case as well as quite a lot of use as quite a lot of interesting developments on the um on the closed let's say the closed environments that they've been controlling for such a l period of time so like we're talking about affiliate marketing what's changing if Google is changing if the place where people are going is changing if the way that um impressions are happening on website everything starts changing right

and when you start seeing uh when you start seeing a big entity like Google being forced at least in the European Union I don't know if it's like this in um the states but if you had to open up your browser and I don't know just try and search a keyword in your U um the URL section in the the European Union we're currently being asked which our favorite which browser or sorry search engine we would like to use to perform that search right so there's

a lot of changes happening and now suddenly you know this monster Google which has had you know a monopoly over the market of search of I don't know how much is it 90 95% yeah 95 9996 and it's uh it's dropping quickly though yeah so you know they have that 96% let's call it what it is it's a monopoly right suddenly the browser funneling is starting to change because there people are actually being asked I mean maybe um although I don't really enjoy the Google experience

that much I still do believe that they are the best search engine out there right now at least for what they do um so I still select them as my default search engine although now I'm starting to see a lot of different brands and you know what I might go and test them out and see who else is ranking and see what they're doing and even as a search engine professional you get blinded because you don't need to care about many other search engines you know

and 9.5 out of 10 people are going to one you know you might be wasting your time on the 05% unless you know it's really cheap and easy to get there and there are some volume so things are changing Google has been panicked um and they're taking some decisions that's beyond also like parasite SEO I mean I didn't see an update which impressed me on the parasite SEO side I saw an update which was a panic move it reminds me very very much of the old

days of manual penalty I mean nowadays if there's link spam not much happen right Google's algorithms have gotten so good that they can you know start defining velocity the quality the network and if you don't get impacted NE negatively they will just ignore you know what's happening so even link attacks although they still do work don't work as well as they did so you have this amazing monster with all of this you know data and data is King at the end of the day which cannot

figure out how to deal with parasite SEO and instead is going to coupon and betting websites or subd directors which are posted onto news sources and manually issuing penalty so this is not algorithmic accidence it's a show of weakness in my eyes not a show of power and it's definitely a slap on the wrist and a kind of like hey if you're going to do this you know there's a risk towards it because if we discover that you're doing it we might come and we might

damage you okay so this like kind of reminds me also of the days where you know they released the sponsored tag and everyone started you know oh my God we need to have sponsored tags on our on our content okay so you just wants to flag to Google what a sponsored post looks like so they can collect a lot of data of over this for a very long period of time and then can potentially get better at dealing with that so you know this is the

kind of thing that we're doing and you know just because I really want to get to the crooks of your question but I think it's important that we cover this first so on the other side we also have apple you know who have had for a very long period of time Google as their default search engine and I mean in the United States at least I do know that Apple adoption for mobile usage is quite is extremely high so that's a large percentage of searches which

are happening on the internet we also see that open Ai and apple are coming into a partnership also over time so this means that all of a sudden something which has been very stable over a very long period of time is starting to get disrupted now um from a practical point of view right now are you seeing a huge amount of difference in clicks and all of these different items if you have been impacted by one of these updates definitely right but if you have managed

to retain positions or win then we are not seeing as large of an update an impact right now um if you manage to hold that said it's kind of like you know you know you have a cancer deep down but you don't want to go to the doctor to scan it and to deal with it so over time this will start changing and Affiliates will need to start not focusing on fighting for keywords but focusing on fighting for attention and that's what we're going to be

moving towards at as time goes back I mean look John I see this as the future and not that distant future you know people are going to be looking back and saying oh my God you guys used to have search engine where you used to go and type a keyword and you used to have to go through like you know maybe it worked well until 2019 and then it started working badly and then instead of getting your answer on one click you had to start looking

at four different websites with four different experiences they had to figure out how to navigate those websites and read through a lot of information to get you know the little bit of information which is actually relevant to you like I believe where we're heading to is you know uh and we're starting to see this also I'm sorry I'm going into a really deep Rabbit Hole over here because I really want to answer it correctly I I believe that we're going into a a w Garden kind

of approach where Publishers are not going to be rewarded with clicks that much anymore and traffic to their website I believe that you're going to have a few domains which going become massive and they're going to be pulling information from ugc and feeds rather than authors I still believe there's going to be a place for those so we're moving into a Direction Where We have an open market based on Google you know on on how Google's feeling that they to send you a click um to

a closed Market where Google going to and other search engines are not going to want to send the clicks and I going to wants to provide information in the browser Al in the in their website everyone's laughing at what's going on with sge and you know ah it's suck they used to have a large amount of clicks were being served through AI content I believe it was something like in a particular kind of what what was the word um intent 60% and now it's down to

like 9% of the of the searches are showing um SG based uh based answers but yeah that's because they're learning right um and right now I believe that Google is moving more and more into valuing the user signals than it is into valuing the SEO optimizations and the content so I believe that over time is going to be rewarding people or rewarding sites or rewarding sources of content which have branded traffic which people return to which people spend time on and this is like flipping the

affiliate model on its head right to an extent because like you speak to any affiliate at least until last year and the model is okay I want to rank on a keyword get someone on my site and I want them to click out as quickly as possible because gosh darn it if they don't click out as quickly as as possible I'm going to end up with a lower conversion rate and I want them to select one of those sites click go and then convert on that

website and then it's done right and maybe I have some programmatic I can retarget them I do some smart stuff with telecoms providers yada yada but that was the model before but now we're going to a different kind of model over time we're going to an attention model and realistically I mean right now what would I advise advise B to Affiliates um so don't just have one asset you're going to have one asset do the best job that you possibly can to build a brand like

from the domain name into um the kind of authors and personalities that they have and content they write think about reducing your cost cost cost significantly um so integrate I'm not telling you use AI to replace people or to replace content writers but I mean don't ignore AI okay use AI don't ignore it um but also you know don't only go for those high value assets you know the ones which you invest money into a lot of time into you have a period of time where

you're not going to be getting much out of it but you build it over time and then you build a big monster which is which is monthly rational so that that can still work but if you're going to be going for more of the exact match domains for more of the let's say link building tactics which are um you know that they're dangerous you know that there's they're not going to have like long lifespan right so the aim of going for a good time for a

long time or a good time for a short time right you know so like there's a huge potential right now to be a crash and burn affiliate what do I mean by that so if you want to be an affiliate that purchases domains expired domains exact M loads content on them regardless of what Googs you still see this working okay load content on it um deploy 10 15 20 sites wait for them to rank for a couple of months do it extremely cheaply then they get

burnt into hell you have they're not recoverable but in that period of time you made the money which you needed to make and it was profitable and you're going to fail a lot more than you suive but you need to keep your cost under control so that can work also um but from my preferred approach and it's really funny John sorry I'm a bit but um when I when I had just started Game Change all those years back I remember telling people on a my first

panel I had ever gone on at Sigma Sigma Sigma 2019 guys start investing in building a brand yes you know and this was this was all those years ago and you don't really see the patterns emerging in the future and predict it because that's what we do in SEO we try to predict what's going to happen you just care about how you're making money right now and yeah yeah making money right now is good but making money in the long term is good all right yeah

I know the the concept of just build a brand sounds simplistic but when I went to brightness SEO there was a panalysts then she basically said when I'm trying to help my clients win business and in search said there's one type of uh competitor I I can't be over and over again and why what what makes them good and she said it all came down to branding and I think branding like here's my my recognition of you know what you see in the marketplace of going

like what works and what isn't work isn't working I think building a good product and you've already said this before it's like build the best whatever it is you can be build the best affiliate site I think if you build a good product it becomes uh an extension of branding so think about ask gamblers how many people search for Casino name ask gamblers I mean we already have it right now where you search for something plus Reddit I do this all the time like I'm looking

for the Reddit version inside Google for a question I have but this happens for Branding like we want to be in a space where people search for an affiliate program plus the word Stone because they're looking for the review we've done that's what we aspire to so we're already thinking you know that far ahead in the future and I think you're right like to fight for attention how do you fight for attention build a good product and it's got to be not more than information so

I don't know my answer is like eggs all your eggs in one basket or diversify I think the answer is you pick and choose but if you're going to pick only one uh you're right no one I don't think everyone really comes to the the filet marketing game going I want to be the best they want to rank for best casinos but they don't go out of the way to make the best best casinos article which is pure irony yeah and and now we're entering an

age where I mean I come from the software industry okay so I actually started off in SEO as I used to write user manuals way back for software companies and companies and you know I mean my journey was I saw that there was an opportunity to publish a PDF in pages on a site and entally entally manage it through Google Docs I had a plugin for different pages and I used to join everything so it was it was cool it was a fun project right while

I was like you know doing training and recording videos and then when I you know put this manual out as pages I started realizing oh look I'm getting a lot of lot of lot of traffic coming towards this manual and Sal started contacting me and saying hey we're getting a lot of leads uh where are they coming from and you know when you're talking to the people that you're solving the problem for with the solution that you're promoting and the product is good that's winning right

so I always believe that if you have a good product you don't even need to sell it it sells itself okay and as you said right now Google is the product that everyone is selling right because everyone is selling someone else's product and how risky is that okay um when you look at it on like a macro scale you have no control over Google most you can do is influence it so if you're entire strategy is not into the product you're building that can sit and

live by itself and generate repairing visitors if you're only going to survive by ranking number one on a particular keyword then you're in trouble because positions on Google are never bought unless you're paying for BPT right positions on Google are rented and I've ranked number one for thousands of keywords over my career I never retained ranking on number one throughout my career so it comes and it goes so it's going to fluctuate the traffic you need to have diversification of topics other keywords your ranking on

all of these other aspect so yeah there's a very simplistic approach that people think of when they're trying to tackle these kinds of games which is let me use Google's products rather than build my own and it's a good strategy because it works right and a lot of people are very very successful at it but I think it still works but we're still going to be working for much longer when you just simply write a very you know lean piece of content a website which loads

extremely fast it ranks on a particular keyword and then that particular keyword over a period of time might disappear it might come back then what's going to happen over time if you're just providing like content very inexperienced traditional CH and burn SEO over time Google is going to start looking at the user signals and I've been saying this for years right so the biggest success that the greatest success that I ever have SEO is when I mix it with multich so if I can't buy a

link from a website I buy a banner from that website if I cannot if I need to if I cannot um let's say get an uplip in my keywords because the competitors have something over me then I start pushing traffic towards it and I'm not talking about quick manipulation okay so those things do work I think they have a LIF span also okay um but I'm talking about real traffic over here a real proper strategy where you know you look at your compeers and you try

to determine what do they have which I don't which is making them successful and I can give you an example about the UK Market when we were promoting an operator a regulated operator in the UK Market that was a casino I at that point in time all of the people who are ranking on the top positions in the UK market for online casino UK Big B Bonanza big banza UK all of these kinds life Casino life Casino UK all of these kinds of keywords back then

actually had uh a Sportsbook platform also so they weren't just standing alone as Casino they were also sportsbooks they had in some cases local shops and the link profile I just couldn't compete with why because these guys had um footballers and you know I eventually end up meting meeting the guy who who runs this this whole this whole activity so they would find let's say washed up footballers right who are no longer no longer um playing they're a little bit older to uh make a comment

on the on behalf of the operator such as on behalf of um John beting right um I am going to say this and then get it published as a quote quote quote within a particular publication such as the sun the Telegraph and these kinds of domains which you know you suddenly have a gap in your profile so if you do everything perfectly suddenly you have a gap in your profile so you know then we had to start looking into ways of how to fill that Gap

when we don't have the product to be able to satisfy the market requirements and the topicality which Google seeing relevant towards the UK market so I don't know how it is right now but back then you needed to have sports you needed to have Casino people who wanted to bet on Sports would be cross marketed Casino people who would bet on Casino would be cross marketed Sports so it was an ecosystem so we actually managed to get there and we managed to get there by uh

teaming up with um some great PR guys that uh and and running some some advertisements okay some different let's say skills to casino and this is a beautiful thing okay that when you create a viral sensation and recreated a viral sensation I'm not going to mention what it is but I mean it it went it went wild you know so like 2,000 referring domains in two weeks lad Bible uni lad all of the best things right that's for the UK Market you could hope for um

not only that all of the traffic behind it to make it look not only more organic but to actually rise the wave and promote it more to get it to go even more viral and so forth and you know we managed to get that point in time a huge boost and start ranking at top positions of all of those keywords or registrations went through the rout TDS went through the rout you know the promotion itself got reated by some very famous people that you know just

you know got the brand out there on a global scale so when you look at SEO and isolation and this is what a lot of people do uh it works but you're playing by a set of rules like the formula one right so uh who cut the most fat off of their you know their machine right so the the the car itself and who can have the most power to weight the highest power to weight ratio and that that's what it is you know like hyper

competitive but then there are these secret which aren't really spoken about in SEO um which which which is a shame because some cases SEO see to work in isolation and if SEO you integrate with PR you inte integrate with um programmatic media advertising media buying you even integrate the SEO side with the PPC so like how many people and I I spoke to a guy like a month ago and I came up with a suggestion like okay so this is a new product you've never worked

on it you don't know what the conversion is going to be like but you want to start we don't have any market research or any reference point so it's not an area of expertise for myself or Game Changer and we're instantly going to go all in on a set of keywords that we don't know how they're going to perform so why not test it out on PPC first which is you know an approach that can actually tie the click to the actual result okay coming from

the particular keyword let's see where the money is online casino space it's something different is technology and then let's scale a strategy around something which has proved improve and to generate money so we're I see that a lot of let's say departments and organizations work in isolation the greatest success that I have Ino is when either I get all of the Departments to work together or when I take control of everything myself so I'm a monster when it comes to these kinds of things you know

I mean um setting up ad networks programmatic by myself um obviously having the correct partners and so forth volum to be able to track everything um you know and and start scaling and moving towards profitability know we don't get a banner we don't get a link from here let's buy a banner and like when you know you suddenly start building all of that up and you start tackling that multi-channel approach that's when you end up with that's when you end up having a great product great

promotion great Omni Channel approach then you become unbeatable right then you can say like okay this is going to be a little bit last longer lasting like okay we're not just relying on position one of best online casinos in a particular Market because right now our machine is faster than the other guys that's the way I thought I look at it yeah so I'm gonna go back because you said something that really got my attention which was you you said you have experience in creating manuals

and then you published it so it was a PDF I think you said you turn it into pages and then sales were like where are all these leads coming from and this I already wrote down as a note before you said it which is bottom of funnel content and funny enough we're we're a SAS company so what I've realized is that we need to do more and more bottom of funnel content and then trying to tie this into Affiliates I think not enough Affiliates think about

what bottom of funnel is and it's like that is a valuable Insight where it's low volume but the clicks that come through are like high int like it's it's sales that are people ready to buy I mean if they're going through this documentation it's well how did they find it and if it through search you've got a high intent user I think uh a lot of affiliate sites are missing this concept and going how can they go deep or super Niche or really deep in the

content to go let me get some questions answered yeah and when you when you obviously start going down this this rabbit hole which is another Rabbit Hole um it is correct and listen how crazy this industry is okay so you have let's say three major tools okay or let's say two right let's just say the ones that everyone on this podcast is going to know about so you have semrush and you have HF so these two tools are going to provide you a set of keywords

that either they've pulled from someone's search console they've pulled through apis or they've pulled through Google related searches when something gets when when something gets placed into the search so every time someone also searches a key word on one of these platforms it enters their database okay and persists data so if you look at an HF as an example and you see go put in UK type online casino and it will say last updated either 10 seconds ago or 10 days ago this is all based

on the data persisting from the last time that someone searched for that to make a more efficient product which doesn't have weight times so listen how crazy this is a lot of people are taking their entire decision making decision making process on which key was a Target through a tool which everyone else has access to is actively looking at and basing their decisions on so by definition everyone's going to be you know I mean by definition doing the same thing over and over again and expecting

different results is the definition of insanity yet everyone is looking at these keywords on the these tools saying Hey I want to build up from around this and then everyone ends up in a competition in some cases where no one wins John so like what we do is we really help people or rather what what I started way back when I was working with oper when I was working in in in going from technology and then I started coming into the space and I started working

for companies you know I started taking a look at like why are we doing what we're doing is there money in this particular keyword in this particular Market or are people just spending so much money because they're artificially inflated by their brand right and you know and and in some cases C Level are taking decisions because it looks like SEO is doing well but in actual fact is just ranking on its own brand name which people are searching for as a result of of all of

the great work that uh that that has been done with affiliates with promotion and so forth so I really started looking into you know like okay product and I I'm going to say it again and again and again so that we keep on having a consistent basis for this conversation because we can go into many different products but online casino okay so if I I'm looking for the keyword online casino within again UK Market position one I need to look at everyone else who's looking at

that keyword so everyone knows about the keyw right everyone wants the keyword if you say you don't want traffic from this keyword you're lying right the question is are you capable of getting there from the technical perspective are you capable of getting there from the organizational perspective so if you're we need to make update are you capable of prioritizing SEO once what is it going to take to get there what have people been doing there for all these years how much is it really going to

cost and I'm not talking about that's that BS approach you know where like sometimes you have people who go in and say you know like people pretend like they have a hotline to Google like their grandmother right and say like yeah you know h you just give me this much money and in two months you're going to get click it's BS you need to look at the data approach you need to look at number one the performance of the site or the operator of the affiliate

site or the operator itself to understand what the metrics are and how those convert into money at the end of the day and when you run this investigation if you really run it the way that we do um which is something I built from the ground up and I've perfected over like the past 10 years right um You can really determine at least if everything goes your way and everything works out great for you and there are no Google update and people keep on moving at

the same Pace they're currently moving if you already ploted out if there's money to be made or not and you would be surprised John how many times with these really large keywords which everyone has access to through the tools the answer is no if people are overspending and and it doesn't make sense because it's it's a it's it's more of a scenario of I'll be there to gain market share rather the gra Roi and that's when you can start looking at these other sets of keyword

and I'm not going to mention the name of the individual but let's just say not really a mentor but let's say someone who guided me in the past and this was the thing that they said many years ago in I gaming you know at least seven years ago even before I started Game Changer was like Sean don't focus on the big keywords focus on the longtail keywords which probably not a lot of people are landing on but hey if if it's going to cost me €

10 or30 to get a page live and I get one player every two months but I get a350 CPA on it's money you know and those are the kinds of keywords which unfortunately not all SEO practitioners are geared tackle why because seos are we we we think of ourselves as scientists and nerds um and we look at lot of data but what we tend to forget sometimes is the expertise aspect and there's I mean when I'm working on something which I've never done before I'm not

an expert at my first approach is not only looking at the data but looking at the expertise and finding the correct person who knows everything about that Niche and everything about the niche within that need right to be able to come up with the questions that the tools don't give us yes that we know are problems that people are looking to solve and that's where the money is yeah and that's what I try to do in affiliate marketing that's why I'm like let me do this

one thing really well and make up my identity I I I saw something on Twitter or X recently that someone was basically sharing like their own version of case study they said I had this ranking on Google and I removed a an affiliate link on that page or a whole bunch of them and they said their rankings increased and I kind of believe this to be true because i' I have a few friends that some of their sites suffered massively in this series of Google updates

so I've also read that affiliate sites have been kind of targeted a little bit more at the expense of e-commerce so e-commerce has gained more whereas affiliate has gained less do you think there's some truth in this where if if a site has too many affiliate links Google one knows what an affiliate link is and they're kind of analyzing your site going is this really good value like do you think this is uh important I'll go back to what we're talking about when we said like

what is the purpose of an affiliate site right um at least from the SEO point of view the way that studiat have been looking at this for so so long is and this is the Reason by the way why as gamblers does so well right because they're not just just just providing a click path right so so if you are creating a website which it's specific purpose is to rank number one on best whatever um you know best story to control based toilet brush best this

whatever it is right and the purpose of that website is to keep people on that website for as little as possible and click out into an affiliate link then the signals that Google is going to be receiving over time that it's starting to pay more attention to are going to be less valuable as a data point than if people had spent more time on the page maybe they managed to buy the actual product from the website you know so I see that Google is also implementing

features over time and everyone's seeing this right where they're effectively putting affiliate links and and and links to these different in the search result themselves okay so I would say that over time over time the concept is going to start moving in the different direction but what we know and even from the latest Google League which by the way I mean we could talk all day about those Google leag right but that could be another uh another episode easily I you know I mean the nice

thing about Google is like if you if you've been getting slapped in the face by Google for over 10 years like I have and some other people you know you there are some things that you know happen right so you know that as an example Google um does something with chrome right and if you're building pbn you might want to use Firefox but you know you sound paranoid like okay look at that guy who's saying that all Google products should be avoided yada yada yada you

know that traffic is impacting SE results you know that there's a trending effect on Google you know that all of these things are happening and seeing those leaks come out and actually seeing some of the variables which are related to those particular features although it's unclear how they worked and the source of information if it's correct if it's misguided you know whatever it might be everyone tends to know what's going on in their Niche quite well it's only until something leaks that we say this is

actually happening so for me to tell you hey look if you have affiliate links on your website you might get potentially um less rewarded than other websites which are offering specific product I would say do you think that your website is offering the best user experience CU we know that Google is factoring in traff and if the answer is no and people are just coming onto your product and leaving and there's no reason to come back don't only look at the affiliate links look at everything

else you have too many ads on your website is it's just sucky experience in general you know so I mean i' be lying to you if I said yes it is having an impact and I'll tell you why John also because if you look at how the gaming Niche performs versus the medical Niche versus the coupon niche versus all of these niches in different territories it's like how I see it is that Google has police and the police it puts onto certain certain certain industries with

a harsh of force depending on the they medical you you know typically if you're writing content it shouldn't just be you know um we're going to be providing people medical advice it should be from a trained professional right it shouldn't be from you know a a fiver a Fiverr content writer kind of thing you know so maybe that maybe they want that's for Google to do the AI content version of that but that's a that's a whole other joke yeah so you know what I'm saying

so I mean I mean Ian FN had mentioned a really cool uh result that SG had had provided um at at igaming next which had to do with you know something to do with drinking your urine is healthy or something like that from G so yeah look every industry every Niche Works differently and it even goes as far as if you're going to look at the online casino space in UK versus the Netherlands okay you there are a lot more if you look at the link

provided in the Netherlands link directories everywhere very low quality then you go into some Asian market and you just see you know just because you want to see what's going on over there and you see it's all pbn it's all the crappiest sit you can possibly imagine which are linking and purposely being linked back to the asset and they're winning you know then you have some people who do it the correct way also who are also winning so it's like one r one size fits all

you have Africa and in Africa in some cases there's like a clear a clear there's a clear hearing towards searching for brand versus searching for keyword so it looks like though people just aren't educated right all particular areas and the stuff which is happening over is absolutely mad also so I wouldn't say that hey these having affiliate site on your link is going to get you negatively impacted I would say like okay look at your Niche look at the language that people are searching in the

language that the browser say look at the location that you're set to okay and there's a there's a difference you know where Google doesn't distinguish h of flying between State okay and provinces so if you're in the states there's us and if you want to Target that particular State you do us SL Oregon SL Washington whatever right give that indication but it's like Google Sees as you are the United States but there are differences in the serps in different areas and locations that you're in in

particular different countries so since it gets so minute and it gets so specific to those particular keywords you it's difficult for me to come up with a generalization and say hey affiliate beings can get hit when in so many cases they don't you know so you mentioned before that you think that there's going to be maybe just a bunch of bigger Affiliates that have like a better product so if Google's making changes we're going to see some Affiliates shaken out of the market so if that's

true would you say that it might be important for Affiliates to be considering first-party data where you're kind of going okay instead of sending you all these like pages of links it's kind of going let's not just build a product to keep you here but let's go out of our way to go what can we do to earn the trust to get your name your email your address your phone I kind of think these things are going to become more important in affiliate marketing and I

want to get your your your takee oh yeah it's it's again the old model which is rank as quickly as possible stay there as long as possible get a click to leave your website as quickly as possible and make money to now having a product like so if you have a newsletter if you have sidebars if you try to get people to register you know all of these different these different concepts they kind of trade away from what makes you money so that's why people don't

typically do it because if you try to get someone to sign up and then you try to remarket them in the future it can be seen kind of negative as an approach just because you might potentially risk uh you might potentially risk number one that they sign up but they don't give you the right to Market to them via email so that's like one R um but more important guy would say create something of value value you know create something of value like and and a

tool right so I mean way back had built a a tool um that had helped people co uh which help people understand the price that they should pay for a link you know so you put in the domain it's calcat the Dr of the different G and it comes up with an average price based on a huge amount of factors that we had cooked into our system yeah that's valuable valuable valuable that's valuable you know so like you're not only going to have people who land

on your product but they're also going to want to um get value out of it and they're going to want to receive update that's something you have to think about and I think that right now if you're only getting value from search engines then you need to milk it as quickly as possible because it's in some cases so expensive to compete at the highest levels but if you're looking at like PPC in some cases if you don't get a conversion every three cricks you're losing money

yeah you know and you're breaking even up the three cricks so it's tough to see that people who have invested so much money and are only relying on the Google aspect of thing cannot adopt these approaches because if they do they could potentially be losing money on the amount of money that they've invested versus what they're able to gain outward but then there are other ways on those assets that people can can can generate um reason for for people to come back and I mean streamers

do a great job of this you know so I always thought what how great would it be if as an example a Jake Paul or a Logan Paul you know at to set up their own website their own gambling website and you can actually then fun a huge audience over there right and then which is effectively what a twitch streamer is doing or a streamer in general for the casino industry um and then build those assets in a way which are not focused on SEO only

where you have this kind of uh you you have to get to get performance out of it so you kind of have to take certain decisions but you also have traffic coming from different sources that you can treat differently and add and provide value to which I think uh compounds that actually gives you SEO power which yeah if you have if you're offering something of value number one people link to it so they reference it number two people will return and visit it again so like

you know I mean a m will have something called the M salary calculator right I mean how many people are m going for the salary calculator and checking their salary and how much money the government takes and I how many people are doing that while they're at work you know what I'm saying so um I mean user Behavior value um user signals traffic these are all things which are going to help in the future are helping right now and ultimately the longer that you hold like

we're we're in an attention economy so in Google we're just focusing on the attention of a search and intent and giving them the answer we're just trying to get in between that right that's what we're trying to do but if you look at like the typical attention that a user has like what's going to happen we're going to get off this podcast we maybe we'll have a chat with each other afterwards we'll go you know check out our s we'll go on LinkedIn then we'll check

our WhatsApp and then we'll check our um then we'll check our Skype then we'll check our internet systems you know our teams our this or that then we'll come back to maybe we'll go on Instagram like a photo go to some so you have been split as a person into a thousand pieces and the area that you touch brings out a different version of yourself which needs to be spoken to in a different way agreed so we are talking about tackling the search intent I want

you are the you are looking for an answer to your question but we're ignoring everything ignoring everything else yeah so uh last question is what do you see of the future of affiliate marketing as it intersects with business intelligence that's a tough one Joe yeah well again like you know I think it's a great question for you because I think you're a very good Problem Solver and my belief is that one of your skill sets is pattern recognition and I think you've already seen the patterns

well before Google's made all these changes which is you know build a better product uh data can get you answers to things um I I think applying that concept is actually you know one of the strongest insights can you build a product that answers questions or is data driven I don't think that like I can't think of many data driven affiliate sites out there they're more product first which is great but it's like how do you make an app or how do you make a plugin

I think these things are like the real like your experience is business intelligence in SEO which can apply to anything I think I think that something that I've never seen done right at least in my limited experience I haven't delved into this in detail is attribution modeling yeah I've never I've never really seen like a tangible attribution model which I can say I can trust um trust um and like I think there are two areas or would say three main areas which I'd like to see

in the future number one is I want to understand and this is what's I focused on for a long period of time and adopted I want to understand a realistic budget and what I get out of it okay and I want something which that trails that Trails over so not something which is a BS number and then we start and then something completely different you know I want something which is based on data that hey if we do this that and that we can expect within

the Border within the range of x amount of results so that would be something and that's on performance-based approach right so that would be from a bi point of view I'd like to be able to build out business plans automatically right and trade them aut about and then what I would like to do from the business intelligence point of view is I would like to trade the performance of the business I would like to trade the actual performance versus the business plan and why would I

want to do that I'd want to do that because if I do that enough and I have enough people doing it I collect a data set that can then be applied against benchmarking and then you can start implementing intelligence around the different data points to start trading towards what patterns are going to emerge and make and refine uh projection as well as a trading kind of understanding of like how it's going and then ultimately understanding like from the attribution side of things where the money is

actually coming from you know so I mean like from Game Changer point of view I mean building a brand is great because I mean most people that come to us uh or rather a lot of the great people that come to us are people that come to us because we are a brand we have had results over a significant period of time we're here to stay we've been here for a while and you know it's it's difficult to say like we got this customer from this

event or we got this A customer from this online form or this that and the other because someone comes and you know contacts us they might have searched for a keyword or might have been presented for it um and that might get the attribution or they might have seen I'm a tall guy they might have seen you walk past an event shake hands with someone say I need to speak to that guy um or they might have heard us speak or they might be watching this

podcast right or I recommended you to a friend and then they Googled your name and then the attribution is Google not from me yeah you know so that's that's something which I'd like to see um more of in the future let's say so let's say projecting so business plans versus actual versus actual versus actual performance performance versus understanding where the performance is really coming from I think you've asked yourself uh the next uh uh super app you could build to do this uh maybe AI analysis

of going what would the search and PPC value be what would the road map be what do you need to do what is the competition analysis uh what are like you know the page Optimizer Pros or the like you know just to be able to analyze a site and going this is what you're competing against from every angle yeah and and the truth is that you don't need to have you know a huge customer database to do that because all of the information is basically public

it's online the only thing that you're missing is the financial performance and that's where you come in John we could so we'll work on that big project so Sean uh thanks so much you're welcome to be on as another guest yes I know there's a lot of things we can talk about how can people get a hold of you oh yeah um feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn I'm always responding to all my messages um you can come to our website contact us

but please feel free to go through Linkin uh it's the easiest and most approachable good way to reach me okay you can do that I'll include all the notes in the uh include all of that information in the show notes and it's gamechanger.com as well Sean thank you so much for doing this thank you so much John we appreciate your time thank you for tuning in to the affiliate bi podcast 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