Kasra Dash on Why Lazy SEO Is Dead and Brands Win

Let's say you're getting £10,000 visits a month to your website. If I came to you and I said, "John, you've got £50,000 to spend, would you rather try to double your current conversion rate, let's say it's at 3% or 1.5%, or would you try and get 20,000 people onto your website?" I think I'm I'd like to think you would say, "Yeah, I'd do CRO and try and make it as seamless as possible." Maybe I know that you're not necessarily like an e-commerce store, but you might

say, "Okay, I'm going to add in like Apple Pay because we've not already got that and we're going to add upselles onto the checkout. We're going to do X, Y, and Zed." And then boom. That's personally what I would do. >> I'm John Wright and you're listening to AffiliateBI, the business intelligence and affiliate marketing podcast brought to you by Snapchat. >> Welcome to the AffiliateBI podcast. Today we're chatting with Castra Dash who is an SEO consultant with Castradash.com Castradash.com and he's affiliate marketer and the founder

of the masterminders. Castra, welcome to the show. >> Hello. Thanks for having me. >> All right, we're going to jump straight into the mastermind concept because I've interviewed James Douly in the past and he was telling me how this is like a massive unlock and I've been following what you've been doing with the masterminder. So, what are people missing out on? And tell me what's behind these things where I personally probably should start getting involved.

>> Yeah. So, I I think the number one way to learn stuff is by finding someone that's kind of done what you have already done and asking them as many questions as possible. That that's kind of similar to how I got here today. I probably met James and guys like Craig and a few others in a mastermind in Liverpool maybe six or seven years ago now. And ever since that day, everything's just been leveling up, leveling up, like just grown to be a better entrepreneur, a

better SEO, a better affiliate marketer. So, I think that's the number one way. And I al I also think that a lot of people don't know this, but a lot of the content and stuff like that, it's kind of like gatekept online. Although there's a lot of free knowledge online on YouTube and stuff and blogs, there's also there's just that little bit of sprinkling magical dust, if you will, when you actually speak to people in person.

Like even you you'll probably know this yourself, John, a lot of the big deals are probably done at the bar. It's not done online. So that that's another advantage of actually going to conferences or going to masterminds and stuff. Yeah, that makes me feel a little guilty where a lot of the social events I tend to slowly back away from. I've just been in eye gaming for 20 years where the bars were, you're right, so much business was done there, but everything's changed where now people

are not showing up hung over the next day. And that's a whole other story though. though. though. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Okay. It's hard to not ask questions without AI and the state of affiliate marketing today because I get asked this all the time. What do you see as the state of affiliate marketing? Where's it going? Given your personal experience, your network where you talk to a lot of people, you know, about all these things, what's happening?

What I keep hearing is that it's getting harder, but for people like you, I'm hearing that you guys are like celebrating this because it's when people are not really wanting to compete, you're having more of the pie if I think I'm right. >> Yeah. So, there there's two sides of it that I see. A lot of people think that SEO, affiliate marketing is dead and SEO or doing SEO for affiliate marketing is just one piece of the puzzle if you think of it.

Like for example, you could say that the masterminders is an affiliate marketing network because I send traffic through to a hotel and I get an affiliate commission off of that. So there's all of these different nuances to affiliate marketing. Yes, there's a lot of people leaving the SEO affiliate marketing space, but there's a lot of people that are like, all right, I'm just going to double and triple and quadruple down on this space.

this space. One other caveat to all of this is if you are thinking, I'm just going to upload 500 articles to my website, get topical authority, rank for a load of casino phrases, or whichever niche you decide to go down. It's not the it's not the case. Like I I remember when I first got into affiliate marketing, it must have been like 20 2018 2019 and it was very easy back like in hindsight it was very easy looking at it back then thinking okay I'm just

going to publish maybe 60 articles get topical authority and I'm going to rank for best I don't know best televisions right or what whatever the industry is now Google wants to see actual brands they want to see brands that actually have have people searching for them. They want to see people that are actually getting a positive UI and user experience on the website. The days of just uploading a hot pile of garbage through to your website and ranking number one are very truly gone.

Like I I remember after the 2023 September helpful content update, I had just finished speaking at Changai SEO and I got a little bit of stitch for this, but I tweeted a picture of me like next to a pool and I said, "Look, do I qualify to be a holiday blogger?" Because the whole joke is like a lot of holiday bloggers haven't even left their house in the past four years.

is they're just publishing articles to all these magical places that they've never been to and they're getting affiliate from Booking.com and whoever else. So, I think the people that are willing to go that one extra step, they will be able to make a lot of money, the people that are just trying to hack their way around affiliate marketing, especially more so in SEO now, you're probably like going to ride a wave.

So, you might earn for one or two months, then you're going to get slapped. And to be fair, that's some people's business models. Like, I'm not a big fan of that business model. Mainly because I try to build up assets and brands to potentially sell them in one or two or three or four years time. Whereas some people, they're like, "Nah, that's not the game that I want to play.

I m would much rather build out a website that lasts maybe one or two weeks or one or two months and then it burns back down and then I'm just going to reload the gun and go again, which is completely fine. It's just not my business model. business model. >> Yeah, that makes sense. What I think to be true is that there's a lot of people like you just highlighted that people like the short-term gains.

They're not even thinking long term. But it seems when people want to build sites, like I get this all the time and I'm guilty of this. I did this a long time ago and it's one of my biggest mistakes was doing multiple sites when I never put in the quality effort on one. So there's always people saying don't put your eggs in the one basket. But I think with the new world of not just SEO but affiliate marketing, you actually need to do that.

It's are you going to create the extra >> TV article or are you going to actually put that extra quality into if you're going to be a travel affiliate even if you're not traveling it's do something that you're you're curating data or something. Yeah. So, I almost see it as if you could either spend or put all your eggs in one basket on a website, which might not just be SEO traffic, by the way, or you could spread yourself too thin and go or not too

thin, but go across multiple different sites and just go after SEO traffic. But you kind of need to pick your battles. So, let's say, for example, if I went and registered stone.org, registered stone.org, right? Would I want to publish a podcast? Yeah, probably would do because that's what you've done. Would I want to focus on SEO traffic? Yeah, probably would do. Would you want to go and sponsor a load of different events that your potential customer audience is at?

Yeah, you probably would do. Would you want to do PPC? Yeah. Would you want to do Facebook ads? Yeah. So trying to build the bigger picture here and saying I would rather build the brand and not just focus on SEO traffic as opposed to building let's say seven different stats drones that's only focusing on SEO traffic. And that's kind of what Google kind of wants from you.

Now I'm not saying that's the case for every single niche, but for the more competitive industries that is definitely the case. Like a lot of people would might listen to this and be like, "Okay, so Casra is telling me I'm a local plumber. I need to go and do a podcast, do PPC, do Facebook ads, do SEO, do email marketing." I'm not saying that by any means.

But if you're in, let's say you are doing a pet supplement brand, which might be very competitive. In that case, I would try to treat as much of a brand as I possibly can. I would look to build out an email list. I would look to potentially sponsor events. I would look to do PPC, SEO, Facebook ads, etc. >> Well, and now you've just added a couple things I know I need to be personally doing more of.

So, I think we did a decent job at Statone, but we always know that there's another thing we can do. And the idea personally of me actually adding another product or subbrand, it's if it's not part of the central family, it's I don't really want to build another YouTube channel, another Facebook channel. Reddit's trying to go, okay, what am I talking about, Statton or some other product?

It's it's been actually helpful for us to be focused on one project and actually sell our affiliate sites and say, you know what, we're not even in the affiliate space other than B2B affiliation. >> Yeah. I So, one thing that I would say to that, a counterpoint, I would look to potentially add products or services to Statone or to any business that I think would be useful.

So, let's say, for example, if your lifetime value of a client is, let's say, $6,000, right? If you can add a certain product or a service that would get them to let's say 10,000 and you think that's going to provide a good service, a good user experience to that customer, then by all means. That's just like business 101 really. So there in certain times I would say stay in your lane and other times it's not a bad idea to test out different products and different services.

services. services. >> Yeah, I think that one's just stacking like a perfect example. I'm giving you a couple insights where we've thought about building an M&A marketplace inside of our app because we actually had customers saying, "Can you introduce us to to buyers?" And funny enough, it's we have seat functionality. So, they can actually offer a seat to these people. Now, there's so many people in the M&A space.

Empire Flippers is a perfect example. Do we really want to do all the things that they do? like when you go through their their due diligence process, I don't want to build all these funnels and like NDA contracts and the buyer contracts and that's just a whole other business. So, I think for us, we'd probably sit back and go, let's turn that on, but let's have it so it's choose your own adventure.

Like, here's a link like here's a link to Empire Flippers with the tracking link where if they sign up to them, then we're getting a commission and we're still getting the same thing done. >> Yeah, definitely. >> Okay. And then you're featured in the I gaming SEO book and you talk a lot about don't trust KPIs like domain rating and traffic value which I already know to be true but I just kind of want to go a bit deeper because they can easily be manipulated and

you wrote rely on tools like link research tools but do you think there's an easy way to pass this as a highle info to an affiliate manager or should everyone be doing their homework? So, just to give you context, like affiliate managers, they're going to hrefs and they're like, "Oh, this is a good affiliate." And the same thing for link buyers, but you're like, "Wait a minute, this is manipulated DR." >> Yeah.

So, I've kind of been on the receiving end of like affiliate market or head of affiliate and stuff like that reaching out to me and they all they've done is they've just looked at AHF's like the vanity metrics and they're like, "Ah, yeah, this website's brilliant." There's definitely other ways. Like another tool that I'm I've been currently using is similar web as well which it tells you where the traffic is also coming in from which is always good to good to analyze because in some cases

like there there was actually I'll give you a prime example. example. There was a tech website that I was doing like consultancy for a couple months ago and you would look at it or any SEO would look at it and you like ah it's not getting any traffic. It's like DR12 or whatever, but that website was generating around 60,000 a month net like after all their expenses, after their hosting, after paying their content writers, marketing team, etc., etc., etc.

60,000 net it was doing, but on an SEO ground, you would think, ah, I'm not even going to bother like doing like any affiliate links on it or I'm not going to reach out to these guys because there's too small fry. But they were getting a lot of their traffic from Twitter and also Pinterest as well. So in some cases you look at websites on AHFS or Majestic or Semrush and whatever else and you're like ah it's not generating any leads at all but in other

cases it actually is. So that's why like Similar Web's quite decent for that. Link research tools is also good for like toxicity levels of backlinks. I wouldn't necessarily say to an affiliate manager that you should be using that. But yeah, like everything can be manipulated with a lot of the tools. Whereas if you're looking at at some point you need to say you need to just be be you at some point as an affiliate manager you need to just say look I'm going to take the

risk with going to I'm going to take the risk with this website, right? Because otherwise you're always just going to be analyzing stuff. But yeah, it's everything can be manipulated. So if you're an SEO watching this, don't just look at domain rating and a in ahfs and semrush. You want to try to figure out, okay, yes, it's got high DR, but has it been manipulated? What's the outbound link ratio?

What's where is the traffic coming from? What are the keywords that it's actually ranking for? And then also do a little bit of a deep dive of the keywords. Are any of those being manipulated? because you can also manipulate search volume which many people don't know about. So for example, you could like I I could tomorrow manipulate manipulate John Wright is the best affiliate affiliate p sorry John Wright owns the best affiliate program in the world.

Grab it now today 20 2025. So it could be like super long and it could say 6,000 people are searching for that. But we both know that 6,000 people won't be they might be. Who knows? But I'd like to say that 6,000 people wouldn't be searching for that per month. >> Yeah, it it's I don't even know if it'd be one. be one. be one. >> Yeah, exactly.

So, it can be manipulated. So, that's all I'm saying. Just do your due diligence. That's also one thing that the the guys over at who's the guy that you just said then websites. websites. websites. >> No, they sell websites. >> Oh, Empire Flippers. >> Yes. Empire Flippers do a really good job of checking to see if anything's been manipulated and stuff like that as well. well. well.

>> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> So, yeah, always do your due diligence. >> Yeah, it's something we're trying to do because we're building a tool that maps affiliates linking to operators using a tracking link. So, I know personally that a lot of affiliate managers, they they're not all using hrefs. Like, it's probably 10% at best. And that's even generous. And then when they have hrefs, it's like, how do they use it?

So, I know they're not always on top of this. So, I've been in the space where it's I'm buying links and I have these people offering lowquality links all the time. So, it's they get sales because you can actually see sites linking to another and you're like, I can't believe this still makes money. And today, it's still happening. happening. happening. >> I mean, with those guys, because I probably I could probably open up my email right now and it's 100 p.m.

in the UK. Probably had five of those emails already already with those guys. I think it's just a numbers game. Like I I honestly think they must send out like maybe anything from 500 to 5,000 emails a day and they're like their conversion rate must be like so low. It's like probably 0.003% 0.003% but when you're doing it at that scale it probably makes sense for them and a lot of them are like overseas and stuff like that.

So if they can sell maybe I don't know four or five links at $600 700 a day that's a really good earning in India and stuff like that. >> That's a career. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Okay. So, you mentioned that nav boost is important. So, I have an idea of what it is just from reading some of these books and listening to guys like you, James, and Carl Hudson talk about it.

So, what is it and how do we measure it for a site and deciding if we want to get a link from it, if that's even we want to go down that rabbit hole? >> Yeah. So, I actually done a video on this like maybe two or three days ago. It's going to go in like a course I'm giving away for free, but Nav Boost is basically basically the visitors that have been on your website.

For anyone that doesn't know what Nav Boost is in its simplest form, basically Google came out recent or maybe not recently, but maybe a year ago and said, "No, we don't use Nav Boost is it's completely made up blahy blahy blah." And then they got a lawsuit, which I still think they might be battling today. I I could be wrong in saying that but then Nav Boost actually got mentioned then and they like the Google CEO whoever was at court from Google's end they basically said

yes we do use Nav Boost. Now Nav Boost is basically basically it tracks the type of person that visits your website and also how long they visit it for what they do on the website. So for example, if somebody goes on to or somebody searches best affiliate status tracker tool, right? And let's say stats drone is number one and a lot of people click on that and then they bounce off and then they go to number two and then they stay on that number two result

for a much longer period of time. Basically, that's telling Google that Statone provided like a bad user experience on the site and then they need to go and find more websites like position number two. So then at that point, Google would basically penalize you and maybe drop you f from position number one to position number six. So that's basically what nav boost is. Now where Google basically got in trouble for it is how they got access to the data.

So basically a lot of people just end up forgetting that Google owns Chrome, >> right? So like >> they they own Chrome, they own the Chrome store. A lot of the actual Chrome extensions also they either own or they partially own or there's just a lot like data leaks where they can get access from it. Everyone kind of thinks Google's a really cleancut company and stuff like that, but when it comes to trying to get as much data as possible, that's where they get their data.

And on top of that, they also own Android as well. So they've got a lot of different data points to basically pinpoint, okay, this type of user didn't like this type of eye gaming website. Which type of eye gaming websites did they like? Okay, they like, let's say, casino.org, right? We're going to go and find more websites like casino.org to fulfill that the search results page of between 1 to 10.

So that's where they kind of got in trouble with with Nav Boost. And also another thing that kind of makes it a little bit more difficult for SEOs, Nav Boost is stored for 13 months. So let's say you got hit by a Google algorithm update. update. You would essentially or not in all cases, but in some cases, you might need to get another fresh 13 months worth of data for Google to recover your website.

I I'm hoping I've explained that in in its in its simplest form because it can be a bit of a minefield. Yeah, that's Navus in its simplest form. >> Yeah, you're right. I've learned from listening to you guys talk about this where it's like we do forget like Chrome, this is a lot of data. Are they using this? And it's just following you guys on Facebook, I've learned quite a bit about click manipulation like volume and then obviously the snav boost is important.

So, I've been saying for a long time that I think user experience has always been important because it's a weird signal for SEO. It's, hey, is this what's going to correlate for a bounce rate? If you've got a welldesigned site and a good layout, obviously with good content, I think you're going to keep people happy. That's the whole point. whole point. whole point. >> Yeah. So, this is like one thing that I kind of said before when I was saying like don't just upload like a

wall of content because nobody I don't know about yourself, John, but I don't particularly like reading 6,000 words of content cuz a lot of the time it's just mumbo jumbo. But if you're actually able to use certain elements on within your website, like for example on Am I able to share my screen? Is that okay? >> Yeah, go ahead. We will do share screen entire. entire. So there's a lot of websites that Oh yeah, there we go.

Perfect. So I recently redone my website and I've got just certain elements in inside this website where it just makes it like easier to scan read. So for example, I've done this article to do with the best SEO tools and we've got like certain elements in here where like people need to physically click. So for example, what did Charles float say when he wanted to when he was evaluating the keywords insight SEO tool, right?

So there's certain tools where if you're a user, you actually need to scroll down and you need to click certain elements. Now, I'm not saying go and hide load the content, but making certain that like you highlight important text, making certain that you bold certain keywords, making certain that like you've got an accordion within your content can definitely help. And it's also a lot easier to like scan read as well.

Like I just I personally just don't like big walls of content. Like I could have easily just uploaded this article with a big block of content, but if I don't like it, I'm going to assume that my users probably reading this won't like it as well. And this is like one thing that I see a lot of like eye gaming SEO sites do as well where they'll have they'll have a screen or they'll have a page to the best slot sites and you can very quickly

like filter through. Okay, yes, I'm on the best slot sites page, but I only want to see slot brands that only accept Mastercard. You click one button and then instead of displaying, let's say, 60 slot sites, it's showing you now 12 or it's showing you maybe five that accept PayPal. So adding like certain elements like that can definitely help with the UI and UX. Like I even myself, speaking for myself, like I've purposely clicked on to websites that I know have given me a good user

experience before because they've got like a good filtering process or maybe they've got like a nice readable list, for example. So just making certain that you're doing stuff like that can definitely help within your content. So when people say SEO is dead, I would say that lazy SEO is dead. But if you're actually doing like all this stuff, then SEO is alive more than it's ever been before.

>> Yeah. My my personal learning to try to like take what you said and think about it in a different way is that I think the role of product or product owner has actually become more important because it's like what you're doing is you're doing product work. You're like, how do I take this 6,000word content that's a wall of text and make it so it's interactive, digestible, and you're right, people scan before they read.

We know this, but >> for some reason the web masters keep doing 6,000 word. Like even if they get to 6,000, that's being generous for most of them, but if they do get to 6,000, it's Yeah. It's not fun. There's nothing exciting. exciting. exciting. >> Yeah. It's a long day for the reader. That's what it is. >> Yeah. So, continuing with the book in the chapter you did, I read that.

It was excellent. So, this isn't a question. It's just basically a thank you tip where I feel guilty. I'm like, "Yeah, I should be doing more of this." you wrote to use Google Search Console to find pages that you want to boost. So, ones that are they're close to the first page or maybe they're in position five and just do internal linking. I read this and I be like, "Oh man, I've got so much work to do." >> Yeah.

So, one piece of advice or one added piece of advice, and I thought of this after the book got published because a lot of people would read that and be like, "Okay, I need 16 internal links for all my pages." You want to internal link when it makes sense. So for example, on that best SEO tools page that I was showing you, I might be talking about a content writing tool and it helps with topical authority, right?

And I might say, okay, John Wright has this brilliant content writing tool. It helps with topical authority because it got mentioned by XY Z users, right, that I asked the question from. But when I mention topical authority, I might do another page to do with topical authority and then internal link to topical authority or I might have a little bit of context saying by the way if you don't know what topical authority is click through to this article and read it.

Whereas a lot of people again they do lazy internal linking where they'll literally just do controlf and they'll say okay I mention topical authority five times on this page. I'm going to internal link from three of these and it might not even make sense to internal link. So what you always want to make certain when you are doing like any internal linking work is it's actually adding more context.

So one website that does this really well is Wikipedia. And I don't know if you've ever played this game like I I got taught it like back in high school. It was called the Wikipedia game, right? So you could go on to any page. Let's say we were on the Wikipedia page for Spain and you could give me a person or a place or someone or piece of history and I would be able to get click through to that person.

So let's say for example we're on Spain's Wikipedia page and you might say Justin Bieber the singer. So I could probably say okay Spain's in Europe's in NATO. Who else is in NATO? Canada. Justin Bieber's from Canada. I might there might be like a famous musician's page that I can go to and then I can find Justin Bieber. Although you can't directly go from the Spain page to Justin Bieber's page, there is always a way to get around the website very naturally.

That's what I would recommend when it comes to like internal linking. Be more like Wikipedia. And also don't have too many internal links either where because then it just gets really confusing. >> Yeah. internal link for the right reasons, not the wrong one, which is I think most people are using the wrong ones where there's already WordPress plugins that will basically autogenerate everything. Like I want to do some programmatic internal linking, but only when it makes sense.

>> Yeah, definitely. >> Brilliant. So, I've done backtoback panels or I did one in SBC Malta and I've got one coming up for SBC Lisbon, which hopefully I'll see you there. I'm moderating the future of affiliate marketing and everyone's panicking. Like I've talked to potential customers where they're basically like not only can I not use your software, it's like we don't have the budget anymore because we just got absolutely destroyed.

So it's the question I get asked over and over again. What is the future of affiliate marketing? How do affiliates battle this? this? >> Yeah. So, we were talking about this before where before where I tend to see this as being like a gold mine for me personally cuz everyone else is, oh, I'm too scared to touch affiliate now. It's too up and down. SEO's been hit or whatever.

I'm almost kind of brilliant. There's more piece of the pie for me. So, that that's one way to think of it. But then not only that as well is let's say for example if I've got Casra Gaming, right? It's a slot site and I decide to onboard 50 or 60 affiliates to do reviews, to do videos, to do UGC content, what whatever else. One thing that a lot of people are now looking at is how to how do I rank my brand in chat GBT or

claude and stuff like that by having all these affiliates talking about you. So you should almost leverage the affiliate marketers to say, "Okay, there's been 42 different affiliates that have said Casra Gambling is the best slots provider or the best slot website in the UK." Guess what? ChatGBT, Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, all of those websites are going to be able to read all of that affiliate content saying how great I am or how bad I am as well.

well. well. >> But you should you should always be making certain that you've got affiliates like that. That's one thing that I'm actually doing right now for the masterminders. Like I I'm on boarding affiliates to say, "Okay, if you bring a friend, it's going to be you're going to get X amount because if you provide a good service, why wouldn't somebody actually recommend you to their friends?" friends?" friends?" >> Yeah, that's that puts everything into context like why awards are becoming in my opinion more important

as time goes on. Testimonials, reviews, user generated content. we knew that these things were important, but it looks like it's that's being amplified. And for some reason, I just see a lot of these same affiliate sites not incorporating any of that. They're just like, as you said, they're like SEO's dead and affiliate marketing's dead. And if that were true, I think we we would see a lot less of these conferences and I gaming, but we see more of them.

>> Yeah, it's Yeah, like even SPC's got like an awards night, one of the nights where I'm sure, what was it now that I spoke at? Affiliate World in Dubai does the same as well. Yeah, like just again it goes back to running an actual brand as opposed to just running a website. >> Yeah. And so I want to finish off by asking what do you see the future of affiliate marketing as it intersects with business intelligence?

I think it's going to become a lot more important. Like the thing is it's going to become a lot more important to the ones that take that basically start to take action today as opposed to the guys that are going to be like, "Oh, I've not got the budget or whatever else." Because again, once some of these guys, let's say for example, if we're competitors, right, and I'm the one that's being a little bit tight fisted and I'm like, "I've not got the budget." But if

you're going on board, let's say 60 or 100 affiliates all talking about your brand, it's going to be very difficult for me to rank in in Chad GBT and Claude GEO or what whatever else people are calling I just think is good SEO, right? But by the time you've onboarded all those affiliates and every one of them have maybe a video talking about your brand or maybe they've done blog content like review pages and stuff like that and they're linking back to you and stuff.

By the time I'm onboarded, let's say another 50 to try and reach it, catch up to you, you've probably got double that. So, I almost see that affiliate marketing, marketing, especially for the brands and stuff like that, is kind of went like back to zero, like ground zero, because everyone's now focusing on, okay, yes, I care about Google and SEO, but how do I also get my brand into all the chat GBTs and stuff like that of the world?

And it's like just by on boarding like 50 or maybe even not 50 but let's say just 10 affiliates talking about your brand that can definitely expedite the actual the time of you not ranking to the time that you are ranking in all the AI overviews and stuff. and stuff. and stuff. >> Yeah, I I think we're trying to do a bit more of that but I think we actually need to be extremely proactive.

It's I think we actually have a head start in the AI overview game where if you start asking for certain questions like a lot of our content is being ingested but I know we actually haven't put a lot of this podcast content into a lot of writing and basically fed it everywhere. So that's on the plan. What's your take on this concept where I think that conversion rate optimization is becoming more important.

So if you had an average site, you're going to do the things that you just showed with your site and it's like our personal dilemma. So, we help affiliates optimize their business. But people don't really seem to care about as much unless we're talking about a pain point of we can help you either make more money or we stop you from losing money. That's pain and that's real.

And like I remember just chatting with the Louis Grenier where he said when he was selling conversion rate optimization like people weren't buying it. But when you say SEO you're like it's still optimization. I think the thing with SEO is that people equate it instantly to I'm getting more traffic from Google. They're not even actually most people thinking optimization. So what's your take on this this challenge we have where in our case our TAM is massive but people are problem aware but not solution aware.

>> I have said this before on podcasts I I think I have. It's always a lot easier to double your conversion rate as opposed to double your SEO traffic. So, think of if you if stat I don't know what how much traffic stats drone get gets but let's say you're getting a,000 visits or actually let's say you're getting 10,000 visits a month to your website. If I came to you and I said John you've got 50,000 to spend.

Would you rather try to double your current conversion rate? Let's say it's at 3% or 1.5%. Or would you try and get 20,000 people onto your website? I think I'm I'd like to think you would say, "Yeah, I'd do CRO and try and make it as seamless as possible. Maybe I know that you're not necessarily like an e-commerce store," but you might say, "Okay, I'm going to add in like Apple Pay because we've not already got that.

We're going to we're going to add upsells onto the checkout. We're going to do X, Y, and Zed." And then boom. That's personally what I would do. For example, I think I probably spent about three weeks on the new masterminder site and I I don't do development and stuff, but I just wanted to make it perfect because I said if I'm going to spend let's say 60,000 for ad spend next year or sorry, I spent about 60,000 this year for ad spend, right?

I said we're going to double the amount of people that are attending next year. Would I rather spend 120,000 spend 120,000 next year or would I rather try to spend the same amount but have a higher conver conversion rate? I think everyone would say, "Yeah, I'd rather focus on the conversion rate optimization site." >> Yeah, I still believe it to be true. I think most affiliate marketers out there, they're, as you said before, there's a lazy SEO SEO, there's a lazy affiliate, and I think we're

starting to see them shake away. And now maybe for the long time conversion rate optimization is getting the attention it always deserved. always deserved. always deserved. >> Yeah. Like one of the So we work with a lot of different gambling brands in the UK and the ones that have a custom landing page and they're constantly split testing headings. They're con they're constantly split testing like colors. Like it's it's so silly.

like some of the stuff that they test, but they're like, "Oh, that headline that we tested, it's increased our conversion rate by 0.5%. Oh, that color, we've changed it from red to green. That's increased it for from z.2% to now 1%, right? It's all about stacking all of these micro wins." But if you think of it, if you're getting like, for example, we'll talk about Bet 365, one of the biggest brands in the UK.

if their pages are getting, let's say, 10,000 hits a day because it's Chelenham weekend, right? That's gonna stack up big time. Like all the little micro gains like the 0.2% there, the 1% there, the 0.5% there, then you times that by I don't know, however many days in the year, let's say. say. say. >> 65. >> 65. >> 65. >> Yeah. 365. Now, what I had in mind is like all the big events like you've got the World Cup, you've got Chelnham, you've got all that

stuff like Champions League and stuff like that. They won't be getting that amount of visits every single day, right? They might be, who knows? But let's say it is 365 times the 10 times the I don't know 10,000 hits a day times all the new affiliates coming onto that and send them more traffic, right? It's just ridiculous amounts of money that you're just wasting if you're not doing CRO.

And from from an affiliate that pushes brands, the ones that we like to work with are the ones that constantly split test their landing pages because those are the ones that truly care that. And another thing that we've not even spoke about is there was another set of brands that had like really good lifetime value. And basically what they had is they just had a really good CRM system.

So if I sent for example John Wright for to bet 365 they would make certain that or I don't know how they've got it set up but let's say for example John goes and bets on Manchester United to to win. Say goodbye to your money because they're doing terrible right now but let's say they were on good form. >> What their CRM system would basically do is they would look at what type of bets John's done.

So, let's say for example, John constantly bets on Chelsea and he's also he also does a little bet on horse racing every so often. Their CRM system understands and the next time Manchester United's playing, they'll say, "Hey, John, Manchester United are playing in the Champions League or the Europa League or Premier League or whatever." So, it will trigger you to consistently be spending more money with them.

And then if there's any like horse racing and stuff like that, it will also do that as well. So again, think of the why I was talking about conversion rate. All these clicks like that's just a text message that they'll send out or in some cases they might even send out WhatsApp message. That click is going through to a landing page that they would have split tested loads and loads and loads.

So if you're a brand watching this and you're saying we've not got the budget for it, you like are you truly a brand? Like you should be split testing. You should be doing it. You should have a CRM system in place. You should have affiliates in place. If you can't make it work with affiliates, bearing in mind, and I could be wrong in saying this, but I think affiliate marketing might be your cheapest traffic source.

If you can't make it work with affiliates, you're definitely not going to make it work with PPC and SEO. That That's just my opinion. opinion. opinion. >> Yeah. No, I agree. Something that I don't know how we're going to solve it, but it's everything that you said. It's like, how do we know that an operator actually has a really good CRM? Like sometimes the only way of knowing is to basically throw your own players through it and watch what happens.

Another example is there's a lot of AI tools on the market that are helping optimization within that stacking on top of CRM. So we're starting to learn who are these companies, but not all of their customer lists are available. One one piece of advice and this again just comes from experience. The ones that have really bad lifetime value of clients typically give out a higher or sorry a higher percentage of lifetime value to their affiliates if that makes sense.

For example, I think bet 365 is is CPA of CPA of 60 I want to say something like that. And then last again few years ago, not recently, they were doing like I think it was like 20% lifetime, right? The guys that have really bad lifetime and they've not got a good CRM in place, they'll say, "Hey, John, we've got 80% lifetime." Yeah, but your players only bet once.

How? Like that's the that that's what we found anyway. >> Yeah. I'm hoping to change that because I'll tell you a short story. long time ago when I was affiliate manager for a casino group, I lost out to number one position. So, this brand over here is giving me 70%. I'm like, it's 70% of zero. Let's be real. Yeah, you couldn't talk to them, but it was one of the inspirations for why we wanted to build our stats app.

Like, we were like, I want affiliates to be able to see the data in front of them and have it automatically rerank where you should work on things. And then the other challenge is how do we factor in lifetime value? There are a couple tools out there that will do it. So it's if we can come at it from all angles and just be aggregate any data, we'll do it with click ID level tracking.

We think that could be another helpful signal where there's so much data that can come from having your player separated where you can say I can see all of them individually. I can separate my whales from the regular traffic to know what is the regular player look like. How long do they stay? How much deposit time in between? The average deposit value. I think when affiliates have easier access to this, I think the space will start to change.

change. change. >> Yeah, 100%. >> Brilliant. So, I want to pass it back to you. How can people get a hold of you? And once again, thanks a lot for doing this. I've got a lot of notes and a lot of ideas of things I need to do and this is going to be super helpful for the next panel I have to do. >> Yeah, no worries.

So, people can find me on casual.com. on casual.com. I fairly active on social media and I also run the masterminders which is happening on June 24th through to the 26 in 2026. So hopefully I'll see you there. there. there. >> I think I might have to make some plans for the month of June for next year. There's nothing wrong with being it's going to be in the UK, right?

>> Manchester. I've not been, but there's a lot of affiliate marketing people there, so I'm starting to come up with the less excuses of why I can't be there. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Brilliant. Thanks a lot for doing this. I appreciate it. >> All right. Thanks for having me. >> Thank you for tuning in to the AffiliateBI 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.

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