TRAFFIC
THE CONSTANTLY CHANGING WORLD OF SEARCH
Blueclaw’ s marketing director Martin Calvert looks at the five key ways SEO has evolved for iGB Affiliate, and what betting and gaming marketers need to do to keep pace.
SEO IS CONSTANTLY CHANGING … but the nature of that change is more evolution than revolution.
● SEO used to be mostly about optimising your on-page content, and having an off-page strategy that resulted in inbound links.
● SEO is currently mostly about optimising your on-page content, and having an off-page strategy that results in inbound links.
The difference is what we mean these days by optimising and strategy, and betting and gaming professionals need to adjust and evolve their approaches accordingly.
In terms of these changes being an evolution I mean that SEO professionals know, more or less, what the future holds: search engines will become better at refining and enforcing existing on and off-site quality standards and the pace of technological change will continually reconfirm that mobile and voice search is now mainstream.
Let’ s look at the five key ways SEO has evolved, and what must be done by betting and gaming marketers to keep pace:
1. Algorithm updates, machine learning and semantic search engine sophistication OK. That’ s a bit of a mouthful. The point is, most betting and gaming marketers are keenly aware of the impact that search engine algorithms can have on their rankings but increasingly these huge updates will be replaced by a focus on moment-to-moment search engine learning and refinements.
In an industry that has had its share of attempts at achieving‘ quick wins’ through dodgy methodologies, it is now widely understood that the days of rampant, unnatural link-building and keyword stuffing are over.
The real evolution has arrived in terms of a move away from seismic, irregular algorithm updates that throw everything into chaos.
With increasing levels of sophistication, computing power and machine learning, sites will be assessed on a continual basis by search engines, with penalties and rewards happening in close to real-time.
On-page optimisation still matters, but the changing world of search means moving beyond mapping a few keywords to one URL and then tweaking the standard page elements( titles, meta description, heading tags, body text content and the like) for associated keywords.
Now search engines‘ think’ beyond just the text you have on the page and can make associations between the terms you use in your content, and related terms that are not even mentioned.
For users, this means they don’ t need to search using every permutation of a query and that there’ s a decent chance a search for‘ top bingo site’ will return results for‘ best bingo site’ as the search engine knows‘ top’ and‘ best’ are comparable terms using semantic understanding.
This should in turn( kind of) make SEO a bit easier in that it frees SEO professionals to think more like content professionals and write great material aimed at visitors rather than gaming the algorithm, aware that with great content can unlock rankings for a wider range of keywords than would ever be achieved in the old days of SEO.
This is all good news for the operators and affiliates who pay close attention to Google’ s guidelines while also staying up to date about how to present themselves in the best possible way in terms of SEO.
This leads to the next stage of evolution – quality over quantity, and the user experience.
“ Your goal as a betting and gaming professional is to ensure that your website answers the question asked by the user i. e. does the page end the search?”
2. Qualitative SEO, ending the search and user experience Google’ s main goal is to make money. We all know that.
The company is keenly aware that, as dominant as it now is, that can be broken if users start to trust the site less. Google is in the business of providing the right answers for search queries, and if that doesn’ t happen, people may very well be open to an alternative.
So. That means that when a user clicks on a link in the search engine results page, visits your site, decides it’ s not for them and returns to the SERPS, Google is being told that it’ s providing the wrong answer.
As the speed with which Google evaluates quality increases, the sooner we’ ll see sites lose rankings in response to being the‘ wrong answer’ for searches.
Your goal as a betting and gaming professional is to ensure that your website answers the question asked by the user, i. e. does the page end the search?
iGB Affiliate Issue 63 JUN / JUL 2017
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