TRAFFIC
This is the ultimate measure of whether or not your site deserves its rankings. The more times your site ends the search – as indicated by visitors staying on your site, engaging, visiting multiple pages and not becoming part of your bounce rate stats – the greater confidence you can have that your rankings will be protected and increased.
There are other factors that impact on this qualitative way that SEO is assessed – how old the site is and how well written and engaging the content. Is it topical and geared towards humans rather than algorithms?
Much like how at the end the second Bill & Ted movie, Keanu Reeves comes to the conclusion that the only way forward is for the heroes to practice and become good musicians( rather than the loveable slackers they spend most of their time being), SEO professionals must think like great content, user experience and media professionals to create legitimately great on-page content that will capture the interests of users.
Anything that disrupts the user experience, from annoying pop-ups, unnecessary redirects or thin content will be more rapidly punished as the world of search continues to evolve – and there’ s no time to waste in getting on board with these changes … even if it means undoing some strategies that helped build your business only a few years ago.
3. Mobile search, voice search and on-page engagement The mobile index is now the core index for Google, and according to comScore, mobile searches now comprise 65 % of time spent on digital media, with mobile searches now accounting for significantly more than half of all searches carried out.
What this means is that if you don’ t have a mobile-first SEO strategy, you really don’ t have much of an SEO strategy at all.
This relates back to the need for quality, and evolutions in technology, and the capacity and willingness of search engines to use mobile-readiness, responsiveness, user experience and speed as a critical factor.
This is as important for on-site performance as it is for SEO. If your pages do not load within two seconds, the drop-off in traffic on mobile in particular is phenomenal – and if visitors leave they can’ t become customers.
Even today, the Blueclaw team encounters operators, affiliates and service providers who have over-invested in websites that look tremendous, but perform poorly.
“ The changing world of search means that increasingly, that preference for beauty over functionality will make your SEO task much, much harder”
The changing world of search means that increasingly, that preference for beauty over functionality will make your SEO task much, much harder.
Though some aspects of technical SEO remain priority areas – meta descriptions, H1 tags and site structure and so on – the changing world of search means that a multi-platform and multi-channel approach is key.
That means paying close attention to the dramatic increase in voice search, both on mobile and on devices like Amazon Echo and Google Home. As these devices become ever-more mainstream, you can bet that optimising for them will become ever more important.
Making sure your site is understood, with correct schema markup, rich snippets and use long tail content to anticipate questions – in voice search we typically use more words or pose a search as a question e. g.‘ best betting odds Manchester United’ may be the search a user types in, whereas a voice search may be‘ what are the odds that Man Utd will win?’
Ultimately it comes down to thinking about potential users, anticipating their queries and making sure that your site is optimised for whatever channel they use to search for betting and gaming companies or services like yours.
4. Off-site evolution and link earning A much-repeated( especially by us at Blueclaw) quote comes from Matt Cutts, formerly of Google:‘“ The objective is not to make your links appear natural. The objective is that your links are natural.”
Links are still important for off-site SEO strategy and in previous years, quantity was the main factor – more links = better rankings, ideally with an exact match anchor text like‘ best betting odds’ or similar.
Continuing the quality-over-quantity theme, times have changed and the semantic understanding of search engines has moved beyond anchor text terms: search engines can figure out what your site is about all by themselves, thank you very much.
Earning natural links is something the betting and gaming industry is challenged by, and penalties for unnatural links have become an impossible burden for many, a particularly frustrating one in that getting links at any cost was previously seen as‘ best practice’. How times change. These days, the evolving world of search places greater emphasis on highquality, natural links and the shortcut to achieving them is to actually stop trying to manipulate the system and actually win coverage.
A diverse link profile and natural, high quality coverage with positive social signals is the basis of a strong off-site strategy – but you have to find ways to get the mainstream media and other industry sectors to link to your site. This is not an easy task if you’ re an affiliate with just a bunch of games or adverts on there.
Again the case is made for quality on-site content and, beyond that, content that is genuinely linkable. Content marketing, thinking more like a PR professional and strong journalistic relationships are the bedrock of this success – but not everyone is up for the challenge. Which brings us to …
5. The pool of( good) SEO partners is decreasing As a digital marketing and SEO agency we know very well that as SEO has become
18 iGB Affiliate Issue 63 JUN / JUL 2017