TRAFFIC
SPRING-CLEAN YOUR
SITE AND ITS CONTENT
FOR A RANKING BOOST
If you want to catch the eye of both Google and new players, you need to remove duplicate or
cobwebbed content and replace it with indexable material with the ‘wow’ factor, says Julia Logan,
SEO consultant at IrishWonder.com
MUCH HAS BEEN SAID in the last
few years about content strategy and
a lot of it is indeed very important.
However, most conference talks and
articles treat the question generally and
little of that sort of approach can be
applied to an industry as specific and
unique as online gaming.
Online gaming has traditionally been
one of the most competitive industries,
and this fact has had its impact on how
content is treated by the industry players.
First of all, let’s agree on what we
define as content. Generally, content
can be:
● ● text
● ● video
● ● images
● ● apps etc
At first glance, there is no shortage of
any of these types of content in the
online gambling industry. Game and
casino reviews are being mass produced
by and for affiliates. Video channels
are run by many affiliates and brands
alike. Most gambling sites are of course
very image-rich. And apps are at the core
of this industry — every conference expo
hall features countless app developers,
and every brand invests heavily in getting
new games developed or purchased from
industry providers.
However, the quality of content or even
the attitude towards it is an altogether
different story. Let’s take, for example,
the top 10 sites ranking for “online casino
games” in the UK SERPs at the time of
writing and analyse the word count of
each (see Figure 1).
The word count varies a lot: from 357
to 4,163 words. However, because those
numbers have been collected automatically
using Screaming Frog, they are very
misleading. In most cases, if a visitor
arrives at a URL with a 4,000+ word
count, they will not see a long page of text
— most of these words will be invisible
to them. The ‘content’ that Screaming
Frog just counted is in most cases just
titles of hundreds of games, out of which
the visitor will likely see only the few best
converting ones immediately (without
clicking or scrolling), and the text is not
even displayed on the page. This is at best.
At worst, the text is just some keyword-
stuffed filler squeezed at the bottom of
the page, below all the shiny banners,
away from the visitor’s eyes. Hence,
this sort of analysis gives us nothing for
our content strategy.
Figure 1: Content word counts for top 10 ranking sites for “online casino games”
URL
http://www.gsn.com/casino-games/
Word Count
357
https://www.casino.com/uk/casino-games/ 2,463
https://www.21.co.uk/ 1,130
https://www.pinkcasino.co.uk/ 1,199
http://www.coral.co.uk/casino/top-games 914
https://www.mrsmithcasino.co.uk/ 675
http://casino.paddypower.com/ 748
https://www.unibet.co.uk/casino 442
https://www.casinoeuro.com/en/
https://www.skyvegas.com/
808
4,163
iGB Affiliate Issue 65 OCT/NOV 2017
13