TRAFFIC
Content audit: what to analyse Content audits should have two goals: 1. Identify possible issues with the existing on-site content: thin content, unindexable content, duplicate content etc.
2. Identify the site’ s content needs for onsite and off-site use( ie what a site needs to be more appealing to its visitors, and what it needs to attract external links) Some of the on-site content audit aspects are really SEO 101 but I will repeat them here as many industry sites still don’ t get them right.
Unindexable content is one of the most difficult issues to diagnose. Many sites, especially older casino brands, use old CMSs built with no regard to crawlability and SEO, and the biggest problem with them is often that no tool used for on-site auditing will even identify the issue. It is not even unlikely that nobody in the organisation will even know that the content in question exists!
Do not just trust the tools— take a careful look at the site manually. For one of my consulting clients, I literally discovered this sort of content by accident. Content hidden behind JavaScript, shown only when a user takes some action and not linked to by a direct HTML link, is likely to be unindexable and therefore uncrawlable by any tools. Yet your site can have literally hundreds of pages of high-quality, relevant content that could have been helping you rank, attract visitors and convert them into depositing players. That content probably cost a lot of money to create— yet you’ re not getting any benefit from it if it can’ t be indexed.
Check your site’ s text-only Google cache— if you can’ t see your content there, Google likely can’ t see it either( see Figure 2). Check the page’ s source code, figure out why and make changes to eliminate indexing problems.
Cross-domain duplicate content is a huge issue for any affiliate-rich industry. If a casino brand is providing game reviews for its affiliates, they better make sure this is not the same content they use on their own site. Feeds, widgets, game rules and
Figure 2: Google text-only cache of a page
descriptions used on multiple sites will devalue the content on the original site. Do not expect Google to figure out the original source of content, because they have never been particularly good at it. Rather, avoid doing anything that is likely to increase the amount of your content’ s duplication by other sites.( Of course, there will always be unscrupulous site owners who will just scrape and steal other sites’ content and there is no real way to protect yourself against it except for legally copyrighting your content and filing DMCA complaints against perpetrators.) Also, if you are buying games from a provider and using the same game description as every other casino who buys the same games, this is also a source of duplicate content.
On-site duplicate issues are typically discovered during an on-site SEO audit. These could arise from the same content accessible via different URLs( eg because of the CMS specifics or incorrect setup). The issue is not unique to the gambling industry so I won’ t dwell on it much. But one aspect of it more typically seen on online gaming sites seems to be the practice of using the same title for multiple pages, sometimes even the same title for all pages on the site. This also constitutes duplicate content and can cause issues with your site’ s indexing and ranking. This can affect your clickthrough rate from the SERPs, so treat each title as a brief presentation of its corresponding page— make it relevant for that page so that your potential visitors understand what your page is about and would want to visit it. The same rule applies to meta descriptions— although depending on the query, Google can modify what they show as a snippet for your URL in the SERPs and it may not always coincide with what your meta description is. If this happens, Google uses onpage content or a combination of onpage content and the meta description. Hence, it helps to keep the overall page content consistent.
14 iGB Affiliate Issue 65 OCT / NOV 2017