TRAFFIC
This leads us to the issue of thin content
— since Google rolled out its first Panda
update, it has been targeting thin content
pages consistently and demoting them
— sometimes this can mean complete
deindexing. To the online gaming sites it
means you can no longer get away with little
to no content on the page. You have to have
something indexable, readable and of value.
Which brings us to the second goal of
content audits: what exactly should your
content be?
Content ideation for online gaming
If we have already eliminated the content
issues analysed in the first part of our
content audit, we now come to the point
where we really need to consider humans
rather than search engines. We now need
to answer these questions:
● ● What do your visitors want to see
on your site? What do they search
for, what do they talk about, what is
important to them?
● ● What is the ‘wow’ factor that would
make people willingly link to your site?
This is where it gets really complicated.
Most tools traditionally recommended
for content ideation fail miserably in the
gambling industry, simply because the
artificial manipulation level (in other
words, spam) is much higher than in
most other industries.
Figure 3 shows an example. BuzzSumo
is a tool typically recommended for content
research. It lets you see the most shared
socially and linked-to content in your
vertical, and research who’s writing about
your topic, etc.
But what do you see if you search for,
say, “online casino”?
Why would anyone share a casino’s
home page? Hardly for the quality of
its content. If a casino gives you
bonuses for sharing on Facebook, that
is exactly how that casino gets the most
Facebook shares. This may be classified
as smart social media marketing —
but it has nothing to do with the value
of the content.
Figure 3: BuzzSumo’s most shared content on online casino
But it gets even worse. If we look into
Twitter shares of some of the top shared
sites, some accounts appear to be sharing
any random spam or even have no shared
links apart from the one of the casino in
question (see Figure 4).
However, BuzzSumo has another
feature called Question Analyzer
which gives you a glimpse into questions
people ask about a topic on Q&A sites
and forums (see Figure 5).
Figure 4: Likely fake Twitter shares
Figure 5: BuzzSumo Question Analyzer
iGB Affiliate Issue 65 OCT/NOV 2017
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