Two of the most popular questions SOFTSWISS managers are asked by potential clients are “How to make my online casino competitive?” and “When will my casino start bringing profit?”. Indeed, promoting a newly launched online casino is not exactly a ‘piece of cake’.
Most online casino operators are painfully aware that acquiring new users requires a hefty marketing budget. Few choose to give due attention to optimising their iGaming website for organic traffic and instead opt to pour their budget into other marketing strategies or tools.
Getting players to find you organically instead of paid targeting is still a great option – mostly through search engine optimisation.
With a content management system (CMS) that offers more advanced SEO (search engine optimisation) capabilities for an iGaming brand, operators can reinforce organic traffic as a player acquisition channel. Below is an outline of how the SOFTSWISS Casino Platform can help iGaming operators and casino websites with SEO and organic user acquisition.
Why is Gambling SEO One of the Best Options for Acquiring New Users?
Implementing an SEO strategy to start or grow your iGaming business is the most cost-effective option, here is why:
What is SEO and What You Should Consider?
SEO is responsible for the organic growth of your position in search engine results pages (SERPs) such as Google, Bing, and others. Proper use of SEO will ensure that your business appears at the top of the search results when users make Google searches related to what your company offers.
Carrying out SEO for gambling sites is highly advantageous. It boosts your casino or sports betting brand, attracting players who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer. However, SEO also entails several factors that should be considered before planning and implementing the strategy.
- SEO for online casinos and betting sites is arguably one of the most complex and long-term strategies available. Don’t expect immediate results.
- Online casino SEO starts with understanding where your target audience is. It is vital to correctly define the countries or regions in which your site will be promoted in. After that SEO experts will analyse the demand in the region and create a semantic core consisting of keywords most commonly used in search queries.
- SEO as a process does not guarantee profit, though it ultimately does help make your site more noticeable and competitive.
Rushing with SEO for iGaming websites at any cost is not always safe and can have the opposite effect – the website can be downgraded or outright banned by search engines. The explanation is simple: search engines’ first priority is to serve the most accurate results, and when they suspect someone of manipulating their algorithms in a bid to move up the ranks, the punishment hits hard.
SOFTSWISS CMS
The SOFTSWISS Casino Platform comes with a built-in content management system. Like most traditional CMS systems, it allows operators to change content, create new pages and manage media. Moreover, it allows operators to adjust crucial SEO components such as meta titles, meta descriptions, headings, SEO text blocks, internal linking and page slugs.
The SOFTSWISS Sportsbook software also comes with a built-in content management system that optimises the implementation of an on-site SEO strategy. The Sportsbook Platform comes with a robust CMS that allows operators to customise the frontend of their website and includes all the features necessary for good SEO practices. It can also integrate with a number of other CMS services.
Meta Titles
Also known as the title tag, the meta title is the text that appears in, if you had not guessed it by now, the title of the page. It is also the text you see as the title of the search result on the search engine results page.
Apart from being a way to present information about the page, the meta title also signals to search engine robots what your page is about and what purpose it serves based on the keywords used in the title tag.
Meta Descriptions
Meta description tags are brief text snippets that provide additional information on a SERP. These snippets expand on the page title and motivate users to engage with the search results.
Headings
Splitting the content on a web page into logical paragraphs with their own headings gives your content structure and increases readability. Placing logical heading tags via the SOFTSWISS CMS helps website crawlers identify the topics of paragraphs and see the context of your pages.
SEO Text Blocks
Text blocks can be used to segment information into logical chunks, format and style their content be it to create a simple paragraph of text or a more complex FAQ block. Web crawlers will analyse and use your copy to determine how it responds to search queries.
SEO text blocks are best used on Game Pages to attract additional organic traffic from SERPs. More about Game Pages below.
Internal Linking
Through the integral content management system operators and their SEO professionals can set up links between internal pages. Internal linking is a key optimisation tool that helps with website navigation.
Search engines will use internal links to single out important website pages, as well as to better understand the structure of your website. Naturally, this can have significant benefits for page ranking and traffic generation to high-value pages.
Page Slug
Online casinos will usually offer different sorting options when it comes to their game offering. This can be in the form of game categories or division of games per gaming studio. After all, many players know what games they want to play and need a quick way to find them.
Using the SOFTSWISS CMS operators can create dedicated pages based on a particular Game provider or game category. More importantly, they can craft relevant and friendly URLs that have a good chance of ranking in search engines and being easily found by players.
How the Back Office Helps SEO for iGaming Websites
A typical casino will use thousands of game pages – dedicated pages where a casino game loads via an iframe from the game provider’s server – with little or no regard to its SEO potential.
Savvy operators, on the other hand, rely on SEO tactics that help bring organic traffic to game pages for an added chance to convert visitors into players.
The SOFTSWISS Casino Platform back office features a separate module dedicated to game management – Games. Besides being the place where operators manage game currencies, bonus contributions, and game sorting, this will also be the module they use to alter game descriptions.
Game descriptions fill SEO blocks for selected games. It is the text about the game that is shown to the player and usually appears on a game page. Game descriptions can be displayed to a player in any language configured on the website.
One way to utilise a Game Page is to craft content that adds value to popular games that have a chance of being found via search engine queries. Of course, it is up to the operator and their SEO team to figure out which long-tail keywords to optimise for.
To enable additional SEO tags or create game page templates, SOFTSWISS account managers must set up internal configuration files (configs) to create tag templates. Most of this work is done in the early stages of development, during casino setup.
SOFTSWISS Frontend Core
The SOFTSWISS Setup Team and Business Account Team managers can also help configure additional settings related to the frontend of your iGaming site.
If you are relying on the SOFTSWISS Frontend Core to build your brand’s website, you can expect SOFTSWISS to walk you through the SEO setup. Most such requests are handled in the pre-launch stages of website development but can also be configured once the website is live. More on these configurations below:
Hreflang
While it is an integral part of the overarching geographical targeting strategy, localisation is also a key component in personalising the player experience.
Platform configs can assign an additional hreflang attribute to pages, which ensures they are served up to the right geographical audience and displayed in their respective language. Moreover, the attribute enables Google’s crawlers to distinguish between different language versions of the same page. You will want to use it to avoid having such pages flagged as duplicates and never being indexed.
Locale Management
All language versions (locales) of your iGaming website’s frontend are pre-configured in a website’s internal documents by an authorised SOFTSWISS technical account manager. Website locales and the content that appears on different language pages are then manageable from within the SOFTSWISS CMS.
Robots.txt
As Google itself describes, the robot.txt file as a guideline for website crawlers to understand which pages it can request to crawl. It is an instruction file used for tracking pages and website load management. Your website’s robot.txt file will be configured by the SOFTSWISS Setup Team before your website launches.
301 Redirects
A 301 redirect is one of the most common file types, alongside robots.txt associated with a website. Its main purpose is to inform your browser that a webpage, or an entire domain, has changed its location. There are several Google ranking factors associated with using the directive, such as the HTTPS protocol and canonical pages. Therefore using the 301 redirect for SEO is a no-brainer.
XML Sitemap
The XML Sitemap is generated separately for each locale of your website and informs search engine crawlers about the pages you most definitely want crawled. Essentially, it is a list of site pages crucial for SEO (e.g. current promotions, popular game pages or game provider pages) and ranking that makes sure they are indexed first.
Additional Site Configurations
SOFTSWISS iGaming brands built using the SOFTSWISS Frontend Core can also take advantage of integrating Google Tag Manager and making their website a Progressive Web Application.
GTM
iGaming operators keen on running A/B testing experiments for the sake of conversion rate optimisation will likely want to set up Google Tag Manager (GTM).
With the help of Google Tag Manager an operator’s marketing team can avoid constantly having to assign tasks to a developer to track website events (player sign-ups, deposits and cashouts) or set up Google Analytics or any other analytics or CRO tool of their choice. The setup of GTM is done for the client by SOFTSWISS technical account managers hassle-free.
PWA for Online Casino SEO
Last but not the least important are the platform’s PWA capabilities. SOFTSWISS online casinos using the SOFTSWISS Frontend Core can be rendered as PWAs. Progressive Web Applications refer to installable application versions of a website.
The web application software enables to ‘wrap’ a website into what essentially looks and acts like a native mobile app. Players can use the app on the operating platform of their choice, be it desktop or mobile, as the application is not bound to an app store.
Progressive Web Apps are a safe and fast alternative to playing casino games in-browser. Not only does it help to increase player conversion and lifetime value, but, in theory, positively contributes to search engine ranking due to improved player return rate, time spent on site and a lower bounce rate.
The Role of Affiliates in SEO
Link building is a relatively straightforward routine for any regular site, but when it comes to iGaming, things get harder. Because of the adult nature of online gambling sites and at times, the variable attitude of the society to this kind of entertainment, the selection of resources willing to cooperate is limited to the ones closely connected with this business domain. Thus any newcomer faces a situation when the number of partner sites is limited, but on the other hand, such sites are highly relevant and can pour quality traffic to the casino.
Naturally, these affiliated resources do not cooperate for free. Due to the high demand for their services, the costs associated might be quite high. Moreover, an affiliate website must comply with Google algorithms and keep the ‘ads-to-content’ ratio at a reasonable level to reach higher positions.
So ensure you cooperate with reputable affiliates since the web is full of low-level resources collecting their own traffic from link farms. Association with partners of this kind will do more harm than good.
In any case, affiliate marketing is by far the most effective method of attracting large amounts of quality traffic fast. It could and should be discussed separately from the general SEO strategy. We have written about affiliate marketing for online casinos in another article.
If you finally decide to invest money in your SEO strategy to venture into affiliate marketing, Affilka by SOFTSWISS is an excellent tool that will give you better control over your affiliates, traffic, and all the essential features for improved management.
Wrapping Up
SEO is a potent and handy tool for elevating the position of an online company, enhancing the brand, and attracting users and, consequently, players to the online casino. It’s important to remember that it’s a comprehensive tool that functions as a ‘whole.’
Doing only one part will not yield results; you need an integrated strategy, a skilled team, and, above all, a platform with all the necessary features to apply SEO successfully.
The SOFTSWISS Online Casino Platform, Setup and Business Account Teams work closely with clients to acquire organic traffic, improve search engine ranking and visibility, and contribute to their bottom line.
Client feedback and continuous research form a key part of boosting the platform’s SEO capabilities further to provide more opportunities to increase unpaid website traffic.
