Internet gambling is one of the absolute largest online industries in the world. Made up of thousands of online casinos, poker rooms, sports betting sites, bingo halls and other betting genres, success in this multi-billion dollar business relies heavily upon SEO marketing tactics. According to recent reports, WilliamHill.com strove to gear its SEO towards online blackjack, but the results were far less than impressive.
The duo of interactive gaming consultants from iGamingBusiness, and SEO content marketing group Blueclaw, put their research teams together to investigate the efficiency of William Hill’s online blackjack SEO (search engine optimization). For a major player in the internet casino business, the results of its marketing campaign weren’t nearly as impressive as you might think.
[showSites]
According to the results of the SEO research report, WilliamHill.com did not appear in the top 15 results for online blackjack. In fact, a personal search of the term at Google didn’t bring up a WilliamHill.com link (vegas.williamhill.com/online-blackjack) until page 9, making it the 81st result on the search engine. The report by iGB and Blueclaw showed the gambling website’s Top 10 Ranking at -18.1%. Average positions, Impressions and Visitors also performed in the red.
On the plus side for William Hill, the number of total indexed pages, topping the 6.7 million mark, landed at 94.8% of the markets average. The number of referring domains – most of them certainly coming from affiliate websites – also received a green mark in the 87.6 percentile.
Interestingly enough, of the top 15 websites indexed for online blackjack, only 4 of them actually provide real money blackjack games on the internet; those being 888.com (5th), casino.ladbrokes.com (7th), casino.bovada.lv (8th) and fortunepalace.co.uk (15th).
Games.com, which offers a free-to-play version of online blackjack, received the 3rd highest index ranking. The majority of the top spots were awarded to online gambling affiliate websites, including wizardofodds.com, blackjackinfo.com, casino-directory.lots0cash.com, among others.
As the data foretells, the biggest problem is that third-party affiliate websites are taking all the glory in the search engines. Ironically, these same affiliate websites are employed by the very online gambling giants they are competing against for front-page indexing.
In one way, that works in favor of online blackjack sites like William Hill, but if the affiliates that gain top billing from SE’s like Google aren’t promoting William Hill’s iGaming products, then it’s doing them no good. In short, by commissioning so many third-party affiliates to promote their games, online gambling sites are putting their SEO marketing campaigns in the hands of anyone and everyone willing to open a portal website dedicated to their cause.
Revenue wise, the affiliate business is almost as massive as the online gambling industry itself, but competition wise, there’s no larger industry than affiliate websites. To put it in perspective, there are no less than 1,000 affiliate sites for every genuine real-money gambling site on the world wide web. But due to the intense efforts necessary to succeed and earn a viable income, the vast majority of affiliate websites are merely taking up cyberspace and making it more difficult for online blackjack marketers to drive their own traffic by achieving optimal results in the search engines.