Cheltenham Festival 2025 in focus: competing with content

Debates often open up about the value of ‘big’ seasonal sporting events, like horseracing’s Cheltenham Festival, when it comes to player value and adding wholly new depositing players.

In this short article, we’ll take a look at what next week’s four-day meeting means for affiliate and operator brands in the current hyper-competitive context, with viewpoints from OLBG’s Richard Moffat and Betfred’s Richard Smith.

When quizzed about the opportunity overall, Moffat from OLBG outlines the major risks for operators, but also the special importance of the Cheltenham Festival in 2025: “For UK and Irish bookmakers, the Festival is probably the biggest event of 2025, given the lack of a Euros or World Cup.

“On the operator side, it is important to proceed with caution with offers – if too aggressive and costs are too high, there can be serious damage done. With a focus on favourites, if operators don’t get offers right and favourites happen to win, it can be very costly.”

The importance of the Cheltenham Festival as a ‘milestone’ event is clear, and it’s certainly striking how the races overwhelm anything else Cheltenham-related.

Nevertheless, affiliates and operators need to get granular with content around odds, tips, promotions and more in order to cost-effectively compete. As the Google Trends graph shows, while interest remains high each year, there is not a large window to capture attention, and it can be hard to determine if strategies are successful (or not) until the Festival is upon us. Added to this is the need to try ‘new’ methods and pay attention to what works well for others, and what (might) work well for your brand.

Smith from Betfred shares his thoughts on this point: “There’s genuinely lots of great content out there in a variety of formats. Good videos, some great uses of data and longer reads from experts, as well as some affiliates using Telegram and WhatsApp groups. It’s just a case of the whole industry finding new keys to open old doors, as user behaviours change.”

For this reason, it’s worth looking into how overall SEO health and year-round digital discipline can help capitalise, without betting everything on a last-minute push or paid media blitz.

Capitalising on search volume spikes by preparing well in advance

As seasonal racing events draw near, SEO professionals know that ‘big’ terms like ‘Grand National betting’, ‘Cheltenham tips’ and ‘Ascot odds’ (and their variations) are important in the run up to each event – but it’s not enough to just have an offer available. Big-name bookies and those with bulletproof backlink profiles built up over time will always have an advantage due to Google’s repeated emphasis on ‘trusted’ brands through successive algo updates.

For the rest, it pays to go granular to fight winnable battles. That means creating event-specific landing pages well in advance. Getting these pages indexed early – and ideally using the same pages each year to get stronger over time – can mean the site is in a good place when interest does begin to spike.

Betfred’s Smith continues: “Analysis, tips and promotions will always be part of the Festival’s DNA, but in 2025 that content needs to prioritise all the E-E-A-T [experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness] signals to stand out amid the noise – from the veteran operators and publishers to the parasites – everyone is jockeying for visibility.

“I truly believe genuine content, created by people with passion and creativity, published consistently between October and March, embracing the whole National Hunt season and road to Cheltenham, remains the way to go when it comes to ranking and converting. As such, as much as the bigger brands dominate, there are still niches that can be enjoyed by the smaller affiliates.”

In 2025, there are many views on what ‘optimising’ means but given the relentless focus Google has on succinct, actionable content, personal perspectives, exclusive data and fresh copy that chimes with E-E-A-T principles, there’s plenty to get to grips with.

Creating ‘high-quality’ content

Again, ‘quality’ in content when it comes to SEO is a subjective area. Perhaps what we should say is focusing on content that Google consistently seems to rank, which you (or your team) can consistently create is what counts as quality for your brand.

As an agency, every year without fail we receive ‘rush’ orders for different seasonal events, sometimes from the largest bookmakers around. In these cases, it’s not a resourcing issue but a planning issue, which may mean they’re not getting content live as quickly as they could.

Given the raw power of mainstream betting brands and the propensity of their sites to rank, ‘last-minute’ approaches might still be perfectly profitable, but it’s an opportunity for smaller, faster and more agile brands to chip away at these advantages. In this regard, it is important to play to your strengths, be it well-researched blog posts, betting guides and race previews or more entertaining, link-earning PR, newbie guides or more characterful tipping content.

Getting granular can help differentiate, while opening up long tail ops across areas like:

• Horseracing previews with in-depth analysis of key races and contenders
• Betting strategy articles explaining concepts that newer bettors may be less familiar with
• Jockey and trainer profiles that provide insights into the form and history of runners and riders
• Live updates and results pages to encourage repeat visits – if the data is available to you, of course

While Google seems to have rolled back on its interest in structured data, schema markup and so on, given the different types of content that could be on display during big racing events, it might be no bad thing to take a more disciplined approach here to aim towards improving presence in AI overviews, rich snippets and others areas where your content could pop up.

Logical offers and customer experience

Offers and the wider customer experience can help earn traffic – and make the most of advertising traffic – but similarly if the on-page offer is jarring or feels ‘off’, visitors won’t convert.

Moffat adds: “OLBG works with new bookmakers in particular to come up with offers to match their target markets. With OLBG’s focus on UK and Ireland bettors with event sponsorships, the OLBG Racing Club and tipster competitions, we understand that different offers appeal to different audiences, so it’s important to get it right.

“For an affiliate or media company’s perspective, it’s important not just to push any offer a bookmaker wants to promote – focus on what your customers and audiences will understand, trust, value and respond to.”

This is worth bearing in mind for SEO reasons, too – affiliates have found it hard enough in recent years with successive broad core Google updates seemingly designed to cut out ‘middlemen’.

Given this current context, it’s important that any offers and surrounding content are contextually relevant, appropriate for the affiliate’s brand and a logical addition that adds value to – rather than detracts from – the user experience.

Betfred’s Smith sums it up nicely: “More than ever before, brands must balance the excitement and entertainment of the event with offers and insightful content that clearly makes the end user feel like they are getting genuine value.

“In the past it was not uncommon for major bookies to offer £50 to £100 CPAs, triggered on first deposit, in their pursuit for new business. I doubt those days are coming back anytime soon. The gold rush days of fast rankings, low-cost PPC and an abundance of new accounts may be long in the rear view, but there’s still a great opportunity for those that get it right.”