SEO Tracker: Football landscape shifts following global tournaments

With both the Euros and Copa América now consigned to the history books, this month we’re analysing the football market to see which brands are the trophy contenders in this sector.

Given that our last analysis, from summer 2023, encompassed the period post-Qatar World Cup 2022 and pre-Women’s World Cup, the raw numbers have seen a significant decrease.

Since searches across the market are down 31% from that period, decreases in traffic for the brands analysed are not concerning in themselves, so should be taken with a pinch of salt. As such, we’ll be looking more closely at brands’ performance relative to each other, as that will tell us a more balanced story.

As is to be expected when the market as a whole sees less search interest, it is the brands with the most visibility that see the largest impact on traffic. This is simply because they control more of the high-volume, broad keywords which will see spikes in search interest at high demand and then decrease afterwards.

Leading two maintain a healthy gap

The result of this is that Oddschecker and Paddy Power both now see considerably less organic traffic than they did a year ago. Crucially, however, they are both still head and shoulders above the other brands in the sector.

Between the two leading brands, Oddschecker still sees a healthy lead over other sites, although this has been cut during the past year. While a portion of this will be due to the outsized impact of the overall contraction in search interest affecting Oddschecker disproportionately, it’s interesting to note that Oddschecker’s average ranking position has slipped to fifth, while Paddy Power’s has increased to sixth. A small change, but one that brings the brands closer together.

This is not to say that Oddschecker’s position as the most visible brand in the sector is particularly suffering. The brand still receives 18.2% of the monthly clicks across all of the keywords analysed and, while this is down on the 20.3% it saw last summer, it is still a dominant position to be in.

Elsewhere in the top 10, almost all brands have witnessed significant decreases in traffic, resulting in a shuffling of the pack behind the two leaders.

Bettingodds.com and Betfair have both seen rivals overtake them in terms of organic visibility as a result of fewer ranking keywords and a lower average ranking position, meaning that both brands saw an above-average decrease in monthly clicks.

Aggregator sites less prominent in SERPs

Beyond perennial leaders Oddschecker, aggregator sites are less prominent in the top 10, with Bettingodds.com slipping from third to fifth most visible in the sector, and Oddsmonkey.com and Justbookies.com out of the top 10 entirely, although Oddsportal.com has entered as 10th most visible.

This is likely a result of various factors as football has moved on from the World Cups. There will now be fewer casual bettors who want to find the best deals in order to set up accounts, those who are still searching for football-related terms will be searching for more specific keywords, and there will also be an element of brand loyalty from those who set up accounts with a specific company during the tournament. Therefore, there is less overall demand for the information that aggregators offer.

However, while the market has contracted, it’s not all doom and gloom for brands in the sector. William Hill was the only brand in the top 10 to see traffic increase, as despite ranking for fewer keywords, a strong improvement in average ranking position saw the brand increase estimated monthly clicks by 21%. This means that William Hill is now best of the rest behind the runaway leaders, now the third most visible brand having been sixth a year ago.

This is down to an increased number of medium-volume keywords ranking in the top three positions giving the brand additional traffic across the board, including for terms such as ‘football odds’ and ‘football betting’.

The fact that the increase in traffic is spread across a number of keywords rather than a few high-volume terms bodes well for William Hill maintaining this traffic, rather than being susceptible to losing it with a few changes in keyword rankings.

Overall, here are three key takeaways from what we have seen in the football market: 

1. For seasonal topic areas, or those with events that spark large peaks in interest, it’s natural to see organic visibility rise and fall – when assessing your performance, benchmarking against competitors is more useful than looking at the raw data
2. Within those peaks and troughs, search intent and audience composition are also likely to change – you should be aware of this, and where possible, take action to ensure that your brand is meeting the needs of the audience as those needs shift
3. Even when a wider market is seeing fewer searches, a strong organic strategy which targets ranking improvements across the board can result in organic growth and put you ahead of competitors

To find out more about how Stickyeyes could help your brand to establish and maintain organic growth in the football market and beyond, please reach out to William Conboy, director of igaming by Stickyeyes, at william.conboy@stickyeyes.com.