SEO Tracker: Oddschecker leads as bookmakers jostle for position ahead of Cheltenham

The Cheltenham Festival will look and sound very different in 2021. While there will be no crowds descending on Gloucestershire in 2021 and no famous roar reverberating around Prestbury Park, the show will go on, with fans following on TV and online.

March and April represent key months in the betting calendar, with both the Cheltenham Festival and the Grand National being huge drivers of betting volume and customer acquisition. If there is a time to be leading the market in the horseracing search results, this is the time to be doing it.

Oddschecker leads as bookmakers struggle to gain visibility

What we have seen in recent years in the sportsbook markets is the increasing prominence of informational and odds comparison sites into the search results, often coming at the expense of the bookmaking brands. This trend continues when we look at the 105 biggest keywords by search volume in the horseracing market.

There are five bookmaking brands among the 10 most visible brands in this market; those being Paddy Power, Betfred, William Hill, Sky Bet and Betfair, but only two of those are in the top seven.

Paddy Power is the most visible bookmaker and the third most visible brand overall, coming in behind oddschecker and The Jockey Club. The bookmaker gets just under a third of its traffic from this keyword set from three keyword terms, “cheltenham races”, “grand national bets” and “horse betting”, with the brand ranking in position one for the latter two.

The market leader, oddschecker, achieves its dominance of the search results by ranking in the top two positions for six out of the seven biggest keywords by search volume, including a position one ranking for the biggest term, “racing betting”. Overall, the brand ranks in the top two positions for 66 of the 105 keywords in our analysis, including 50 number one positions. In addition to “racing betting”, the brand ranks in position one for high-volume terms including “horse racing betting”, “horse racing odds”, “cheltenham betting”, “grand national odds”, “cheltenham betting offers” and “cheltenham odds”.

William Hill has improved its position in the market from last year, ranking in the top three for high-volume keywords including “racing betting”, “horse racing betting”, “horse betting” and “horse racing odds”.

While The Jockey Club is the second-most visible brand in the market, almost all of its visibility comes from the term “cheltenham races” where, as the operator of the Cheltenham racecourse, it ranks in position one.

The opportunity is greater than the visibility data suggests

When it comes to racing, timing really is everything.

Our visibility analysis considers search volume as monthly average over a 12-month period. The reason we do this is to minimise the effect of seasonal keywords skewing the analysis and to instead give a more reflective view of which brands are ranking at the top of the search results pages on a consistent basis – not just the brands that are top of the market at the moment we happen to run the data.

However, the racing betting market in particular is highly seasonal, as we can see with the Google trends data for three keywords: “racing betting”, “cheltenham betting” and “grand national betting”.

Clearly, the two flagship events are massive drivers of activity and these impact the search volumes not only of those event-specific keywords, but also the generic keywords such as “racing betting”, which also see spikes in interest at the time around both the National and Cheltenham Festival.

What it means is that the search volumes that our analysis is based on will actually be much higher around the time of those events and so, if the brands in those prominent positions can hold onto those positions into mid-March and early April, the actual visibility and traffic that they generate will be much higher that our analysis suggests over that period.

To what extent that traffic will be higher is difficult to forecast. Search volumes generally were lower in 2020 than they were in previous years – particularly for the Grand National, which was cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic and run as a virtual event. While a behind-closed-doors festival could result in a somewhat subdued build-up, the closure of courses and bricks and mortar betting venues gives online operators a big opportunity. However, with only five bookmaking brands prominent in organic search, expect some aggressive paid activity from many operators to capture that all important share of wallet.