Why brand awareness in search is so important

Gaming operators, and indeed igaming affiliates, are taking brand awareness evermore seriously. From the voice of Ray Winstone in bet365’s adverts to OLBG’s sponsorship of the Mares Hurdle at Cheltenham (up until this year), over to Better Collective (BETCO) floating on the Stockholm Stock Exchange – brand coverage, PR (both online and offline), and getting the brand in front of people is essential.

And we have some data to back that up. If we look at Google Trends, and take a look at the top related queries to ‘online betting’, we can see the following:

People are searching for William Hill’s brand.

Likewise, with ‘online bingo’ related searches:

Specific bingo sites are being evermore searched, with branded search queries.

And the same can be said with rising related searches – those queries which are on the up, that are relative to ‘online betting’:

And, again, the same for rising related searches around ‘online bingo’:

The data shows us that more and more people are searching for brand related enquiries, thus showing and increasing need to get the brand in front of people online.

Adapting our igaming marketing strategy to support the data

Data is key in anything we can do digitally, and the online gambling sector is no different. The data is telling us a couple of key things:

• If we are an operator or igaming affiliate which is looking for traffic from an array of gaming products – pick the right ones.
• People are searching for brand related keywords.

So, how do we get our brand in front of people, to encourage them to search for our brand? Aside from the traditional media buying offerings available, link building can play its part. Here is our take on it.

As an igaming link building agency, we’ve built tens of thousands of links for our clients in the gambling industry. But given we’re specialists in the area, and gambling industry link building is different, we’re always looking to work with our clients to ensure we’re working to the best possible strategy.

Old-school, black-hat techniques don’t work like they used to, and put the offending site at serious risk of a Google penalty – both algorithmic and manual. Gone are the days, as most people know, where we could get 10,000 forum spam links, or indeed build hundreds of links into deeper, commercial pages, with an exact match anchor text strategy. Now, we must move with the times – not just to avoid a penalty, but to do things the right way, and to ensure that we’re getting the best results we can.

There is a lot to be said about homepage links, with branded anchors – yet many seem to want to avoid this strategy, in favour of a more aggressive approach. Our response is a clear one: igaming link building needs to be natural, and we need to ensure we’ve got the right balance of branded/non-branded anchors, exact match/phrase match/no match anchors, and homepage/deeper page landing pages.

Building links into the homepage, with branded anchors, is a great strategy when combined with a proper internal linking programme. Send the SEO equity into the homepage, and then use a proper internal linking/anchor text programme to channel that equity into the relevant commercial pages. SEO isn’t all about external links – the internal ones need to be right to. And if the two are running in tandem, both cogs of the wheel are aligned – that’s where we typically see the best results.

Back to the brand awareness topic – how does this help? It’s fairly simple – links from high traffic sites will see more eyes on the brand within the body of the text. And furthermore, it’s a great strategy to get the site ranking, as a whole, for more commercial, non-brand terms.

Panoptic Media is a specialist igaming SEO agency, working with some of the world’s leading operators and affiliates. Our industry experience is exceptional, and our services encompass all of the core igaming products.