Author: Sebastian Scheplitz
If you’ve ever had a meeting with your internal iGaming SEO manager, or even just had a casual chin wag over the ever-present watercooler regarding on-page SEO optimization, you could be forgiven for believing that on-page SEO is a somewhat dark art.
While SEO folk may wish for us mere marketing mortals to assume that on-page SEO optimization is indeed an ephemeral state of mind, only afforded to the chosen few, the truth is thankfully far more prosaic.
While there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to the ideal iGaming content marketing strategy, there is common ground that even the most contrary SEO brains will agree on.
Looking for the equivalent of a high school crib street to take with you as you climb the heights of SEO on-page optimization? It could be time to MUCKSUM.
Got you intrigued? This video will do even more so.
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So, What is MUCKSUM?
Not some new-fangled approach to maximizing SEO – think of MUCKSUM as a shopping list of all the ingredients needed to bake yourself – and your iGaming enterprise – the ideal SEO content strategy for iGaming websites.
Whether you’re a provider, an operator, an affiliate site, or perhaps all of the above, the Translation Royale MUCKSUM™ method is everything you need for effective SERP dominance. It’s how you apply it that counts.
Okay, so you could also make some other slightly dubious acronyms out of MUCKSUM.
If you decide to rearrange the letters to make it easier for yourself to remember, so be it. Translation Royale is not responsible for your cognitive process. If it works, it works.
Whether you’re looking to supercharge your sports betting marketing strategy or optimize your online casino marketing strategy, MUCKSUM is the key to both, and beyond.
Anyway, let’s break down this MUCKSUM business already.
M – Multi-Device Enabled
With an increasingly crowded market of ‘things with screens’ comes the need for your page to be compatible with the lowest denominator.
We’re not quite talking about a greenscreen WAP-only Nokia but the importance of your website to perform well on a device somewhere in the region of an iPhone 5 or above.
Unless you’re unfortunate enough to be queuing for a painful dental procedure, no one likes to wait.
White coats aside, sucking on your gums while you wait for a page to load must be one of life’s more tedious tasks.
Google research shows that 53% of mobile visitors will click back if the page doesn’t load within 3 seconds, so your content approach needs to reflect this.
I think we can all agree that waiting for a page to load is a lot like pulling teeth.
U – Unique Viewpoint
Our friends down at moz.com define a unique viewpoint as follows:
“Unique content simply means that those words, in that order, don’t appear anywhere else on the web. Unique value refers to the usefulness and takeaways derived by visitors to the page. Many pages can be “valuable,” but few provide a truly unique kind of value — one that can’t be discovered on other pages targeting that keyword phrase.”
See what we did there? In case you were snoozing, we included non-unique content to emphasize the importance of using unique content in your content marketing.
Call us silly, call us genius, we don’t mind. Just as long as the importance of having a unique viewpoint sticks with you.
C – Crawler-Friendly
“Be kind to the robots, as one day they shall rule the Earth” a wise man once said. Well, okay, it was the chap with the tinfoil hat who lives a few doors down…
But, he has a very good point, and this mindset should also be applied when creating SEO-crafted pages.
Google employs bots to rank and index pages; to pave the way for our soon-to-be masters, follow these handy, droid-friendly tips:
- If your page is inoperational, temporarily or otherwise, use status code 503 rather than 404. Should you be redirecting users to another location, always use 301 codes (also known as permanent redirects) rather than other 30_ status codes.
- Welcome the bots – do not block meta bots and robots.txt from crawling and subsequently indexing your content.
- Use a 100% unique URL.
- Follow set guidelines on URL length, dynamic vs static, and also incorporate your website into any relevant RSS feeds, including XML Sitemaps files.
Follow these four simple rules and you shall no doubt secure yourself a place in the cyborg-ruled future. Winner winner, as they say.
K – Keyword-Targeted
Bullseye potential traffic by accurately targeting your main keyword in the page’s meta title, ideally as close to the start of the title as humanly possible.
This gives Google a leg up when analyzing the relevance of your page and also encourages a healthier click-through rate.
Search query: “best online casinos”. Which result do you think you’d be more likely to click on?
Oh – added points for matching the page headline with your meta title.
A decrease in pogo-sticking (for a reader to click back to SERP and then to a different page) will boost your chances of ranking higher.
(If you are word sensitive, we do apologize for the term “pogo-sticking”. It seems the Google SEO naming convention team was hopping up on candy canes and riding rainbow unicorns at the time. Where is that sick bag?)
S – Shareable Content
Most online casino content isn’t something your audience would post to their Facebook timeline, although pages are routinely shared player-to-player.
Shareable iGaming content is key to giving your iGaming on-page SEO optimization a shot in the arm, be it your SEO strategy for iGaming websites.
This also holds true when mulling over your approach to SEO for iGaming affiliate websites. Either way, a few pointers to consider:
- Ensure your page has clearly displayed buttons for sharing
- Find out what’s trending – and act upon it
- Where possible, sprinkle in some pop culture references
- People love a good list, so use them
- Images. Who isn’t a sucker for a bit of eye candy?
- Localize content
A good guideline is to ask yourself: “Would I share this?” If the answer is “No”, then you might need to go back to the Google docs-shaped drawing board.
U – User Experience
Clearly, it’s not good enough to have a shoddy user experience. Perhaps unconsciously, audiences are becoming savvier and savvier about how a page feels to them.
If your target demographic is bombarded with slow loading times, pop-ups and gates they won’t spend as much time as you’d like them to on site.
The foundations of decent UX can be reduced to the following on-page elements:
- Make it pretty: eye-catching, captivating, and motivational design
- Employ a natural navigational flow
- Optimize across multiple devices
- Speed up page loading times. They said it’s not a race; they lied
- Create easy-to-digest content: avoid the passive voice, keep paragraph length to a minimum, and use short(ish) sentences
Balancing the UX flow with the right number of on-page converting elements can be quite the challenge, but hey ho, no one said it was going to be a walk in the park.
M – Metadata
Working tirelessly behind the scenes, metadata is what communicates with search engines. To make your page’s metadata sing, do this:
- Tighten your title tags: 60 characters ( around 600 pixels) or less + unique article name + keywords = 🙂
- Use meta tags for images
- Apply schema markup, where possible. It looks legit and can supercharge CTR
- Descriptions should be under 160 characters ( around 920 pixels) and written in full sentences that convert
And of course, always remember: the meta the better.
The Cheat Sheet’s Cheat Sheet
So, here we have the ultimate, pocket-sized guide to on-page SEO strategy for iGaming marketers. By no means exhaustive, this article should serve as a gentle nudge in the direction of a better iGaming content marketing strategy.
Further information can be found within the following Translation Royale blog posts:
Header Image Source: Photo by Gery Wibowo on Unsplash
How did you like Sebastian Scheplitz’s blog post “On-Page SEO Strategy: The Cheat Sheet for iGaming Marketers”? Let us know in the comments if you have anything to add, have another content idea for iGaming blog posts, or just want to say “hello.” 🙂
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