Author: Sebastian Scheplitz
Months of comprehensive planning, strategizing, and execution will come to a head for major companies across industries – including that of iGaming – as they look to rake in the cash and clout that the biggest sports spectacle of the year generates: Super Bowl LVII.
This year’s NFL Championship will be the 57th installment, with places still up for grabs, on 12th February 2023, inside State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona.
iGaming writers and marketers know that this is one of the peak seasons in the U.S. sports industry. The Super Bowl season sets the tone for the rest of the year.
It’s a massive opportunity for them to stick in consumers’ minds for the next year or two. So, let’s see how we can all make the best out of this event this year.
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The Importance of Researching Keyword Trends and Using Tools
However, SEO content and keyword planning approaches are different across verticals – and the sports betting vertical, for instance, slightly differs from the online casino vertical because of the relatively fewer evergreen keywords to pick and choose from.
Moreover, sports betting is a seasonal, and therefore constantly changing market, where search volumes for high-value, highly-competitive keywords (such as Super Bowl LVII, as will certainly be the case) are compressed in tighter intervals of time.
That’s one of the key distinctions between the European and the North American sports betting market – seasons run shorter in leagues in the United States than they usually do on the continent.
Super Bowl LVII is just around the corner and the stage is fully set. The Kansas City Chiefs fought tooth and nail with the Cincinnati Bengals in the AFC, and the Philadelphia Eagles trounced the San Francisco 49ers.
That means the Chiefs are headed for the Super Bowl for the third time in the last four seasons. Meanwhile, the teams playing in the UEFA Champions League final are known 3 weeks beforehand, allowing significantly greater leeway for iGaming marketers to prepare in advance.
Capitalizing on Super Bowl Mania
That said, timing is of the essence – but so is doing thorough iGaming SEO keyword research.
Awareness is of paramount importance, particularly when creating content such as a blog article or social media post.
Setting aside a good portion of the editorial calendar to create evergreen content is mission-critical, but topical posts – particularly on the topic of sports betting on the Super Bowl LVII, for instance – give your content gravitas and added relevancy that will resonate with readers.
Entire iGaming marketing teams, for instance, can capture the lightning in a bottle that the Super Bowl creates and efficiently generate the hype and stoke interest in the event by just planning.
Analyzing Super Bowl Trends
For instance, just by looking at January 2018 to January 2023 on Google Trends, it’s clear that there is always a consistent ramp-up phase around the search term “Super Bowl” in January, peaking into a roaring crescendo in hits just days before the event takes place on 12th February.
Therefore, one of the most common strategies for Super Bowl marketing for sportsbooks is to create content connecting iGaming companies, brands, or services to the Super Bowl in the run-up months before the big game to generate search engine clout.
As interest reaches fever pitch, it becomes highly likely that the content you create will surface at the top of the results page if search queries refer to its primary and secondary keywords.
In the above instance from Google Trends, the best time to publish content with keywords pertaining to Super Bowl LVI would be from December to the last week of January.
Google Trends is a free tool that helps users identify recently circulating and trending keywords that aren’t showing up yet on other keyword research tools.
Once you identify low-volume keywords that are spiking in popularity, you can target them and make efforts to accumulate organic clout, traffic, and backlinks way in advance – just like the Super Bowl.
Clearly, search traffic around the Super Bowl doesn’t gain much traction, building up from December until the last two weeks prior to the event. That’s when the rapid surge in search traffic happens.
How does the Super Bowl garner such an amount of buzz in such a short amount of time?
In that fourteen-day span before Super Sunday, mainstream media began a massive campaign to promote the game, with performers sharing teasers of their Super Bowl halftime performance set.
These snippets of extremely relevant, engaging content raise the buzz surrounding the event, whetting the fans’ appetite to make sure they don’t miss tuning in for the world.
This same process is lathered, rinsed, and repeated year in and year out, and it has proven immensely successful for the Super Bowl.
Here, using Ahrefs, we can see the search volume for the term “Super Bowl” in the United States alone.
Global Super Bowl Interest Reflected in Google Trends
The Super Bowl doesn’t only draw most American households, but it also brings with it tremendous attention from the rest of the world.
Super Bowl LVI, for instance, drew an average viewership of 99.2 million viewers in the United States alone. The NFL, for its part, pegs the total Super Bowl LVI viewing audience at over 208 million viewers. That’s not even counting overseas viewers, which could easily be upwards of an additional 50 million viewers.
According to Google Trends, worldwide searches for LVII – the roman numeral for 57, representing the upcoming edition of the Super Bowl – have surged over the past month, indicating the global interest revolving around a piece of true Americana.
This is proof positive that search engines will quickly recognize the sudden change in search volume, and then serve associated queries that are pertinent to the Super Bowl.
Take, for instance, the results for the search term ‘super bowl 2023’ from AnswerThePublic as follows.
Here, we can see the universe of queries centered around ‘super bowl 2023’ on AnswerThePublic – giving iGaming writers and marketers a gold mine of keywords to create more engaging content that answers what people want to know about the event.
Lastly, this spike in search volume can be attributed to the fact that most Americans are familiar with the style and substance of the crowning glory of American sporting events.
However, the rest of the world might not.
Informational searches about the rules of American football, its teams, rules, and players climax in the run-up to gameday, as worldwide audiences and iGaming marketers themselves prepare.
Key Takeaways
Super Bowl time is crunch time, every time – and iGaming marketers need to be able to constantly adapt.
There’s no better time to build brand awareness in the iGaming sector than Super Bowl weekend, and a balance of iGaming SEO keyword research and using the right keyword research tools for sportsbooks and online casinos in 2023 is pivotal to maximizing that critical two-week timeframe.
Here are three key takeaways as the build-up to LVII marches on:
1. Preempt Search Demand in Advance Using Historical Search Trends
Historical trends can provide insight into what people are and have been searching for in the buildup to, immediately before, during, and after the Super Bowl.
iGaming marketers can take advantage of the opportunities this data provides by creating content around potential searches well before a month or two before the Super Bowl.
If you forecast one of your services will be in higher demand than normal, review and freshen up your content around it to get ahead of the curve.
That’s one of the best ways to leverage sports betting SEO keyword research and rank high at the height of peak search traffic.
2. Take the Game to New Audiences
The Super Bowl is undoubtedly as American as apple pie – but global viewership is rising as the sport rises to prominence in overseas markets.
One of the ways to leverage this spike in search traffic is by answering questions and providing valuable information about these search terms and directing more organic traffic to your site.
Use keyword research tools like AnswerThePublic or Ahrefs to drill down on keyword suggestions for content ideas.
3. Do Proper iGaming/Sports Betting SEO Keyword Research
We can’t stress this enough. All iGaming marketers need to leverage keyword research tools to help them collate the information they need to perfect their Super Bowl LVII marketing for sportsbook clients and create a more dynamic overall SEO strategy.
There’s a multitude of free and paid keyword research tools out there that can help.
A final word: remember, your content is only as good as your SEO. You can be as good as Dave Ogilvy on the written word, but without keyword research (and the required keyword research tools), you’ll be whistling in the dark wondering why your content gets no relevant hits.
Header Image Source: Photo by Pixabay on Pexels
How did you like Sebastian Scheplitz’s blog post “Supercharge Your Super Bowl SEO: Keyword Research Tools That Work”? 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.” 🙂
