What Is SEO and How Can It Boost Your Casino Affiliate Marketing Strategy?: a beginners guide
Search engine optimisation has become a necessity for individuals and businesses that operate within a digital capacity. This is also the case for affiliate marketers who promote products and services from any industry.
Carefully integrating the best SEO practices within an overall affiliate marketing strategy can most certainly result in a high reward but requires dedicating a sizeable chunk of your time, effort, and resources to building an SEO-friendly casino affiliate website, as well as writing your content.
This article will discuss how you can use SEO to boost your affiliate marketing business by delving into several key strategies and practices. More specifically, we will cover the following:
- The definition of SEO
- The importance of SEO in affiliate marketing
- Key SEO practices for your affiliate marketing strategy
Moreover, suppose you are still new to the world of affiliate marketing. In that case, we suggest that you look at our previous article on how to get started in affiliate marketing first, and then revisit this article once you are more familiar with the concept of affiliate marketing in general.
What is SEO
Search engine optimisation comprises a range of specific practices that, when implemented, have the potential to significantly increase the quantity and quality of traffic to your casino affiliate website.
Now that we have a clear understanding of SEO’s exact meaning, we can determine why it has continued to grow in importance throughout the last few years and why affiliate marketers also need to apply the latest SEO best practices in their overall marketing strategy.
The importance of SEO in Affiliate Marketing
Simply put, SEO is hugely important for affiliate marketing because it can either grow or hinder your traffic, depending on how effectively you use it. It makes it easier for individuals to find your products and services and earn their trust.
More specifically, SEO is crucial as it will assist your platform, be it a blog, website, or another form of channel such as casino affiliate portals, in appearing towards the top of search engine results. If your business ranks low on Google, you are not utilising SEO correctly and are missing out on plenty of quality traffic for your business.
Another massive reason why SEO is a must is because it is 100% free. Any company can opt for paid promotions, advertising, and so on, but SEO allows you to have total control over your business’ growth.
Key SEO Practices For Your Affiliate Marketing Strategy
So, what SEO methods, tips, tricks, or practices, call them what you like, can casino affiliates implement to generate quality leads and build a loyal customer base? Fortunately enough, there are several, some of which we will explain within this article.
Keyword Research
Conducting extensive keyword research is a cornerstone of proper search engine optimisation.
In 2021, keywords still play a pivotal role in SEO. When you write up content such as blogs for your casino affiliate website, you would preferably find out which keywords are relevant to your topic prior to writing the blog. This way, you can curate your content around these keywords whilst seamlessly fitting them into your writing. This will help give the content a natural feel, similar to an article not optimised for search engines.
For example, you might want to write an article about how casino affiliates can make use of video content. Carry out proper keyword research before writing by searching for other articles around the same topic and looking at the keywords they use. You might want to make use of keywords like ‘casino’, ‘affiliates’ ‘, casino affiliates’, ‘affiliate marketing, ‘video content’, and so on.
How can this be done? Well, no one would expect you to manually spot the number of occurrences of particular words within each article, as that would be far too time-consuming. Instead, tools such as ‘Keywords Everywhere’ are easy browser extensions that will analyse all the content on a particular page, providing you with information such as word count and the number of occurrences of each word.
‘Answer The Public’ is another valuable tool for keyword research, as this website allows you to view the most popular searches being made by simply typing in the topic in question. You can also do this by taking a look at the related searches section on Google. Both of these work well, but the former is more analytical.
Lastly, finding the right keywords is just the first step. To utilise them properly and help your casino affiliate website rank better on Google, you need to include them in the right areas. These include:
- Title
- Meta Description
- URL
- Main Text
- Images (Names + Alt Tags)
This brings us to our next essential SEO practice, titles.
Titles for SEO
When thinking of a title for your article or blog post, keep in mind that this should also be part of your SEO strategy. Try to make the title as descriptive as possible without making it too long, as this will allow the reader to tell whether the article is what they are looking for. Make sure that you do this accurately by:
- Including the main keyword at the start of your title.
- Ensuring that the title is made up of fewer than 60 characters, as Google won’t display more than this in search results.
After you have your title, you can identify whether it is suitable by using services such as ‘Yoast’. Yoast can be installed into WordPress, allowing you to view any suggestions on how to improve your titles as you are writing them. You can also use Yoast to optimise meta descriptions and your focus keyphrase whilst also providing an overall SEO analysis of the content.
Meta Descriptions
The meta description is that small paragraph that appears beneath your title in search results. When typing up your meta descriptions, be sure to include your keywords naturally, as you would when writing the actual article itself. Aim to provide a general description of what your content is about in no more than 160 characters and try to include your focus key phrase in the first sentence.
URLs
Indeed, URLs are another important ranking factor, so how can you make them SEO-friendly?
Again, you can achieve this by including your keyword within the URL to assist search engines such as Google in categorising your page. Additionally, you should also ensure that your URL’s are:
- Less than 60 characters long
- Consist of lower-case letters only, as uppercase letters may result in 404 errors
- Kept engaging with the use of hyphens.
For example, https://playattack.com/news/progressive-jackpot-microgaming-wowpot/
Structure Content
Structuring your casino affiliate content encompasses a range of things to keep in mind.
First and foremost, heading tags. Your title, headings and subheadings should all be eye-catching, as this makes your content more readable whilst helping you structure and segment your writing appropriately.
These mainly consist of the following:
- H1: Your title should be the only H1 tag, and this must include your primary keyword.
- H2: Your main sections should all contain H2 tags.
- H3: You should apply this tag to all your subsections.
Heading tags should follow a typical hierarchical structure. One can see a good example of how this should look below.
Moreover, make sure to keep your paragraphs small. You can do this by sticking to not more than one subject per paragraph and incorporating bulleted lists. The main goal of this is also to increase the readability of your content. Remember that mobile users will find it easier to read several short paragraphs and lists than heavy chunks of text.
Optimise Images With Alt-Text
The main reason for alt-text is so that search engines can effectively read your image in such a way that makes it possible to determine the relevance of these images. When you add sufficient information like keywords to images, SEO improves. Your audience will not see this text, as that would create an eye-sore on your casino affiliate website.
Internal Links, External Links, and Backlinking
All three types of linking mentioned above are crucial for SEO. Firstly, internal linking involves linking back to your previous content when writing a new article. This will help your older content remain relevant in search engines or increase its rank over time and bring you more traffic. This saves your previous content from becoming forgotten, so make sure to include this as a practice in all of your posts!
Secondly, when writing your blog posts, be sure to include links to external domains that display relevant information that might prove useful to your readers. Let’s say that you are writing a post to inform your audience about the latest Google algorithm update, but your aim is not to expand on each specific point. If this is the case, you can lead your readers to an external domain that explains a certain point in more detail or gives a more in-depth explanation.
Backlinking is just as important as the first two and can be just as effective when aiming to rank high. Luckily enough, the casino affiliate marketing world consists of several high-profile news portals and forums, meaning that casino affiliates are spoiled for choice when finding authoritative figures to help them increase their traffic. Backlinks from popular domains will increase your authoritative score and is, therefore, a fundamental practice of SEO.
Final Thoughts
These are just some of the many ways SEO can help boost your search ranking as an affiliate. The list can go on and on, but these are the core principles you should consider when growing your business.
Furthermore, you should also keep yourself updated whenever Google announces updates to their algorithm. This year, their new algorithm is primarily based upon users’ page experience, giving some of the practises laid out in this article even more importance.
Just to recap, in this article, we first gave a brief overview of what SEO is before we outlined its overall importance in affiliate marketing. After this, we delved into several SEO practices crucial for any affiliate looking to stamp their authority in the gambling industry.