SEO Snapshot: A new beginning?

The return of the NFL season gives betting brands 272 regular season games plus a full post-season to get to grips with, capture attention, and convert fans into betters. For operators, there’s the challenge of promoting the latest offers and responsibly driving up deposits but without pushing passionate fans away by being too opportunity-seeking. It’s notable that for operators, affiliates, and media outlets there’s something of a convergence with betting brands starting to act more like publishers, and media brands starting to focus more on monetizing with betting content.

For this season, we can expect savvier operators to be more focused on organic acquisition with even the largest companies not immune from pressures on spend. In some cases, advertising spend. is still going up among sportsbooks, but not at the same rate as previous years, reflecting shareholder concern about burn.

As research, data, and insight provider Insider Intelligence reported last year:

• DraftKings’ Q2 ad spend increased 16% to $197.5m down dramatically from a 270% increase in Q2 2021.
• Caesars Entertainment said that it reduced approximately $500m in “unneeded” ad spending.

So, given the pressure in now on to earn organic traffic, what does the search engine result page (SERP) look like? The table here is based on a US search on September 14, 2023, with operators highlighted with an asterisk.

What’s specially interesting here is that the ranking is made up not just of affiliates but also conventional news sites like Yahoo and USA today.

In the case of brands like DraftKings and FanDuel, it’s widely known their organic status based on years upon years of building up brand equity (and media coverage) through the fantasy route. For other operators that are finally prioritizing the organic channel, it’s going to be hard to muscle in on those two brands, but the strength of information-heavy affiliates the are in many cases providing informational content on par with media outlets is another challenge.

Will we see operators step up up and work to provide resources to fans in the same way that this type company has been doing? It feels for those that can commit, there’s plenty of fan passion that can be usefully harnessed.

Shareholders, SEO, and alternatives to bonus-driven marketing

It remains to be seen if a) operators have the capacity to truly prioritize SEO in this way and b) if they can convince shareholders of the value of such a longer-term strategy. Operating on an expensive promotional and bonus-centric model has shown limited effectiveness in expanding market share or delivering returns to shareholders.

As Russell Karp, senior VP, media and entertainmentm of software development firm DataArt, commented earlier this year: “Caesars had run generous promotion to entice new bettors: a deposit match up to $3,000 plus a way $300 bonus. That campaign led to a 40% market share in New York but was quickly followed by big marketing budgets cuts and a concurrent drop in market share.”

For the NFL, it remains to be seen how creative operators can be when it comes to product and incentives beyond brute force bonuses, but fans’ appetite for information,stats, and fresh perspectives is strong and that includes content with a betting component, hence the success of media outlets and affiliates.

For this season, we could see creative operators lean into using their authority as expert in odd and modeling to demystify aspects of NFL betting, such as score differentials, field position, time, and remaining timeouts and so on equipping fans to keep up to date with shifting rules and betting options open to them.

In this effort, though, establishing and maintaining trust is key and the challenge from traditional media can’t be underemphasized.

Media powerhouses muscling in

Let’s take a look at the SERP for ‘NFL odds.’ The dominance of new sites is striking, and while many such sites are well known for their reportage and brand heritage, there’s also some more straightforward SEO-focused aspects to bear in mind. Looking at the number of backlinks these sites have, the strength of the domains, and the variety of keyword pages rank for is telling.

Many SEO professionals will advise not to get caught up in pursuing any single keyword but to instead aim for clusters of keyword, and that’s certainly the case with many of these pages if we look at the last column, These are pages that typically rank for many terms.

To compete, operators and affiliates should consider how they can consolidate strenght and topical relevance in key sections and pages across their sites and tank Google’s advice that it seems to rank at the page level, not necessarily sites as whole.

Bearing that in mind, the backlink aspect of this picture can’t be ignored, and it’s fair to say media outlets will pick up more links naturally due to their reporting while affiliates may savvier about more traditional SEO methodologies for link acquisition and link-earning via creative PR campaigns.

Sites with a propensity rank have most to gain

With so many games and engaged fans who are increasingly up to speed on the world of regulated betting in their states, we’ll need to see which betting brand will be capitalizing on the opportunity compared to those who have been resistant to learn from the experience of other regulated markets like Europe.

For some brands, it’s not that there’s no SEO thinking, it’s that the SEO thinking is comparatively dates and why, by accident or by design, media companies are scooping up so many top rankings.

Google’s amphasis on Experience, Expertize, Authority and Trust (E-E-A-T)is one aspect of modern SEO where Google is backling up its ‘best practice’ guidance through successive broad core updates focused on ‘quality’.

To capitalize on fan passion for the NFL, betting brands will have to do more to demonstrate the quality of their content and think more clearly about how they can pick up rankings more consistently over time.

SEO is a subjective field but I feel safe in saying that sites with a propensity to rank, with a track record of answering the queries of users in clear and elegant ways, will better placed to compete for ‘top’ terms on an ongoing basis and that approach can meaningfully compete with the gravitas of the media giants and the shrewdness of the sharpest affiliates.