SEO Tracker: Paddy Power Betfair edges closer to oddschecker in sportsbook market

For a long time now, this column has looked at the sports betting market and our commentary has not necessarily been about which brands are leading, but rather the gap by which oddschecker leads the pack.

Oddschecker has been the dominant brand when it comes to organic search visibility in the sportsbook market, and it’s not hard to see why. The brand has strong fundamentals when it comes to organic search, producing high volumes of quality, credible content, being very adept at targeting event-based terms and providing a strong user experience.

But the brand also has a strong proposition that aligns very much with the values of Google’s recent policy and algorithm updates, providing an impartial source of information for punters looking to get the best odds. The principles that see oddschecker lead the sports betting search results are the same ones that see price comparisons lead the search results in financial services.

But is the lead as large as it might seem?

Paddy Power and Betfair combine to narrow the gap

Oddschecker generates a visibility of 70,230 from the 998 keywords that we considered in this analysis, 23,554 more than the second-biggest brand, Paddy Power.

Behind those brands, we see Betfred, William Hill, Betway, Sky Bet and Betfair, with those brands followed by three affiliate and tipping sites, OLBG, aceodds.com and Timeform.

However, a closer look at oddshecker’s rankings does perhaps suggest that the brand’s dominance is not quite as strong as it might appear.

The brand has the highest number of ranking positions in the keyword set, but it’s weighted average rank is just under 21.4. This is relatively high for a market leader in most search marketing segments and is actually higher than Paddy Power’s weighted average rank (19.95) in this keyword set.

What we also see is that oddschecker also has relatively high rankings for the keywords that have the highest search volume in this market; “betting calculator” (position seven) and “bet” (ranking in tenth and 13th). The brand’s biggest traffic-driving keyword is “odds” but of the 10 biggest keywords by search volume in this market, oddschecker is on page one for just three of them. Paddy Power, by comparison, is on page one for seven of those 10 terms.

Paddy Power also out-performs oddschecker on generic terms (terms not relating to a particular sport, competition or event), generating 19,152 clicks from these terms, compared to the comparison site’s 15,786. While oddschecker does have more visibility in sport and event terms, the gap in some of these cases is not as big as it may have been previously.

With Betfair also in the top 10, generating a visibility of 16,924 from the keyword set, it means that the Paddy Power Betfair group as a whole commands a level of traffic that rivals oddschecker much more closely, putting the group less than 7,000 clicks behind the market leader.

Strength in generics key to Paddy Power’s visibility growth

Just under 107,000 clicks are attainable from the 106 keywords in this category and, while that theoretical maximum is based on the brand ranking in position one for every term, it is clearly the category where large gains can be made. By comparison, while there be more terms overall in the football category, many of these are very low-volume terms relating to teams, competitions and specific markets (eg, promotion and relegation markets or ‘next manager’ markets).

Almost 94% of Paddy Power’s traffic from generic keywords, and close to 40% of the brand’s organic non-brand search traffic overall, comes from the nine biggest generic keywords in the market and if the brand can continue to make even relatively small incremental gains here, it could pose a much bigger challenge to the long-time market leader.