Google: know your History to decide your future
Google's 'Web History' makes 'winning the click' first time more important than ever, says Greenlight COO Andrew Pouros - and four days since it launched, the time to act is now.
EGAMING WEBSITES know how to merchandise within search engine’s results pages better than most do.
Searching for ‘bingo’ in Google, for example, brings up natural and paid search results with a multitude of offers “ every single site will offer free money or cash back, and do so aggressively and competitively.
Such is the level of competition for players that these titles and creatives are critical in ‘winning the click’. In fact, failing to ‘win the click’ comes with a greater punishment in gaming than in most other industries, as the lifetime value of a whale can be the difference between a good week and a bad one.
Google’s launch of ‘Web History’ this month makes winning the click more important than ever.
Essentially, ‘Web History’ is the new name for Google’s personalised search feature, which has been made default across its entire searcher base. Essentially, by monitoring what you click on in their results, Google can learn what sites you like and give them a ranking boost in your search results for future searches.
This adds a further dimension to how Google ranks sites and pages, which has historically focussed largely on analysing on-page relevancy and third party links pointing into a site.
What this means for gaming sites is that if you fail to ‘win the click’, the site that did win the click will get a ranking boost in that user’s search results for any other related search made in the future. So not only do you lose that potential player this time around, but the likelihood of you winning them in the future diminishes too.
This should be a particular concern for those gaming sites that offer a variety of games as, for instance, if you fail to ‘win the click’ when a user searches for ‘bingo’, you are also less likely to win it if the person gains an interest in ‘roulette’ in the future, and undertakes a Google search for that.
We all know SEO it is important, but Google has just upped the stakes (pun intended). So the smart move is to review your titles and creatives against those of your competitors – and to do so sooner rather the later, given that the clock started ticking four days ago!
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