Why SEO isn't dead, but your strategy might be

Many would argue that traditional SEO is dead, or at the very least dying. Google has been on a crusade to discredit any website it believes to be publishing low-grade content and, as a result, everyone has become almost irrational in their approach to editorial and links. It’s highly likely that Google is not devaluing links at all and is simply trying to encourage websites to produce better content.

Let’s delve a little deeper”¦

Links still count

It is true to say that building links for SEO gain needs to be done with a more sophisticated approach than in the past, but it’s certainly not an area to ignore.

Links are still an essential metric for Google to determine which sites are popular and which aren’t. The authority from links just needs to pass through ““ and be part of ““ high quality content that is genuinely useful to readers and users.

We all know that websites engineered with the sole purpose of building links are completely redundant. Unfortunately everyone is getting hypersensitive about links and quality and, in that sense, Google has played its cards perfectly. There will always be links and the more people panic about building them, the likelier it is that those links that remain will actually be genuine.

Content now has to be editorially justified in every way. If no one will benefit from a piece of content (whether it be editorial, video, audio or visual content), don’t publish it. There’s just no point. However, if internet users will benefit in at least some way, and the content is going to be published in the right place, there is no problem with including some promotion within that content.

Almost all websites carry advertising of some kind and that’s never going to stop; Google can’t stop it and average-Joe internet users can’t stop it. There is no arguing that everyone familiar with the world of online now expects promotion, marketing and ads.

Using content to build links for you

These days, perhaps the best way to approach link building is to view the importance of a link, or links, as secondary to the importance of the content as its own entity. From this new perspective, the content is used to build the links; the content is not just a mere by-product of having to force a link onto a specific website.

The key here is shareability, one of those online buzz terms that everyone will be sick of one year from now but which, in terms of its core principals, makes a great deal of sense. Put simply, before creating a piece of content, ask yourself one thing: would I share this? If the answer is “yes”, push ahead and start getting creative.

If links are built naturally by others sharing the original piece of content you’ve created, this isn’t engineered link building, but rather a natural, intuitive way of using the internet that has existed since the very first day we started logging on a couple of decades ago.

Event-specific link building

In iGaming, we’re fortunate that marketing efforts can be directed and focused around events on the sporting calendar that people naturally want to talk about, both offline and online.

Just this month we’ve enjoyed the early days of the new Premier League campaign (not to mention the start of the Championship, the qualifying rounds of the Champions League and the start of La Liga), we’ve witnessed the compelling twists and turns of India’s visit to our cricketing-mad shores, and we’ve hailed a new golfing hero in the form of Rory McIlroy after a summer to remember for the Northern Irishman.

This is an industry and a sector in which people talk, share, and research to an almost obsessive extent, without needing too much encouragement. And, what used to be debate around the pub table and on the football terraces, and scouring the back pages of the daily newspapers for club form and latest results has now become involvement in forum threads, sharing across social media platforms, and conducting targeted Google searches looking for authoritative and reliable sources.

Combining targeted on-site SEO with natural, shareable link building around individual and ongoing events is, therefore, an entirely logical activity for iGaming brands operating within this competitive sector to pursue.

Ultimately, identifying events to create innovative content around is key in this new online era where earning links and/or brand exposure is so much more important than paying for it, or worse, manipulating it.

World Cup betting: a case in point

We can look back at a specific example here from just before the World Cup began.

England were due to play their opening group game in Brazil against Italy, and excitement levels were, predictably, reaching fever pitch across the country.

Blogs, forums, and social media platforms were all alive with chatter and speculation about England’s chances of success or failure, and iGaming brands were racking their collective brains trying to figure out how best to redirect this chat slightly in order to increase brand exposure and awareness while remaining, on the whole, on-topic just days before the start of the tournament.

After all, if you want results, it’s no longer good enough to write 250 articles while hammering money phrases to death like “World Cup betting”.

Betfair are an example of one brand that did manage to strike the right chord. The brand invited a number of influential football bloggers down to the holy ground of Hackney Marshes in London to meet up with England World Cup hero Peter Shilton. The goalkeeping legend gave the bloggers a masterclass in taking and saving penalties before hosting a lively Q&A session about various aspects of the upcoming tournament.

Fast forward just a few hours and individual blogs, huge sporting media outlets, and traditional media including radio and TV were buzzing with talk about the day.

Betfair found a way to subtly redirect the existing chatter and buzz about an imminent sporting event in a manner that spread brand awareness and earned links across the internet.

Other brands, including Paddy Power, have done the same thing brilliantly, displaying a close understanding of the sector to promote and market in a way that just makes people talk.

SEO: a dead term but a thriving concept?

Ultimately, it seems blindingly obvious that SEO isn’t dead; if anything, it’s more pertinent now than ever before for brands to make SEO (if that’s what we choose to call it) a focus in as competitive a sector as iGaming.

The debate won’t, however, end any time soon, but perhaps the real questions should focus on whether a new term and definition is needed for the current online environment, where digital marketing incorporates so much more than the original definitions of the term SEO.