If you look at the SERPs for many of the top value gambling related keywords, you will find that the players in the top five results for many of the important keywords are not always gargantuan rich corporations. Why is this?
Well, Big gambling companies with hundreds of employees spread across the world (e.g.Betfair, Paddy Power. PokerStars, Betsson) are plentiful, and some of them own some of the top gambling keyword spots across the SERPs, but other organizations fail at non-brand SEO, losing lucrative positions to sites owned, developed and operated by lone SEO savvy individuals with some technical knowledge, and often a bit of some domain knowledge to boot.
Let us call distinguish the two entities – the “big corporation” on a SEO mission is Goliath, and the lone SEOer can be “David”.
Those who don’t know about big companies like Goliath’s might assume that Goliath can whoop David’s ass on the SERPs, just by being so highly budgeted. This is sometimes the case, but usually it is not.
Why SEO at Goliath Gambling Inc can be Tough
- Red Tape: Companies like Goliath Gambling Inc are usually so big that any small SEO modification takes forever. In big companies with a modular design, things require justification, prioritisation, coder time, testing time, integration time, and so on. If Goliath has 20+ websites to administer for a bunch of different languages, expect even more time before the site is updated. So while Goliath’ Inc’ is caught up with red tape and internal processes, David logs into his CMS, makes the required changes, tests them and relaxes with a cup of tea.
- CopyWriting costs: Companies like Goliath will pay up to six or seven times more than David will, for content. David writes his own content or hires domain experts (people who actually know about poker,casino,bingo,betting first hand) to write dirt-cheap content, saving time and money and resulting in better overall content quality which may result in higher conversions.
- Translation is expensive : Goliath has to pay for content, and then get it translated into 20+ languages for his multi-language portal. Translation costs a lot more than content writing does. David is just targeting 1 language with his current site, and doesn’t have to worry about the global market.. for now.
- Screw the Rich. Goliath has to pay for links and publicity because nobody gives a rich coporation anything for free or in way of barter or exchange, let alone cheap. David is a networker. Other webmasters and affiliates with whom he has networked on affiliate forums or at affiliate conferences will give David links, content and exposure because he is the little guy – people love to bet on the little guy.
- SEO Team = Reactive, not pro-active – The SEO Team at Goliath spend 60% of their time fixing SEO problems (or fighting to get them fixed) which are created by Developers (technical) on >20 domains. Developers usually don’t know / care about SEO. David knows about SEO, and considers it in CMS design, use and maintenence and article writing and linkbuilding.
- No Grassroots SEO Awareness: Goliath’s SEO team needs to convince everyone about the benefits of SEO: Management (to get fat budget+keep jobs), Technical (so they consider SEO and Accessibility with everything they do), Content Writers (to encourage them to Write copy with SEO in mind) and so on. David just gets on with SEOing on-site and off-site, and has nobody to answer to but himself.
- Technical people are not so “Professional”: Companies like Goliath should have coders and developers who adhere to current industry standards, as a professional should. Of course, there are lots of exceptions and companies like Goliath seem to release new web-stuff suffering from outdated coding habits with a negative impact on SEO. David uses a CMS which is standards compliant
- Goliath Online Marketing Management not SEO Savvy: Some SEOers working with big Goliath-like companies tell stories of asking for linkbuilding budgets and being requested to submit all of the links in advance so that marketing can confirm that the company will not be damaged by linking or association with the web-sites in question.
Okay, so BIG companies like Goliath may have a lot of issues to face due to their size and structure, however many of these bottlenecks and barriers can be overcome with a proper awareness of SEO at the top of the corporate chain. There are of course companies who have embraced SEO , on-site conversion testing, as well as Viral marketing SEO (Big-daddy poker company PokerStars springs to mind). Thankfully for the small affiliate (our David) – these well-oiled SEO-slick companies are few and far between – the reality is that most big online gambling companies are stymied by corporate structure and lack of SEO awareness at grass-roots level to realise maximum ROI in their their SEO campaigns, while our man David has a definite potential to compete well on the SERPs and in the marketplace with Goliath, and most probably has a big edge over Goliath in many SEO respects.
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Thanks, very interesting post, also ties in well with the concept of longtail search terms.
I have found this in other sectors aswell as gambling, i think for the small SEO/companies with a little bit of knowledge great things can be achived even agaisnt Goliath… Very Good Post!!!
nice one
it is very interesting post, also ties in well with the concept of long tail search terms.Thank you for sharing with us.
Very interesting post. It gives individuals the hope and motivation in their quest for their gambling sites to be recognised on the web.
Great post, thank you!
There is also another point that helps small affiliates: Google is at least a litte bit democratic: Even the biggest affiliate companies with thousands of indexed pages only get 1-3 results in the Google SERPs, and smaller affiliates have at least a fair chance to show up on the first results page.
Really interesting post!
And sadly very true.. Big companies are massive ships that take days if not weeks to change course even a tiny bit, while smaller SEO experts/affiliates are flexible and agile and manage to turn things around in an evening if needed.
But this certain “lack of knowledge” is true for a lot of industries involving anything IT or tech related. Like Mr. Cohen says in his blog post on Egaming Review Magazine this week, there are way too few people with a techie background at the top (steering the ship): http://www.egrmagazine.com/blog/572302/technology-gap.thtml