Increasing site traffic and authority is fundamental to a successful online business, not least in the crowded iGaming niche. Hundreds of casinos and affiliate platforms constantly jostle for the highest SERP positioning, so learning how to optimise your website by leveraging various SEO strategies is essential.
Content Lab keeps our finger on the pulse, ensuring our content ticks key objectives to help clients boost their rankings, traffic, and overall authority. Our previous blog post, “Who to Follow in the SEO Space”, is a great example. Learning from expert figures and organisations is the best way to further your own SEO goals. We strongly recommend keeping tabs on these suggestions, especially as Google persistently updates its guidelines and algorithms.
The main objective when boosting site traffic and authority is higher SERP rankings, but this isn’t the only factor to consider. A holistic approach is often the most successful, taking into account user behaviour, on-site technical optimisation, link building, competitor analysis, and keyword research.
Ultimately, Google and other search engines look for genuine and valuable content. Sophisticated algorithms can spot black hat and spammy tactics from a mile away, harming your site ranking and reducing traffic in the process. Instead, a business must emphasise its expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness to gain higher positioning and generally elevate its profile. Sound familiar? It’s all about the E-E-A-T.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the iGaming niche, an area Content Lab specialises in. We’ve explored “Your Money, Your Life” content in a previous blog post, illustrating the importance of following Google’s guidelines to increase site traffic and authority. This time, we’ll examine some of the key practical areas to make your SEO dreams a reality.
Stay with us for a breakdown of the Google Search Essentials, domain rating and trust flow, paid vs organic traffic, SEO tools, keyword analysis, and successful link-building tactics. Afterwards, get in contact to see how we can help you achieve your digital marketing goals.
Google Search Essentials: Understanding The Basics
Outlining the foundations beneath successful site traffic and authority tactics is our first point of call. We could talk about the Google Search Essentials (formerly Webmaster Guidelines) for aeons, but the main thing to outline here is the E-E-A-T concept. This is designed as a bulwark against “creating search engine-first content”, something Google punishes.
Before we get into specific strategies and metrics designed to boost your website’s SEO score, let’s focus on the E-E-A-T fundamentals:
- Experience: Google added Experience to its pre-existing E-A-T guidelines in December 2022, placing added emphasis on genuine first-hand experience. In the iGaming context, this means directly showing you have visited an online casino or played an online slot before reviewing.
- Expertise: Demonstrating a high level of expertise is another key E-E-A-T aspect. Google looks for high-value content that has demonstrable expertise in its subject area. It’s why we demand the most accurate writing and knowledge at Content Lab. We cannot satisfy our clients’ objectives without a dogged insistence on accurate, up-to-date, and expert content.
- Authoritativeness: The most important E-E-A-T factor for boosting site authority is, you guessed it, authoritativeness. This starts from an ability to write with clear authority on your chosen niche. A compelling backlink profile, intuitive site design, and clear appreciation of the preceding Es (experience & expertise) are also crucial.
- Trustworthiness: Last but not least, trustworthiness is arguably the most important E-E-A-T principle. How do you expect to boost your website authority and traffic without unconditionally accurate information? Ensuring all content is 100% accurate and impartial is especially important for iGaming content, especially with so much fake or excessively advertorial writing on display.
Following the guidelines above is the first step towards an optimised SEO strategy. We’ve given a basic architecture of what Google looks for behind the scenes to demonstrate the bedrock of improving site traffic and authority. Next on the agenda are some practical metrics and tactics to supercharge your business’ digital footprint.
What is Domain Rating & Trust Flow?
Domain rating and trust flow are two key measurements for site authority used by popular SEO tools. Understanding how these work will significantly benefit your overall strategy. Check below for a breakdown of each:
Domain Rating
Commonly abbreviated to “DR”, Domain Rating is an Ahrefs metric also known as Domain Authority on other SEO tools. It shows the strength of a website’s backlink profile (the number of pages linking to your website). Ahrefs explains how Domain Rating is calculated with the following:
“We find all domains that have at least one followed link to the target domain.
We look up how many other domains each linking domain links to.
We then pass some amount of “DR juice” from each linking domain to the target domain. That amount is determined (roughly) by dividing the DR of the linking domain by the number of unique domains that it links to.”
Essentially, your Domain Rating revolves around how many sites link back to your own domain and the quality of each backlink. If you have thousands of low-quality spam websites linking to yours, it will harm site authority and Domain Rating. On the contrary, if you have respectable sources linking to your own content, this will boost your score.
Trust Flow
Trust Flow is a similar metric trademarked by the Majestic SEO tool. The rating also explores your backlink profile, awarding points for trustworthy sites linking to your own and punishing your rating for dodgy sites or untrustworthy links. As the Majestic glossary explains:
“Trust Flow, a trademark of Majestic, is a score based on quality, on a scale between 0-100. Majestic collated many trusted seed sites based on a manual review of the web. This process forms the foundation of Majestic Trust Flow. Sites closely linked to a trusted seed site can see higher scores, whereas sites that may have some questionable links would see a much lower score.”
Checking Domain Rating and Trust Flow are essential first steps when building site authority and traffic through link building. They can help you spot where you’re going wrong or highlight positive links you should acquire more of.
Paid Traffic vs Organic Traffic
Understanding the distinction between paid and organic traffic is critical. We must clarify this before we explore practical strategies to boost traffic and site authority using the metrics above. Otherwise, our observations can easily get distorted by false expectations. Check below for a breakdown:
- Paid Traffic: Paid digital marketing tactics like PPC advertising result in paid traffic. This involves using Facebook, Google, Instagram or other platform adverts to show your website or content page directly to users in exchange for paying.
- Organic Traffic: Attracting organic traffic is the ultimate long-term goal for most online businesses. This is completely free and involves the successful application of SEO principles to boost your site ranking and attract natural traffic without advertorial placements.
While attracting paid traffic is a legitimate practice that can pay serious dividends, we’ll focus on boosting organic traffic throughout this article. Using paid PPC campaigns can be a great way to get your site authority and traffic off the ground, but ensuring an organic flow of potential customers is undeniably the most advantageous method to long-term success.
What Are SEO Tools And How Can They Help?
SEO tools are essential for auditing your website and understanding where to focus your efforts. Popular options include Ahrefs, Semrush, and Majestic. These can help you determine your site authority and give practical suggestions on how to boost overall traffic. Check below for a quick breakdown of our top three SEO tools:
Ahrefs
A powerful all-in-one tool launched by Dmitry Gerasimenko in 2010, Ahrefs started life as a backlink authority analysis tool but has grown to become so much more. Nowadays, hundreds of thousands of companies use Ahrefs for all SEO aspects, including competitor analysis, website auditing, keyword investigation, backlink opportunities, and progress tracking. One of its most significant exports is the Domain Rating we explored earlier, allowing businesses to track their backlink profiles and make changes where they’re needed.
SEMrush
Founded in 2008 by Oleg Shchegolev and Dmitri Melnikov, SEMrush is one of the oldest and most prestigious all-in-one SEO tools available. It offers over 55 tools covering everything from SEO to PPC advertising and social media marketing. SEMrush originated as the first SaaS marketing platform to give businesses an easy way to run keyword competitor analysis and has built a considerable legacy since. USPs include in-depth metric reporting alongside a robust search intent tool and several CRM-inspired features.
Majestic
Majestic boasts the world’s largest link index database, granting unparalleled access to businesses looking to enhance their site authority via an exceptional backlink profile. While it doesn’t offer the same all-in-one functionality as Ahrefs and SEMrush, the tool allows marketers to zero in on the link-building side with incredible precision. Metrics include the Trust Flow we looked at previously, alongside other examples like Citation Flow and Crawled URLs.
Keywords: How to Optimise Your Approach
Keywords are the traditional pillars of SEO. Getting your strategy right is still fundamental to increasing site traffic, as you cannot appear on the right SERPs without understanding the key terms potential customers use to find services within your niche. Once you’ve identified a pool of short-tail (generic words or short phrases) and long-tail (more focussed and longer sequences of words) keywords, you can write content with these foundations in mind.
While a successful keyword approach is more advantageous for boosting site traffic, it can also enhance your authority as a byproduct. This leads to not only more potential sales but also more potential organic backlink opportunities. Here are some top tips to help you optimise your strategy:
- Understand Your Target Audience: Knowing your target audience is the first step towards a successful keywords blueprint. Focus on what they’re searching for to generate the most useful keywords. Otherwise, you could completely miss the target.
- Undergo Competitor Analysis: Checking your competitors to see what keywords they’re using is a great way to supplement your preliminary research. This can also help you identify smaller competition terms and phrases where you’re more likely to rank higher.
- Run Regular Tests & Keyword Tracking Tools: Consistently auditing your website is vital to keyword optimisation. You must check what keywords are sticking to keep your strategy moving forwards and gain as much site traffic as possible.
- Appreciate Keyword Difficulty: Mastering keyword difficulty can give you an essential edge over competition. Some terms are very highly searched by consumers, but also targeted extensively. This makes it harder to rank higher, so savvy digital marketers search for the short-tail and long-tail terms hiding in the gaps. Find a low-competition but high-search volume keyword, and you’re onto a winner.
Optimising Internal & External Linking
Grasping the concept of internal and external linking is crucial to boosting your site authority alongside traffic. This relates to links to your website from external sources, as well as the internal nexus of your own links (i.e. from one blog post to another). Both can deliver more value to the reader and enhance your E-E-A-T score. As such, taking care of both is essential.
Internal linking is relatively easy to leverage. Businesses must make their websites easy to navigate and full of helpful internal links to optimise the user experience. However, getting external linking right is much harder. Primarily known as “link building”, this process greatly benefits from the following tactics:
- Link Building Prospecting: Prospecting is an essential link-building stage, where you’ll seek out the best platforms to host backlinks to your website. You must do sustained research to rule out spam sites and find optimal platforms for your niche. This should be your first point of call.
- Competitor Backlink Analysis: As with keywords, analysing your competitors’ backlink profiles is a great way to formulate a blueprint of your own.
- Regular Backlink Auditing: Use SEO tools, such as Ahrefs, SEMrush and Majestic, to consistently audit your own backlink profile. This can help you avoid negative backlinks and find the most useful sources
- Avoiding “Black Hat” Link Building: Google punishes so-called “black hat” link building, so avoid anything that can be linked to this. Spammy backlinks are the No. 1 thing to avoid, but you should also be careful with tiered link building, as this can also easily lead to spam.
- Blog Outreach: A great way to organically build a genuinely valuable backlink profile is through blog outreach. Identify some popular blog sites within your niche and see if you can write a regular guest blog linking back to your own business.
- Create Shareable Content: Another fantastic organic link-building strategy stems from prioritising high-value and innately shareable content like infographics or cutting-edge blog articles. The aim of the game is to get people naturally sharing your content, creating an extensive backlink in the process and signalling to Google that your website is worth pushing up the SERPs.
- Check Resource Pages: Always check resource pages and directories to see if they can list your website. This counts as a backlink, and businesses can acquire many examples through this approach.
Content Lab: Passionate SEO Experts in the iGaming Niche
Content Lab is determined to consistently upgrade our SEO understanding. We’re not just an iGaming copywriting agency, as we seek to help clients achieve their digital marketing ambitions across content writing, translating, and overall SEO optimisation. Get in contact to see how we can help.
See You Next Time
That’s it for this iteration of the Content Lab blog. We’ve explored a broad range of facets influencing site traffic and authority throughout this blog article. Check back to the blog for more in-depth explorations and articles.
Marko Marincic