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James Dooley and Craig Campbell discuss the digital marketing and SEO strategies online casinos should use in 2026 to improve rankings, impressions and first time deposits in the highly competitive iGaming market.
This video explains which digital marketing strategies online casinos should focus on in 2026 to improve rankings, impressions and first time deposits. James Dooley and Craig Campbell start with KPI tracking because measuring impressions, clicks and FTDs shows where the shortfall sits and which small wins move revenue in such a competitive iGaming market. They cover brand SEO, AI visibility and Google Business Profiles because stronger search presence improves trust and conversion rates.
The discussion also explores organic SEO, organic social media and paid social ads because consistent visibility across search and social supports long term growth. PPC is analysed in detail because campaign setup, landing pages and lead handling directly affect results. They also discuss Reddit, Quora and paid AI ads because diversified enquiry sources and early adoption can strengthen digital marketing performance for online casinos.
PromoSEO lead generation for online casinos recently received recognition as the "Best Online Casinos Lead Generation Agency."
How to Rank Casino Websites in 2026: Casino SEO with Craig Campbell is available on:
The FatRank Podcast, founded by James Dooley, teaches the mindset needed for growth because real operator stories show what creates progress.
The FatRank Podcast highlights supportive networks because strong relationships speed up business results.
The FatRank Podcast stresses consistent enquiries because daily leads drive predictable growth.
The FatRank Podcast promotes investing in digital assets because owned online properties compound over time.
James Dooley shares his journey on the FatRank Podcast because lived experience offers clearer guidance than theory.
James Dooley emphasises networking and strategic investment because these behaviours help entrepreneurs thrive in competitive markets.
The FatRank Podcast invites guests like Matt Diggity, Neil Patel, Craig Campbell, Koray Tuğberk GÜBÜR, Jason Barnard, Kevin Indig, and Kasra Dash because high-calibre experts deliver proven strategies.
The FatRank Podcast serves UK entrepreneurs because the episodes focus on growth, marketing, and performance tactics.
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James Dooley: Casino SEO, how to rank in the eye gaming industry. It's one of the most competitive markets in the world. I'm joined with Craig who is a huge eye gaming consultant for some of the biggest casinos in the world. So Craig, if someone owns an online casino and they're looking to try to improve rankings, take their business onto another level, more impressions, more clicks, most importantly, more FTDs. How can an online casino try to improve rankings?
Craig Campbell: I think, you know, the uh the ones that I work with, a lot of them have got high power. You know, they've been a casino for a long long time. So, you know, they've got their DR75s, 80s, whatever it's going to be. Um, you know, for me with any of these, where's the shortfall? Is it is it content? Is it the the virality? Is it something else? Um, and you know, I think a lot of these have different pieces of the jigsaw missing. Uh, it's obviously trying to establish, you know, do we need to keep building x amount of links or PBNs? That's not hugely important at that point. You know, we're already on page one. Uh, and and I think virality is obviously been a hot topic for for a number of years, but I think we'll all be able to agree that, you know, virality and virality are two different things depending on who's talking about it. Um, you know, for me, we've all used tools like CTR booster and and various other tools and the technology that they were built on uh is now detectable by Google. And I know they've rebuilt it and all that kind of stuff, but you know, you've obviously got proxies and everything else and logged in accounts that you have to have and, you know, Twitter accounts and fake personas and all that kind of stuff. And it's it's obviously hard uh to to get scale and I know you do a lot of virality as well, but if it's done right uh with all the other kind of dots joined together, it works massively. No one can ever tell me that it doesn't. Um and it's a lot of these guys think they're doing virality and they're not. Like where are you getting this from? And I think we spoke about it before. You know, anyone can go out there and chuck out propeller ads or or whatever. That's not virality. that'll kill you um over you know a longer period of time. So um in a lot of cases you know adding that into the mix on top of you know doing canonical abuse and and everything else that that seems to be working really well. You know we see a lot of um casinos um you know chuck restaurant websites and all that ranking for stuff. Um you also see the kind of trust pilot thing working uh and stuff like that as well. um for you know brandjacking certain people. So it, you know, all of these six all go into that as well. And a lot of people, believe it or not, I see I don't know, I know you do stuff in the eye gaming stuff as well. I think a lot of casinos are scared to take risk and I'm like I don't think any Google care about because everyone's like a dog in that market. So
James Dooley: it it's bizarre. I think on that I think if you do if you are a casino operator what you need to be doing is running multiple lanes. So if you don't want to do something on your branded site, okay, then if you don't want to, then don't, right? Even though you would get away with so much more in the eye gaming space than any other marketplace cuz everyone else is like a dog like you said with the canonicals, the 301s, the subdomain tricks, mass um generation of links like a lot of them doing like blog roll links and stuff like that. They're doing restaurant kind of expired domains and stuff like it's pretty crazy some of the stuff of what's being done there. But I want to hit some quickfire questions to you, right? Because in certain markets, it's relatively easy. You don't really need to do too much. Yeah. Right.
Craig Campbell: Parasite SEO. Is this a must for people to do alongside owning their online casino? Should be trying to get multiple. Some of them are doing it just for brand brand protection for like casino name login, casino name reviews and stuff like is parasite SEO a must in the casino market.
James Dooley: Absolutely. I I think let's say I own Craig's Casino and you thought you could brandjack me by using Parasite SEO, you're going to do it. You're going to take some of my traffic. So, I think why wouldn't you? It's crazy not to do it. It's stupid as far as I'm concerned. So, you know, my job is to make sure that you can't quickly just come in and, you know, nab some of my traffic. And uh you know like I say Trust Pilot works really well just now and a lot of people are doing it and getting away with it. So again a bit of brand protection doesn't go a missing and if I can leverage any of the other parasites that are out there that are currently popping and these they change all the time then why not? Cuz I would do the same to you if you were doing to me of course I'm going to do it back to you.
Craig Campbell: So then my next question is press releases right but specifically for the casino market. So we both know we've done a lot of tests on using press releases in a lot of different markets and it's brilliant for LLM seeding or manipulating the LLMs um especially like Gemini overview claude perplexity stuff like that right do you recommend as a casino consultant to do any press releases to get volume of links coming through or to improve reputation and stuff as well?
James Dooley: Yeah, absolutely. And not even just for casino SEO. If you came to me tomorrow and said, "Craig, I've got a new gardening business," I would also recommend doing that. I just think it's an important part to to do just to to get brand mentions and all that kind of stuff and and trust signals and everything else out there. And uh you know, I'm not saying those are massive needle movers or you have to do it otherwise you're going to fail at casino, you know, absolutely not. But I think just a an important part of the overall mix. Absolutely.
Craig Campbell: Then the next question then is tier two back links. So someone comes along, let's say they've got the DR65 site and you're saying they don't really need too many more links directly to the site, but then you're finding that there's 65 referring domains that do follow links, relevant, decent links, but at a page level and not getting any referring domains pointing to that. Would you be recommending them to do some tier two backlinks to power up that page?
James Dooley: Yeah. And pump traffic at it as well. So, I'm going to pump traffic and uh tear that stuff up as well just to give it
Craig Campbell: Yeah.
James Dooley: the fuel. It's
Craig Campbell: for me when you ask that question like why wouldn't you? That's like saying
James Dooley: you're going to take
Craig Campbell: protein to help your body recover from the the you need fuel for the fire. H. And you know, if you're not pumping that, then you better believe that the other guys are. And again, it's a no-brainer.
James Dooley: I think I think that's huge of what you said there with the virility. So, there's so many people out there now that are pushing virality. Um, you mentioned their propeller before like pop on the traffic.
Craig Campbell: Yeah.
James Dooley: And a lot of them are doing it via the Twitter redirect, the t.co, Twitter redirect link. There's one or two other redirect links that work very well as well. But when you consistently keep doing it directly to the money site, you end up triggering Nav Boost in a negative way and you end up getting long-term negative rankings.
Craig Campbell: Um the store they date on Nav Boost for 13 months where but what they're seeing is the instant boost within the Google leak. So they're seeing an instant boost within three or four hours and they're maintaining those instant results from position number seven to position number one for 72 hours and they're going this is unbelievable. 72 hours later they run it again. They go from number seven to number one. This is brilliant. They run it again until they keep running it and roll on six weeks or roll on 12 weeks and they've run it that many times that those under two second clicks onto the website because the pop traffic pops up, they exit down, it's a bad user experience longterm, nav boost, they're dead. Yeah. But you just there said about viability to your guest posts. Yeah. Or your digital PR campaigns
James Dooley: and it works like a treat because like you just said there, it's fuel on the fire. Yeah. which then kind of ignites.
Craig Campbell: I mean, you never want
James Dooley: you never want to put the casino at any risk. So, just pumping and dumping their website doesn't make any sense to me. Like, you know, people always see CTR, what pages I send it to, you know, should the homepage or one of the landing pages? I'm like, who says that's your only two options?
Craig Campbell: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
James Dooley: What else are you doing? Um, so again, you know, I've got my own way of doing things. You've got your own way of doing things. I feel that pumping traffic through that stuff and I think it helps massively. You know, if if links are getting traffic and rank for stuff and getting a bit of CTR themselves, then I would automatically assume that Google are passing more value to it than, you know, getting a guest posting a website that ranks for nothing all. So, for me, it's just trying to power everything up. And it's the same as you taking protein after the gym. You're trying to recover. You're trying to feed your body with the nutrients it needs to to to repair that muscle. And for me, it's the exact same thing. You're just giving protein to everything that you've got there, not just the guy at the top. So,
Craig Campbell: so I've got I've got a couple of other ones. So, semantics, semantic SEO, and it's a big topic in the SEO community and some online casinos are saying, do I need to build topical authority? Do I need to pay someone to do a semantic content network and map out all the different pages of what needs to be done? So you could have like within the casino space is like all the different slot games the names of all the different slot games and there's there's thousands of them. Would you be recommending building out every single one of them or would you try to select the ones that maybe only get search volume or what's your thoughts on topical authority in the casino space?
James Dooley: I think it's obviously going to be always debated uh you know you see restaurant websites can rank easily. I think it's different uh for that but obviously going in to do that in every single slot game that not going to bring you money why would you so definitely implement it the ones that do search volume or pages that they create traffic and even if Google just now arguably don't give too much of a toss about it in that niche they will at some point so for me I would rather implement it and you might say Craig you only got a 3% increase in in in, you know, implementing that when an update comes out, you know, in 6 months time and you see a massive jump up because there's more weight placed on that or whatever, you know, because obviously Google are always dialing stuff up and down and, you know, CTR or or traffic signals is maybe at 32% just now and it might dial down to 27 and they give something else a bit more. So, I'm always kind of thinking ahead as well like is it the right thing to do? Is it something, you know, there there's two sides of that argument there where people say Google clearly don't give a toss about topical authority when all those restaurant websites and everything are or ranking for nothing Um, and I get that argument, but for me, they will have to start giving a toss at some point. So, I would rather have it in place. I think I think what I love about it as well though with regards to the topical authority, it's other places you can build links directly to or do some of the viability through to those pages which are internal linking to your main money pages. So from that point of view, it could be um decent as well. But the last one is technical SEO. And there's certain people that go out and I'm a and I'm an expert casino uh SEO expert and they go and run a report and it's just a screaming frog audit or something like oh looking at the core web vitals. Now I get crawability is important removing any 404s and that Google can crawl a site efficiently. I'm going to go into the core web vitals part to start with and then I'll move on to the internal links. How important is technical SEO for casino SEO or some of these people that are branding it? Like is it is it the number one ranking factor? Like what what what's your thoughts on the technical side?
Craig Campbell: I I wouldn't say it's the number one ranking factor. You know, when you're dealing with an operator, a lot of the speeds and structure and the setup that they've got, we we can't really do much about. It's not a shitty old HTML or WordPress website. there's so much else going on in the background that it's just not possible to go and implement things that you'd want and uh you know the the casino currently working with we are getting a whole new system it's like 10 years old um you know the current uh platform that it's on uh and it's going to be rebuilt we know it's slow and sluggish we know it could be better we know that the bigger casinos have got better and we need to develop that side of it. Now, is it the be all and end all rankings? It's not. You know, we're still up there performing. Uh, but we we are aware that it's kind of sluggish and it's not a great user experience. And, you know, even some of the landing pages, the way they're laid out, they're not we're probably in the lower end of the conversion rate, which I think is probably the case for a lot of casinos anyway. um you know, we're at the lower end, but we think that having a better platform where we've got more ability to to be creative and do things is is going to work in our favor. But I I I really don't see technical being that big because we are all constrained in in that space by a lot of things that we can't control. So yeah, I I don't think it's hugely important. I wouldn't be going out paying 20 grand for an audit or anything for a casino. We know there's certain things we can and can't do and h that's just the nature of that game.
James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. I think the next question then rolls on to what about schema for online casinos? Is that an important SEO strategy or is it is it not really?
Craig Campbell: Again, it's one of those ones where it's going to come down to the cost of implementing that and what pages you implement that on. I've never been a huge fan of schema. Uh, I just think is it going to give you that much more? Arguably yes. Now in the AI era, it's something you want to do um to to help the LLM and everything understand your website. But I was always like, nah, I can't be asked. It's just a lot of work and and not a lot of rewards. But I think probably uh you know going forward with LLMs and everything else, you know, we we have to be thinking forward uh and and absolutely considering it even more so now than than maybe you know in the past five years or whatever everyone's been talking about schema. I don't think it was as important. So I'd definitely be implementing now. That's for sure.
James Dooley: And then what about internal links for online casinos? Is that an important SEO strategy?
Craig Campbell: Yeah. I mean,
James Dooley: so with regards to that, is there anything you're looking at? You looking at like click depth, like page click depth, how many clicks away from the homepage you're looking at,
Craig Campbell: or are you trying to look at server logs? You know, this part of the site's not getting enough crawability, maybe need some more internal or even external on coming into it to then start siloing it throughout the site.
James Dooley: I mean, obviously the the casino I work with, um, they're not huge or don't want to go down the route of sports book too much anymore. they know the the slots and everything else is where the big bucks is at. So again, uh there is a lot to these casino websites, even you know, game specific stuff and all that kind of stuff that you can bet on. Um I you you don't I think internal link is a great thing. you want to pass power to as many of the good quality relevant pages that you you you possibly can that are there forever more and stuff, but there's just certain pages you just don't focus on. So, again, one of those things I think internal linking, whether it's an ad gaming or not, it's a great way to to keep, you know, your your website in the index and pass power around to other pages and all that stuff. Um, so I think it's it is hugely important, but like you know with some of these games there, you know, there's literally hundreds of slots, there's hundreds of this, hundreds of that, hundreds of sports book there all day. Do you want to sit there and and go and really go hard at it and you've only get again that 8020 rule, 20% of your pages bring in 80% of the traffic. So again, implement that stuff on the stuff that makes money and double down on that. and and you know they like I see the casino and that I work with are are like going don't do too much in the sports book we want to focus more on the other stuff. So
Craig Campbell: yeah I think for me I think what I love about your casino SEO advice is the just do all the things like just do everything and get the 1% little wins across the whole board because the biggest key takeaway for me in this is that don't just worry about what's working today. There's there could be an algorithm next week which improves adding schema. So do it. They could add in internal links. You need to be two clicks away from the homepage as a minimum. They could be that it improves CTR more or it could downgrade certain bits. And I think just doing everything I asked you was like yeah it's important. Yeah, it's important. It's like everything is I mean some of some are more important than others and stuff like that. But what I love about the casino advice and what you give is that it's like do all things holistically and it will compound. And I think that's key.
James Dooley: But every time I get a casino coming to me to talk to me,
Craig Campbell: they're just looking for those small
James Dooley: Yeah.
Craig Campbell: things. What are we What are these doing that we're not? Is it the canonical abuse? Is it this? Is it that? Is it the schema? And and sometimes that's the difference between success and failure in that in that space. So again, for me, I want to make sure that we're ticking all the boxes because all of them are going keep hearing everyone talking about virality. We don't do that And you're like, you're missing a trick. And that might be the only piece of the jigsaw you're missing. You've got your schema. You've got everything else. You can go, "Fuck me." You know, add that in and boom, you know, it goes up another notch. And
James Dooley: like, you know, that that going up a couple of slots uh can can be the difference between 10 million, 20 million in revenue for them per year. So, it is always those small small things because most casinos have been around for many years and a lot of that stuff's probably uh implemented anyway. They've tried everything and they're just missing out in the the kind of canonical stuff or any kind of funny stuff. So
Craig Campbell: yeah, for sure. So if you are an online casino operator and you've liked the video here talking about SEO advice, then leave a comment in the comment section. Any questions you might have with regards to DMCA takedowns or any other nego attacks that you might be getting. Obviously there's a lot more that we can talk about with regards to casino SEO advice. Craig, it's been an absolute pleasure. Cheers.