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A daily podcast delving into the biggest stories of the day throughout the sports betting and igaming sector.
Hello everyone and welcome to yet another episode of SBC iGaming Daily podcast, the marketing edition. iGaming Daily is presented by OptiMove, the number one CRM marketing solution for the iGaming market. 56% of the EGR Power 50 personalize player experience with OptiMove. And we have yet another special offer for you. OptiMove is offering new clients a free first month when you buy OptiMove. For further information and claim the free month, please go to optimove.com slash SBC. I have a fantastic guest today. And today we'll be talking about the differences between SEO and search AI optimization. If you listen to our last episode, you know we were discussing about the future of AI. Google has changed their approach. How good or how bad AI is? Can we use it? How can we use it? Now European Union is trying to regulate the usage of AI. To make sure that we use it in a proper way, an ethical way, and we don't bring harm to our end customer, we agreed that AI has a place in our future. It is a future of the marketing if we use it responsibly. And this podcast will be discussing how to use it responsibly, how to make sure that with all the changes that are coming, you still score, you still perform, and you still bring your products to your end customer. I am Ivana Flynn, and today I am joined with absolute experts in their field, Dagmar and Valentina. I will kind you askly to introduce yourself, ladies first, and then we go right to it. First of all, thank you for having me today. So a little bit about me, I'm Italian living in Walton. I've been in the digital marketing game for about 17 years now, with eight of those spending a gaming, leading the charge in growth and marketing efforts for operators, both regulated and gray markets. Outside of gaming, I work with big names like PlayStation, Fox International, Chanel, Bulgari, and some various clients in the telecom sectors. And throughout my career, I've covered a large part of the marketing spectrum, whether it's creating buzzer, building awareness, engaging audiences on social media through influencers, driving performances through PC, SEO, affiliate marketing, and since last October, I've been on my own adventure as an independent consultant, marketing consultant. And you bet I'm all about embracing new technologies. Fantastic. Now, Dagmar, please. Hey, thank you for having me today. My name is Dagmar from Holland. I'm currently the marketing director at MegaBlog Gaming. And I've been in iGaming since 2010. And I've been on the affiliate and operator side almost always, SEO. So yeah, that's me. I brought you fantastic guests today. We all have to agree. Now, we agreed that things are changing in. Just to summarize it a little bit, to give you a very short introduction, if you are not really seasoned SEO specialist or marketing specialist, I will ask our guests to Dagmar introduce SEO, SEO practices, the principles of SEOs, why do we do it, what's our goal, and then Valle will take the AI part. SEO first, please. Yeah, so... Optimizing for SEO is optimizing for a search engine bot. In this case, Google bots, because they dominate search. I've been thinking about how to explain this in such a short time span. But I think I always split it up in three categories, optimizing for a technical SEO, on page and off page. And if I can give some nuggets. For technical SEO, what is mainly important is that you update for the bots to be able to crawl, render, and index your site consistently. To do it consistently, set up a monitoring tool so that you are up to date on what's happening with your site. Developers can make mistakes. You can miss something, and you can de-index pages of your sites and notice it way too late. Avoid duplicate content and thin content, which you can do with canonicals. Use schema. If I would optimize for speed, I would start with time to first byte and make sure your site is mobile optimized. When I look at on-page, it is really about targeting the right keywords and related terms. I still see a lot of mistakes where SEOs try to optimize pages for multiple terms and not really looking at the SERPs carefully. in order to identify if this is a one-pager or multiple pages. And it also depends on markets. Like maybe in the United States, you target Bitcoin and crypto casino on the same page, but in Germany, I wouldn't, depending if you're an affiliate or an operator. As an operator, you always get away with a bit more. And then internal linking, which is just something that I also see a lot of people forget. It's such a big part of on-page optimization. If we look at off-page, Entity Salience is a big one for me lately. It's just making sure that you're well-established within your niche or industry. Not just build the travel block links, but make sure that you get links from your industry. And optimizing natural mentions, social media links and traffic has definitely become more important over the recent years. I mean, I can go on and on, but I think... Obviously, obviously. But this was a fantastic introduction to SEO. If I would be hired, you would get a job. That was that good. It was that good. Okay. Thank you. And now a little bit to the artificial intelligence optimization. I mean, obviously a lot of this is similar and we need to carry on all of this good work, but there is more. So what do we do to make sure that we still are relevant for the future? Yes. So let's break down SAO. which stands for Search Artificial Intelligence Optimization. Starting with its inception, the term might be relatively new. If you type ironically into a Google search, you won't find much among the top search results. However, its position in our digital strategies is becoming indispensable. And then remember when TachyBT first launched, it led a kind of a light bulb moment for me and my former colleagues. And we actually said, it's not only about SEO anymore. But what exactly is SAIO? Contrary to what some might think, it's not about using AI to optimize your website or your content in the traditional SEO sense, even though there are a lot of similarities, as Ivana said, and Dagmar. But instead, SAIO focuses on optimizing your content specifically for AI driven platforms and chatbots, like Bing, ChachiVT, Gemini, or Google's generative search experience known as SGE. So, in a nutshell, it's about ensuring that your content is discoverable, is referred, and relevant into this new landscape. It's all about understanding and adopting to how AI interprets. categorizes and presents information in response to conversational queries. And this I believe has a profound implication on for our marketing strategies and is pushing us to rethink not only how we create content, but also we ensure it resonates in an AI driven context. And it's quite obvious and clear to everyone that these platforms are transforming how we search for information, making search more conversational and by extension more human-like. So we are not just optimizing for Google algorithms anymore, but we need a broader approach that consider the variety of ways AI influences search results across different platforms. So again, it's not about typing keywords into a search bar. It's about asking questions in a more natural language, whatever through text or voice or images. And in addition, the latest releases from Google, including the new Circles to Search feature or the Google Lens or other innovative approaches to search highlights this shift. So I think we need to equip ourselves in order to navigate through this new landscape. Absolutely, and that's why we're talking about it, because things are changing and we like to be on top of it. So in a nutshell, SEO and SAIO are very similar, but SEO is more action-oriented. Yeah, we want you to do something. We want you to either, if it's an informational website, we want you to read through it and scroll up and down and spend time there if it's a website that should... convert you, we want you to click away and convert because that's what we want you to do. It's more keyword specific. We concentrate on things such as eat, speed, core web vitals. And obviously, as Dagmar said, very important internal linking, external linking, all of this nitty-gritty optimization that's SEO. When it comes to optimizing for AI, on top of all this, it's more awareness oriented and it's more conversational. When you think how we started the search, we ask more questions. So AI is trying to answer that. It is all about product listings over just specific keywords, and it utilizes lots of schema to make sure that you can be considered as a good result. As I said, it's conversational. So make sure that if you are optimizing your content, you have got frequently asked questions, you have got points on your website and you create conversation that those bots can. answer. Now, why are we talking about this? A few days back, Google has appointed a new head of search, Liz Reed, and she is with Google for many years and she is known to be working with the AI search. She has lots of efforts in the search generative experience. She has been working predominantly on this, which means the way Google is going to be going around about Google search, that Google search will most certainly look more like SGE over time. And this is a big change for us, right? Because even though SGE is not right now covering all the queries, we know it's around 87% of queries are covered with the SGE, 13% aren't, and 13% being adult, being pharma, and obviously casino, doesn't mean it will stay like that forever. But in the 97%, 87%, we have got sports, we have got other things. We are not just casino here. So we need to get ready. Can you tell me your feelings about SGE? I mean, is it a good thing coming? Is it a bad thing coming for SEO? Is SEO in a traditional way, as we know it, dead? What do you think? Where do you stand on this new phenomena? I don't think SEO is dead. Obviously, it's evolving. It's evolving in something different that can be integrated with the traditional SEO as we know it. I do believe that the SEO experts with a massive and solid and robust knowledge in SEO have an competitive advantage and can just adapt the strategy in order for a casino, sports book operators, crypto, e-sports to be relevant, to build on very good and relevant content, sorry, and focus on the quality of the content. Perhaps some of the KPIs that we usually look like the click to visit or because of our regulations at Landscape and the difficulties of probably mainly the gray operators will be a challenge or the click to visit will decrease. But I see it also as a big opportunity for operators to focus on a more user centric approach focusing on the quality of the content that they release. Perhaps there will be a bigger focus on the off-page part, meaning be rent or be linked or hyperlinked with big news publishers out there or focusing on social media. We know how difficult it is within our industry. But Maybe the social casino and the free to play will gain more importance. So I do believe that SEO is not that, but we cannot minimize the importance of AI. So the two strategies needs to be integrated and work along together. Yeah, I absolutely believe that SEOs are morphing. I mean, we morphing all the time. I mean, SEO for 16 years and it was Penguin came, we're dead. Panda came, we're dead. You know, Hummingbird came, we're dead. And it's we just change. So I think we will change. However, the SGE is a huge shift. Google's latest releases are a big shift, are bigger than ever. And SGE is a box of 10 answers. And are you gonna get into it? What are your fantastic actionable tricks and tips that you would definitely want us to consider to get considered to be in the top 10 results and appear in SGE and maybe once they start to include the links to be clickable there. Yes, so a few tips. Emphasize the Q&A formats. Use long-tail conversational keywords. Keep text structured simple. Incorporate multimedia in the content and utilize bullet points for easy comprehension by AI. Now these are not set in stone, obviously, but there are tips. and actionable insight in order for your own content to be also referred by AI platforms. Yes. Dagmar, how do you feel about it? You're a hardcore SEO for years. When I started to study SG, I was like, oh my goodness, what are your feelings? I mean, I felt very uneasy. Now I'm looking at it with like more optimistic eyes and adapting to the idea that is going to change forever very much. But you have been in affiliation a lot. We know that the main drop is going to be for affiliation because that's where they stealing the visibility. Should we be worried? Should we not? Yeah. So I'm on the operator side at the moment. I'm not worried at all. I think as an affiliate, if I'm operating in a regulated space within the United States, I would start to pay attention. Maybe other English countries like UK, New Zealand, Australia, obviously unregulated. I would maybe pay attention as well. But I don't really see within iGaming big implications with SGE. And I don't think this niche will see big changes anytime soon. I could be wrong, but I haven't really noticed it yet. I think iGaming will be fine for a long time to come. And we are able to look at other niches, for example, in health care. to see how this really rolls out, what the effect will be on the search behavior and also potential loss of traffic or potential increase of traffic if you play the game right. But I'm not worried yet. I think this is the point that I actually didn't think of. I knew that in iGaming, we're not going to be affected right away or that strong right away. But you made a good point. We can observe the others. monitor them and learn from them what they're doing better or what they're not doing well. So it will give us the advantage of time, right? We will learn from them. SGE is definitely coming. We are lucky to be in the 13% who is not influenced. But when you think of all the other travel, restaurants, leisure, all of the other ones, they are going to lose traffic. Do you think it will really have such a huge impact that up to 80% of their traffic will be taken away? I mean, I don't think it's economical for Google to do so, but that's, I have my reasons to believe why so. But what do you think? I think it's really going to depend on the behavior of the user. Like, are they going to really be satisfied with the answers that they get in the box? Is that enough? Or would they still want some sort of long read form where they go into a website? go on to the page that gives up the information and then dwell over other pages because that's something that the conversation won't give you. You would then need to start a new conversation and a new conversation. So it's just going to be interesting to see what the user actually will do with it. When it comes to, for example, okay, I want to travel to Portugal, which city should I go to based on this criteria? If SGE can answer that correctly, then content creators might be in trouble. But if it doesn't really satisfy that search intent, then I think they will still dwell to a website and the traffic will still be given to that website. I believe so too. And mainly Google will learn, they will monitor if people are clicking in the SGE box, if they are interacting with there or they're looking further. So even if your niche is affected right away, it might not be long term. And as well, when you think of it, the answers in SGE are coming from creators that have got their independent websites and are researching and are writing. And we're just giving them tips how to make sure they appear in SGE. So in the end, Google will still need them. Right. And as well, when I think of it from my very selfish point of view, if I'm traveling to a new city, I am vegetarian and I'm going to research where to eat good vegetarian food. I am not going to rely on a bot that never ate in its life. I'm going to go to an actual influencer, tell me, yes, this was good. No, this was not good. I had a poison food there. I would still want to hear it from a human being. So I think in the end, certain queries, just like we see in the zero click position, like position zero, will be fine to have the quick answer. But most of them that you actually want to interact and learn will not be. But if the worst come to us and all this traffic is lost, what other sources of traffic should we look into to sort of compensate? Is there any traffic we can look to and be creative? If I may, to add my two cents to what you just said, Ivana, about you made a very, very good point regarding interactions and the intent of the user. So let's forget for a moment the... website as a traditional owned media, which is important to have it, to nurture it through content, high quality content. Because as you said, perhaps people want to be satisfied enough to get the information that they're looking for from results on Google, on different other platforms, because we know how in reality now the user... is consuming the media and searching for information across all other platforms, including social media, TikTok, and not only through Google or the AI platforms, Gemini, LGBT, Perplexity. What I noticed when I was playing, when I played through out all these AI platforms, is that for example on Perplexity, when you ask or search for information, he gives you a follow-up questions. trying to understand your primary intention in order to provide you with the right information. Very relevant. So it gives you follow-up questions that perhaps you would not have thought when you first added your queries. What I'm saying is that perhaps the future is that It's really different from the search as we see it right now. Even if there are schema and web structures kind of listing product, maybe it will be more as a mind map sort of things where you search for something within any industry, could be casino, could be sport book. So I want to search for the best casino website giving away cash back. the question can be more articulated. And then from these question and queries, some others will open up, some other type of content, maybe CTA directly there. So I really envision a different landscape, which is not necessarily a negative one, but a positive one considering the ultimate consumer needs, which is to find relevant information based on his first intent. When you ask about other venues or be creative to maybe find other ways of monetizing, perhaps we... from an operator's point of view, okay, right now, more than an affiliate's point of view. We might be thinking more out of the box and not to be afraid of promoting our product in feature, how dare in more of thinking about, for example, if we have streaming happening on our websites. Even though we cannot insert a market due to regulations, promote it and put it on the face of our customers, we could build up an influencer, a campaign, bespoke and campaign around it to actually promote the social aspect of experiencing a live streaming together. So I think... the search experience will be more to create awareness and hit the upper stage of the funnel of a customer journey. And then as exactly we do it now, try to capture that lead, that interest, and slowly, slowly convert it in players, in actual players that generate revenue. Yes, absolutely, absolutely. I think you answered my questions. If you're losing traffic, look for other places to get traffic, streaming, videos, social media. Just don't give up, just adapt to the new reality. This is full of information. I'm gonna actually listen to it because there's so many things I did not think of myself. Thank you very much for finding the time and I wish you a beautiful day. Thank you so much. Thank you.