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A daily podcast delving into the biggest stories of the day throughout the sports betting and igaming sector.
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OptiMove, the number one CRM marketing solution for the iGaming market. 56 % of the EGR Power 50 personalized play experience with OptiMove. And as a special offer, OptiMove is offering new clients free first month when you buy OptiMove. For more information and to claim the free month, please go to optiMove .com slash SBC. Hello everyone, and welcome back to SBC iGaming Daily, the marketing episode.
I am Ivana Flynn, and today I am joined with two mammoths in our iGaming space, Vadim and Eitan. Guys, I'll kindly ask you to introduce yourself, then I'll introduce your topic and we'll start. Thank you. All right. So if you said mammoth, you say Mamuta. Exactly. I was inspired there. So yes, Mamuta Media, I'm the CEO and co -founder of Mamuta Media. We're helping brands and affiliate networks to bring traffic from non -regulated markets. And Eitan.
Hi, my name is Eitan. I've been doing SEO from, I think, 2010 overall and marketing. I had a few high gaming leadership positions in my career and currently I'm working for Tonybet as an operator in multiple markets, leading the marketing performance. And this is a fun fact for everyone. Eitan was my boss and was Vadim's boss, so we are all a little bit connected here.
Today we are going to be talking about the truth about SEO and marketing for iGaming. We all know that our marketing era is very specific due to regulations, due to compliance, and then we are targeting markets we shouldn't, which makes our marketing and SEO approach even more fun. So what is your number one truth about the iGaming SEO or iGaming marketing altogether? I will start. So first of all, I think...
it's super important to put the difference between the operators and affiliation. Yeah, it's absolutely different approach. To make the really, really long story short, I would say that operators is by definition and by design, not SEO friendly, not at all as a product itself. That's why you need absolutely different SEO strategies. In my opinion,
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no matter what market we're talking about, if it's regulated or non -regulated, you have to invest a lot in technical SEO improvements and brand awareness. Not even talking about some backlinks or content that's less important from what I think for operators. Now, when it comes to...
real SEO for affiliation, you can do much, much more, including manipulation with content, manipulation with links. I doubt you should, and you can invest a lot in branded, I would say in branding, in affiliation, but definitely with the technical SEO investments. That's a must. That's absolutely short opinion.
about the real SEO. I mean, I definitely agree with most of the points that they came up with. I think that there is an interesting thing that is happening in the last few years in gaming, which was not there if you look at it eight, 10 years ago. We are in a saturated industry, very highly competitive, super highly competitive on all sides, affiliation.
game providers, and also on the operator side. So strategic thinking has become one of the, I would say, top things that an organization needs to have. And because of this high level of &A and market being saturated, there is two things that is happening. First of all, no matter what, organic traffic is the best value traffic. Any channel you try, no matter what, it's PPC and SEO.
that lead the best LTVs. Now with the saturation, cost of marketing has increased immensely. So everywhere you go on the performance side, you gotta pay much more on the level of, much more means that your CPA prices are going through the roof. And now you say, okay, I want organic traffic. And traffic is also very, very costly and requires also internal resources. So I'm thinking that,
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My main point is a lot of operators and affiliates are lying to themselves and living in a comfortable lie of saying, okay, I've bought this player from an affiliate, I paid out for 400, 500 euros in CPA and everything's gonna be fine. But in time, they pay CPAs and they see the LTV is not coming back for a million different reasons and hard questions pop up.
On the organic side, everybody wants it, but not everybody's willing to do the sacrifices for it. And to do branding activities, as Vadim said, this is also expensive. So we are coming into a gridlock where, to be honest, everybody's screwed. So the only edge a company can have on the affiliate side or on the operator side is the ability for strategic thinking and the ability to...
ask hard questions and stand your ground. And you mentioned that both of you have worked with me and I'm very proud of both of you because you have the strategic thinking. You have this pragmatic thinking and you stand your ground. That's why you are successful in the ventures that you do because you're not going to take shit from anyone. If your CEO comes to you and then the other client comes to you and tell you something that is silly, you will tell them it's silly. And still I do know that you are meeting a lot of people and a lot of companies that do not do that.
And just blindly, yes, go buy links. Yes, pay traffic, pay this. And then you slowly see them wither away. Very interesting time as a, as you know, business ventures and gaming companies to be in requires out of the box thinking. And this is the place where we do not have that much of out of the box thinkers. Absolutely, absolutely agree with both of you. There is a massive difference between both.
Thank you for the compliments, but what can I say? We learn from the best. So yeah, if we don't take bullshit, thanks to your training. Yes. So let's talk about the branding because branding is something we do usually extremely well in iGaming. If you have a huge brands such as Bettson or you have got Come On, you have got Unibet, we spend lots of money behind it. And I think this is an activity that if done properly.
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And if working correctly with SEO, you can leverage lots of good players and lots of money there. Naturally, it comes with brand protection, with lots of people are failing shorts to do. But I would say that's one of the activities we do in iGaming that lots of other industries are not looking into yet. Absolutely. And when it comes to the branding activities and the saturation of the market that Aitin said, it's super important to understand the saturation coming from the, I would say, very...
easy entry level today to open a casino. I believe every investor with a couple of millions thinks that he can run casino. They go to white label providers, they take the license, Corosal license, they take and they think they can do everything. And they open casinos and they think they can do everything. They do shitty marketing, they scam a lot of affiliates. And that's, by the way, the reason why affiliates, yeah, after shaving them, affiliates are asking for...
400 euros 450 years and even 700 euro CPA in Canada and so on and this situation and this and they don't invest in any branding absolutely here because they think why would they invest in branding they can do very fast Acquisition and so on but a normal and not only SEO but marketing strategy is absolutely branding and not only
Organic, I would say, results will improve, but in general, affiliation, media buying, white PPC, black PPC, gray PPC, it's all about the branding and it's all about the product itself. But as Aitin said, the saturation and the competition today in the market and everything, we need to invent something new every day, not even two years ago, every month, we need to try and find some new ways on how to do it.
especially in non -regulated markets, we're working with a lot of clients in a gray black markets, trying to help them to bring traffic in markets where you cannot run officially Google ads and so on. And we see how crazy these markets, I would give you an example with Japan, let's say. Yeah. So in Japan, you cannot buy traffic officially from Google. Why? Because Google decided they can regulate it. Yeah. But when you...
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actually buy this traffic from Japan for your client, suddenly you're being DDoSed by affiliates of this specific brand that is actually running another Black PPC trying to like a parasite, like an actual parasite, try to resell this branded traffic to this specific brand because in Japan, brand is everything. The branded traffic is the most important there. So...
I believe it's good that it's saturated today because only creativity and I would say brave players can make money today in this field and it's interesting. I really see it's only a plus all this stuff that's going on today in the market. It's such a fantastic point that you're making with the competition because we are dealing with internal...
problems, we're dealing with market saturation, we're dealing with competition, but then we also need to defend ourselves from our competition, which is not playing fair because nobody's playing fair in gaming in that sense. And this is part of, I think, our future discussion is that to play fair in SEO and PPC and affiliation, I mean, it won't get you far because you're going to be attacked. You're going to be clicked on. You're going to be
scraped, you're gonna have duplicate content, and leads me to this thinking that you need to be defensive, you need to have defensive tactics and tools in place, and know this is gonna come. The more you're successful, the more you're gonna be attacked, and you also need to come to a place where you are going on the attack. And when I say going on the attack, I don't mean going clicking on other competitors, but you need to be on the attack on the platforms that you are actually operating in. So you need to find a way to hack.
Google, you need to find a way to hack AdWords, you need to find a way to get your site D index penalized and so on, because that's your attack on that sense. Now we see these Google leak documents and we see algorithm changes and so on, but if you have abused some of your assets, you already know when and what is the actual points that break or make your rankings. The competition side is super important.
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At the end of the day, when you are number one, Google are number two, it's not that because you have been very good at learning the algorithm and optimizing your site, it just means that you're better than number two. You need to be number two, not be the Google. And that requires a certain way of thinking that some SEO teams have, some PPC teams have, where they're saying, I need to be aggressive in these markets. I need to have a strategy and tactics on a day -to -day basis.
A comment on the branding side is that branding is, or good branding, needs 360 alignment. And that's a leadership and business strategy, which most companies do not do. They will say, okay, let's do a sponsorship. And it also needs to be digital first, because if it's not digital first, then there is no advantage from an SEO perspective and so on. So companies that have this thinking, and I'm thinking like,
I remember when I joined Bettson, we had a weekly meeting with Jasper, the CEO then, and he was the sponsor of SEO. Today, Bettson, probably one of the most successful operators in SEO because of the hard work that has been done and consistent for years, but it was a CEO decision. We are doing SEO. I'm going to do anything for SEO. I'm going to prioritize the technical tasks. I'm going to tell all branding teams to think organic first.
because just sticks the patience and everything. When we look at sponsorships, there's a big difference in choosing a sponsorship with a company that has, or a team that has a million followers on Instagram and all their media channels are full of content versus a massive, massive sports organization that hasn't understands zero in digital. What we have seen in the years with branding and all of these opportunities that usually what happens is companies.
an operator and say, hey, we have this, hey, we have that. Well, it goes the opposite. You need to go to the market. You need to know what you want to achieve, what kind of digital traction you want to achieve, and Google will react to it. Now with the last leak of the API, one of the most interesting ones that I've saw was actually the clickstream data. So the clickstream data impacts a lot, and it's not a surprise that...
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If people click on your brand, if people click in your site to a certain degree, you will get that ranking boost and Chrome actually stores that data and spreads it. So we cannot live without branding, but the right branding. But we always said that traffic is one of the biggest ranking signals and this leak just, just confirmed it. I was personally very happy with it, but you can see it every time when someone is going really crazy on TV and on everything.
their rankings go up. You just can see it in each market that if they steal all the traffic in the market, their rankings are being pushed. But I think what we came down to here is that the most basic truth about iGaming SEO is that we have to be very creative because it is not easy. The competition is super fierce. And if you want to win, you don't play always nice. Sometimes you just simply play dirty.
And that's why we broke Google, right? We did the Parasite SEO, we did the AI, we did everything and people criticized it, but I always say that that's SEO's job, right? We are there to abuse everything to bring you to cheaper traffic. Am I wrong? I will tell you even more. I think Google should thank us, Black Hat SEO. And for me, by the way, there is no White SEO. I always say it and will tell it again. For me, White Hat SEO is SEO that when you create the website, write the content and waiting for someone to put a link. That's White SEO. Yeah.
Black Hat SEO is everything when you manipulate with outside, inside and everything. Now, if you will see Google evolves actually, thanks to Black Hat SEO techniques, because they create some updates, we find the loop, the way how to circumvent it, then they create another update, they evolve, then we find another way how to circumvent it, and they find another update. That's the game. And without Black Hat SEO, without Black Hat PPC,
I doubt Google will ever gain this kind of complexity of the mechanism that they actually created. Moreover, I will tell you, I believe, especially after this leak, that I think, by the way, it's absolutely fake and nothing is true there. And they did it just to put aside everyone who is very angry about AI overviews and so on. But...
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And I think we agree on that, Ivana. Yeah, we spoke about it. Absolutely. Absolutely. I believe this was just a way to distract us like little children with a lollipop. Talk about this now, because you are so right about our broken AI overviews. The Yandex one, yeah, it reminds me of the Yandex one a few years ago. It was absolutely the same tactics that Teddy, but they built so complex machine, they don't know by themselves how it works. And that's one of the reasons why they cannot...
They don't have technical tools to stop blackhead PPC activity. Cause you would ask why, why, how can you buy casino keywords in Finland? If it's banned, why can't Google just go and ban all casino keywords? That's it. It's not that simple. It's technically super, super, I would say over complicated even for them, for Google itself. I agree.
Because if they knew how to do lots of things with their algorithms, as you said, they don't know how it works. They wouldn't have to be giving manual penalties right now, left and right. At the end of the day, Google is a corporation. It's 70 ,000 people. They probably need half a million to cover everything that is happening on their platform, the different products and all. They cannot cover all stops. And at some points also, that's prioritization, like any company. Like what would you do? Stop Casino?
versus prioritize some kind of pharma queries and so on. They want to be not harmful. Keep in mind the last few years, a lot of lawsuits against Google on that sense. So when your legal department is busy, business priorities also change. So that's the reality of it. I really like the point that Vadhi made about Black Hat versus White Hat. One of the things that make a very good SEO in a company is the ability to explain yourself to senior stakeholders.
and we have the clickstream kind of opportunity. So if you come to your CEO and you tell them, listen, we need to increase clickstream, we need to increase clicks, you can do it by a branding campaign, but I also have tools and I have ways to generate bot traffic, which will also operate. So in an ideal world, if you can explain it properly and do it properly, you will do both, one with an immediate effect and one with a bit of a long -term effect. And we must use all the tools and in the black,
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world there is tools happening now more than ever with you know auto GPT happening now our capabilities are endless we can fake content we can fake traffic we can fake links we can generate all the things we ever wanted but to be honest five seven years back already there was SEOs doing it just manually or doing it with you know cheap manual labor on that sense so farms of clicks
This is happening for years, right? It's just nobody has been talking about this because people that know it works, they keep it to themselves and that's it. I remember one time when we were working at Katana, we saw scraping of one of our sites in the tens of thousands. It decimated all search results, just decimated. In one night, all search results have became replicated content by a competitor that actually scraped all the websites. Worked fantastically.
Google cannot cover all exits and that's the main thing. The main thing between how you're gonna build your business. If you're gonna build your business on high risk, and it's always high risk with Google to be honest. Even if you're the best at what you do. Even if you're completely clean and structured and you see a competitor doing all this shit in the world, just passing you by on the corner. Strategic thinking and education, technology now has become critical.
I think that slowly SEO departments will have an AI on automation person sitting or machine learning person sitting in their teams. We did something called Batson a few years ago where if you remember years ago,
and Edo started building a lot of Power BI systems in the system, trying to automate a lot of things, because machine learning can be there and can do things more. Absolutely. I even said before I left Betz, and I said, I wish in five years, you will fire all the SEOs and you will stay only with two and everything else will be automated. The team didn't like it, but I said, I don't care.
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Nobody likes Vágym. Nobody likes Vágym. I don't know, I keep inviting him. Just automate it and then... Yeah, but lots of things can be automated. You still need to have someone to automate it. Good. Fantastic. So basically, let's summarize. Think outside of a box. Look into tools that are available. Be brave because everybody else is brave. If you are playing too safe, you might not succeed. And combine all of your resources, leg head approach, wide head approach.
Combine it for quick results and long lasting results that you build in a quick way. Did I get it all? Or any last two cents? Build your own tools. This is the time to build your own tools on that level. And get ready to worst competition ever, scammed, banned, hacked and everything. Get ready for it. We will see much more black, anti -COE even.
phrases, your techniques in a new future, even this year. I agree. Especially in a niche like iGaming, there is money. So if you have money to invest, there is simply someone going to invest them better than you. So be the one investing the best and optimizing better than the position too. Thank you very, very much. And that's it from us.