iGaming Daily

:
Welcome to iGaming Daily, presented to you by OptiMove, the creator of positionless marketing and number one player engagement solution for iGaming and sports betting operators. Learn how OptiMove positionless marketing is changing how iGaming teams operate. Discover how operators are using OptiMove's positionless marketing platform to launch personalized CRM campaigns, dynamically change casino lobbies and bet slips and create engaging gamified experiences. Learn more at OptiMove.com. To see how this approach comes to life, OptiMove Connect returns to London on March 11th and 12th, 2026. It is the only user conference where marketers from around the world share real-world results of positionless marketing driving, efficiency and ROI. Register at connect.optimove.com. Hello everyone and welcome back to iGaming Daily Podcast to the marketing part where we usually talk about the difficulties of marketing and particularly of SEO. Today, we are going to be talking about how to set up a successful strategy for either operator or affiliate for 2026. We saw that 2025 was absolutely crazy, super volatile, not just with Google updates, which we had less than usual, but with the market changing and the practices changing, extreme growth of Blackhead. unprecedented amount of attacks on each other with negative SEO. So with my fantastic guest and very seasoned SEO Alina, we will talk about how to protect yourself and how to set up strategy and how to stay vigilant. Alina, welcome to the podcast. Thank you Ivana for having me. Team White. Today we're Team White. Team White today. Team White. Just very quickly, you have worked on all of the sides of our business. What would be your number one tip for successful strategy? from the SEO perspective here for 2026 could be anything technical brand, anything. And then we just get deeper to it. I have lots of tips as well. Yeah. I mean, it's super hard to choose like one because I have a list in my head. I feel like I already thought about that and let's divide it like this. So if we speak about something more generic and more like a concept, I would say that The brand focus and clear brand positioning through all the channels, including SEO, would be very essential for 2026 to win the whole game. Also, when it comes to, again, the most more generic things, I would say the consistency, which is like strategy of all strategies. What a surprise to be consistent and continue growing and scaling step by step. uh If we keep speak about precise things, I would say it's of course technical excellence and readiness for scaling because many websites from our gaming industry, including casino operators or affiliate websites and so on, they sometimes they have these technical blockers that cannot allow them growing and scaling. And sometimes it's very basic. Mistakes so technical excellence and scaling and of course AI but I wouldn't say as a focus. I would suggest to think about AI as the next layer as the next step of your SEO game. So you know like we're building we are polishing our SEO and optimization of the website and our next step would be AI visibility and performing in LLMs. And here we can discuss further what would I suggest to do, like to stick to this kind of mindset and concept. AI will definitely get to it, but I just want to say we don't really show up too much in AI overviews yet. It is not taking into our business because it's your life, your money, and Google is not touching us. So that way we're blessed, but it is slowly coming for us. So we need to be prepared. We'll get there. But first you said brand. Brand is very, or evergreen strategy and I love it. And I think it's growing in importance, especially through this really unstable times and attacks. Once you have brand, you're more recognized and attacks are less effective. However, how you go about building and promoting brand in iGaming? Because I think branding is really misunderstood here. So what would you say to people when thinking about starting or promoting a brand? I mean, I would suggest to have it as a DNA of the whole company, of the whole idea, of the whole website. All teams have to be aware and clearly have this oh clear vision of what are their values, what are their unique selling points, what are they bringing uh to the user, what is unique. And it has to be consistent through all the channels, including SEO. And uh if we speak about details, like it has to be consistent in terms of methods, in terms of headings, in terms of, and everything has to be in harmony. As we discussed in our previous conversation uh about the brand name, the domain of the website, the logo and stuff like that. Everything has to be. harmonized, I'd say, and SEO has to support that as well through the contents, through the headings, through the methods and everything. Yeah, all the communication needs to be aligned. the million dollar question, if you would be starting a website now, let's say an affiliate website, because they tend to pop up a little bit more than operators, would you go with a generic website, online casino one, two, three, or would you actually invest in a good brand name, let's say? Mr. Ivana. 100%. 100%, especially with Ivana's name. 100%, I would choose something unique, something that people will remember, something that definitely will have a lot of direct interest and direct traffic, which also would be a great signal for Google and so on. Something that would be easier to promote. to grow through the backlink profiles, through all the promotions, and through all this stuff that surrounds the gaming brand, the casino brand nowadays. So definitely something unique, something unusual, something that people can remember and something that you can be uh unique for. And known for because when you have a... a brand, can build a persona around it and marketing just get easier. And it's SEO dream to have a brand search volume and it's stabilizing the traffic when you are losing the generic keywords like online casino, casino online. So think of that. If you are working on something, think of brand, definitely think of brand. Now, as I said, 2025 was absolutely horrible for SEOs with stability. was just no stability. And a lot of it was coming from SEOs attacking each other, right? The nastiest practices, the lowest practices of them all. I would say most of us, we have a gentleman agreement that we don't do this to others, but there are companies and there are individuals that just, instead of playing a good game and ranking, they just attack whoever is ranking above them. So we saw tons and tons of negative SEO attacks. think links are, there was, everyone can identify and I see them coming back. We discussed this before. I think it's. lack of understanding that you still need to disavow, you still need to do a good hygiene because hygiene is important to any website. Do you think we will keep seeing all this negativity in 2026? I think since we all are aware of that and it's like brought up in every conversation, maybe we will have less of it and they will invent something else. But definitely we have to keep an eye on it and keep the hygiene of our backlink profile big. oh work closely with the PR teams, work on the localization, all this when it comes to our backlink profile and working with off-page. I would suggest to stick to these things when it comes to best strategies and best direction in 2026. uh of course, especially for new brands and new websites, hygiene would be a priority. to keep it clean in case if these attacks will continue. For now, we still see these attacks. mean, last year it was a lot for all our gaming clients, even for trading clients, you know, and I think it's everywhere. I had that feeling that it's everywhere right now. At some point I had a feeling they attack only our clients' websites. I was like, they found out somehow our database and they attack only our clients, but then I started to... research through the competitors and so on. was, uh it's for everyone like that. I mean, sorry for being happy. So yeah, hygiene would be very important. It is very sad. You usually see these UGC links, like you can just go to forums and use something like X runner and uh rumor and just publish 300,000 shitty links around the web. And it's difficult to clean up. I mean, how do you clean up UGC's what you go in? ask people, please remove this. Like, there a trick outside of disavowing? And sometimes the attacks are so strong that disavow is simply not enough. You just need to clean up, clean up and clean up. So then you need to build, build, build. And the SEO is becoming more and more expensive. They are making it unnecessary, expensive game for us. mean, I'm not surprised. It's a very profitable traffic channel, you know, so... they know what they're fighting for, definitely. And yes, as you said, when they build these negative mentions and so on, you have to build on the positive. You have to cover with the positive things. You have to work with the negative PR and cover it with the positive PR and keep an eye on this as well and work close to PR team and the off-page team as well. And after a short break, we will talk about Blackhead SEO. And we are back with all of the horrible Blackhead that is flooding our SERPs and should you consider them in your strategy. what we are seeing is Parasite is everywhere. Even though last few days I see sort of cleanup on Parasite and some of the biggest names in Parasite stopped ranking that much and when checking their traffic, the traffic is tanking. However, what is absolutely flourishing is a canonicalization abuse. 2026, in my opinion, is going to be Blackhead as Blackhead as ever. But what do you think? I mean, maybe I'm little bit too biased because I keep looking into the Blackhead practices. So maybe I have tunnel vision by now. Do you think Blackhead is still going to be winning for the very competitive keywords in the very competitive SERPs? mean, definitely. What's going to stop them from doing their job? I don't think that 2026 will be an exception. They will continue, definitely. um We just try to keep an eye on it and clean up whenever it's needed. And when it comes to our work, we definitely don't do black hat. We do only white and grayish work and white and grayish SEO practices. Because we do client SEO, so we cannot do anything black. They will not let us. But there are lots of ways of fighting with these things with white techniques. It's another thing that I wanted to bring out. You just have to do the regular analysis and to audit the website and audit your performance. This would be another thing that I would recommend for 2026 as one of the strategic concepts to keep in your head. So you have to have a long-term commitment, long-term vision for your project, but you have to work in a short sprint. So you have to analyze the technical condition, the performance, how the system actually uh replies to everything that you do, if it's working or not. if the impressions are growing and clicks are growing, if the proper pages are ranking and how they're ranking and so on, and if the pages have a good conversion and so on. So we just constantly trying to keep an eye on it. And I would suggest to have this like short springs in like one, two, three months and every one, two, three months, double check everything and adjust your strategy according to the like current situation because it can change super fast and just blindly doing what you planned six, eight months ago might not be a good idea. I very much agree. I personally think that you should apply Whitehead, especially if you already have a website with proper product, right? And maybe has lost some traffic. Go and do the best SEO practices. As you said, audit, try to review your content, merge if necessary, redirect if necessary, get good links, clean up the back profile. However, I believe we will keep seeing all of these SEO abuse in our SERPs. And I am a huge fan of studying all of this because as any SEO, I love to know what's going on. So as you said, and I'm doubling down on that, you should know what's going on in your SERPs because our job as SEOs is to rank. And some of us, like Arina, will always advocate for best SEO practices, wide head, and yes, they still work. But then there are people who want to take shortcuts and they will do black head. And you need to know that... They are your competitor as well. And you need to understand what the hell is going on and why this website with zero backlinks suddenly took your position. keep educating yourself and keep an eye on SERPs because it is changing extremely fast. think if there's a real wild wild west we're seeing in SEO right now. My dear friend Alan Kladek said that a white head SEO is a scam. Would you agree with that statement? I was just listening to a podcast with him and it was like, white head SEO is a scam. And I know what he means. He means that even white head SEOs do some black head, like buying links, for example, or now and then use traffic manipulation. But I think we just saw seeing this as a black head anymore. It's a must do SEO, you know, like no head. So where do you stand? What's white head? What's black head? It's a very philosophical point. Like I thought about this when I was starting my career. as like SEO is a manipulation. Okay, we can think about it as making things more clear for the bots and so on. Or you can think of it as a manipulation because you manipulate and you keep your interests in this. So and where is this edge between white and gray than black? It's already, you know, details. So all these are manipulations. So yeah, in some way, SEO is uh is a scam and can be called like this. Okay. So name for this podcast SEO is a scam. No, please don't use that. And now to the last part of our podcast, which is AI, AI overviews, chat, GBT. mean, it was like a scarecrow. It's coming for our jobs. All the contents can be created with AI. Then we started to understand it's a tool. Then we started to understand it's actually stealing our traffic because when you go, there is an AI overview half of a page and you are like, what the hell is going on? And you start to look into it deeper and you see that, okay, it's not touching us that much yet. But as an NSEO, you need to be prepared because, you know, one day is just going to be there for all of the iGaming products, all of the iGaming keywords, and you know, you're going to lose. And there are lots of interesting things about AI. For example, we know that if you appear in the AI overviews, it's, you test it over and over and over and the results there are not consistent, only 16 times. uh the same things or 16 % of the times the same results appear where SEO SERPs, one, two, three, four positions are constant. Okay. I mean, they are not changing the same minutes so many times. So maybe three will jump to two and vice versa, but it's more stable. We know that things that are ranking in Google rank in AI overviews, however, doesn't have to be top 10. So you still need to rank to appear. It's like a whole new headache for us. So how do you work with this? How do you prepare for this? Because every time I look into it little bit more and I learn something new, I just get little bit more confused. mean, yes, like I said, m just, we just think about it as the next step in our SEO game. Like when we know when that the technical part is polished, that we are constantly producing valuable content. that our backlink profile is growing and we are getting the rankings that we need. At this point, we can talk about AI because I think now about everything from a client SEO perspective and sometimes clients are coming from gaming, the casino websites, sports betting platforms, other gaming businesses, affiliates and so on. They come and say, we want to rank in AI. And we are checking their website and we're saying, but you are not even ranking in Google. Why, why you want to go in AI? So in this perspective, it's hype. Okay. So it's just a hype and clients just heard it somewhere and they desperately need it here and now. So for them, we're trying to explain that it's a next step. at first you have to polish everything when it comes to basic SEO or optimization. Right. um And. when we are getting to the point when we have our rankings and we are ready to uh compete and have LLM performance as well, then we start to revisit and try to understand what we can do better to rank in AI and to get more citations and so on. And when it comes to the content, I would say that eh We are trying to focus on conversational narrative. We're trying to rebuild our content as if it's a dialogue with our user. Now we're changing headings and making them in the format of questions, in the format of more long read, um know, heading or a question and so on. Of course, we polish the structure. We're trying to have uh precise FAQs. or up to date is very important when they're up to date. And it's very important when it comes to content and the brand also involved here. It's to think of not just creating content for a particular brand or website. It's about building the whole ecosystem for your website. It's the things that big brands with big budgets are doing, but other... smaller brands can still do it. just don't think of that. you have to think about ecosystem where your users will be able to do additional things that would complement your product, right? Like, for example, a platform where they can generate uh UGC or where they can exchange some opinions or where they can share something. ah or they can stream and so on. These things, they are not just a new thing that Stake did a long time ago or some other brands. already, you need it. It becomes essential to build an ecosystem which will support the main brand and AI also reacts very good to that. um Because when you have your own ecosystem, they take your brand more seriously. It gets more recognition. It gets more users generated signals and so on. ah When it comes to the off-page side of this game, let's say, so of course, we work with Reddit and any other platforms that are relevant and complementary for this particular uh industry. oh uh Sometimes for trading, can be some special platforms about meta, meta trade and so on. For gaming, Reddit works well, Quora works well. if there are, for example, uh eSports for this client is a, you know, important part of their business, we try to find resources which are mainly focused on eSports and so on and be present there. be mentioned there, give value there to the users. But it's a big, work. It takes a lot of resources and a lot of commitment from the client side as well. The PR and creating on your own sources is like crucial now. And I'm sure in 2026 it will continue and in 2027 as well it will continue. making sure you're not just building a backlink, but making sure that you are building a source that would be viral, that would become a source of information for others who will be sharing it and so on, like any kind of research or any kind of interesting collaboration, interesting promotion and stuff like that, that can be newsworthy. Absolutely agree. So summarize it. It's what I saw as well. The freshness is extremely important for AI. relevant information and then videos are a whole new thing for AI. And as you said, not just your website, but being present on the third party websites to be actually cited in AI. Fantastic. You shared so much information. I think we are a little bit more ready for 2026. Not that it's less scary, but we are this much more prepared. Thank you very much. Thank you, Vana.