iGaming Daily

00:00
Hello everyone and welcome back to the SBC Daily Podcast, the marketing edition. Today's episode is sponsored by OptiMove, the number one CRM marketing solution for the iGaming market. I am Ivana Flynn and I'm welcoming today, Emilio Takas, who will be talking with me about predictions for SEO and marketing 2025. We have a lot to unravel. We're gonna go a little bit over 2024. So bear with us. Hello Emilio.

00:27
Welcome to the podcast. Hello, Ivana. Hello, Ivana. Thank you so much for hosting me and happy holidays to all the people who are listening to this podcast. And of course, my warmest wishes for a wonderful 2025. Oh, well, let's wish, let's wish. So very shortly, I'm going to tell you what we predicted last year, and if it came true.

00:50
For last year, 2024, we had Vagim and Edo talking to us, and Vagim predicted increase of blackhead practices in PPC and SEO. I think we can both agree, Emilio, that that happened. Massive scale, we were just criticizing it. Then we predicted massive volatility, basically volatile being the new normal, more updates than ever. Which happened. Absolutely.

01:13
Edo's. Even November, December, what we're experiencing right now. Absolutely. Seven days between updates that never happened. Exactly. For the first time. The first time. Extremely. Seven. They're probably just rolling back because something went wrong. Like good websites started to rank again, probably. So they're like, oh, we cannot have this. Let's roll back. I can say that. Same, same. And then we predicted that the AI, Google is not going to love AI as they did in 2023 when they were a little bit experimenting with it. Obviously, March clean up.

01:43
of AI content and AI scale. So that happened. And I think we're very, very, very accurate. So let's try to be accurate for 2025. But very shortly, what did you expect of 2024? Was there a prediction that you thought and actually came true? Or was there a prediction you thought like, oh, this is going to happen and it didn't happen yet? Or not at all? Or you expected in 2025? Basically, everything that you mentioned right now was on my, you know, to-do list

02:12
from Google Hatsu. However, I think it's the best thing right now to think that after everything that happened in 2024, in 2025, we're expecting exactly the reverse of some things that happen. Because as we see, Google is not that big or all the search engines. It's not that they don't understand what's going on. However, they have processes. And as a big company, they have longer processes.

02:41
We saw that AI right now, even that they said that it's not a problem to have AI in your content. If it's on good quality, it can still rank. However, when you produce that on such a big scale and all of the website owners said, okay, let's go into the AI, then it was a matter of time for Google to start evaluating again what they see and train the LLMs that they use, how to rank them.

03:12
What people didn't think about that was the cost of the AI. Because when AI started, they were saying, yeah, OK, I'm not going to have content creators anymore. I'm just going to use AI. But in 2024, we saw how expensive the advanced use of AI and the prompting is getting that a lot of the times we see in order to do just one task, you might use $1.52 per prompt. And that's.

03:41
If you sum it at the end, that costs you like six people or 10 people in total. So I think also the companies as well in 2025, they're going to be more organized and more to the point on how they're using AI. And to be honest, I don't think we're going to continue to see websites running out of the blue with 10,000 pages created by AI. And even if they do, I don't expect to see them in the SERPs anymore.

04:08
Hopefully, hopefully. I mean, the AI abuse got out of hands for sure. And I agree with you, even if you do AI content to a good quality, it becomes very expensive. And then in the end, it still needs a human to read over to make sure that the data provided is correct, that it reads naturally, that it follows the language of the websites of the tone of voice. So in the end, AI...

04:29
Exactly. It might become more expensive than using normal humans that are trained to be a really good copywriters and already know your product, already know your website and already understand what your audience is looking for. So yes, that's very nice. Now little bit to that blackhead. So we've seen, definitely we've seen increase of blackhead because people just lost their patience with Google and like this is not suddenly working and this is not working. So they resolved to a horrible practices such as traffic.

04:59
manipulations, CTR manipulations, 301 redirects and all of these things, but they never last. Let's be honest, they never last. Parasite SEO never last. We've seen it very recently. Huge website using any of these practices started to disappear. Google is just allergic to it. And just very recently, I think two days ago, I read a study because we already know that Google can detect 301 redirects. We know that Google is trying to detect it for years and it's just getting better.

05:29
It was announced with the March update. It's announced with every update that those practices are not okay and are going to be punished. As well, they are starting to understand the traffic manipulation, the bots and the so-called viral social traffic, whatever you call it, motivated traffic. Everybody calls it something else. In the end, it is a traffic that is not real and Google started to understand that and pick up on it because we abused it one step.

05:56
too far and Google is allergic to it and it can detect it and websites using this sooner or later start to disappear, especially if you abuse it. And now I read two days ago, I honestly think it was that the CTR manipulations is being detected because Google understands it's a new blackhead technique and they have a new part of algorithm which predicts how much of CTR there should be for certain page.

06:21
depending on a position, on a niche, on a keyword, on content, on backlinks. Like it's a sort of, you know, you need to have a mathematician's brain to understand that. But basically they predict, this should get this much clicks. And if you get massively more, they start to flag it as a manipulation. So even this practice is starting to die off. No question, we will come with some other black hat. But after reviewing what happened in 2024 and what was the impact and how Google reacted to

06:50
what we've seen and how we reacted to it, what do you think 2025 is going to bring? What we should watch out for and how we should do our strategies to avoid being removed from Google, to stop having penalties and stop seeing all this horrible, we invest this much money, we are position one, now we are not. What do you think? I can start by telling you something for me very important. And the important thing here is...

07:17
for people and for the audience, but in general, the people to understand that there is the fast approach on things and the long-term approach on things. And usually the CMOs or the COOs or the business owners or the CEOs or anyone, they know, especially in competitive niches, that a CEO eats a long-term path. It doesn't bring you the short-term win. It doesn't bring you the short-term return of your business.

07:46
And in order to do a good SEO, you need a lot of money. It's not something cheap. SEO is not free? Oh my goodness, spoiler alert people, SEO is not free. Yeah, it's not. No matter what you do. And it's not. Which I would say otherwise, it's not free. And you know what? The thing is that when we say, because I want to be very precise because I was corrected today on LinkedIn, and the person who corrected me was right. The thing is that I'm not saying that the viral boosting, for example,

08:16
It's bad. So, the bot viral boosting is bad. And that's why I want all of that to bring it together first to tell you my biggest prediction for 2025 and we're going to also analyze the black hat on that and how I believe most of these people are going to die and not the SEO is going to die. And I'm going to explain. When you go, you're either an affiliate or a website or...

08:45
you have an ESO, e-commerce or anything. What matters in marketing in general, because a lot of the times we forget the fundamentals of marketing, is the brand. And the last years, we've seen a lot of affiliates, for example, to use keywords as domains and start creating tons of websites on the keywords without creating any brand behind them. And on this technique, when you try to create a brand out of the keyword, it's nearly not

09:15
So I believe for 2025, we're going to see more websites turning into brands and create brands that the brands can have the holistic marketing approach. Because let's face it, SEO by itself can run a website. No, you need social media as well. You need YouTube if you can as well. You need Telegram. You need Reddit. You need all of the resources. You need PPC. You even need...

09:44
to be on the television if you can and you want to be a big brand. So you can get the traffic and you have a diverse traffic into your website. And of course, when you achieve this, then the SEO efforts are bringing bigger results and bigger results. And if you don't have a brand, unfortunately, you cannot do that. So the decision on a business is, do you want a long term or do you want a short term?

10:14
And I understand that also the black hat techniques that they're out there, there are for a reason. And they sell because they go to people that as you said, they create 100 websites and they don't care if they die after three months because they make the money that they can make and then they're out. Me personally, I'm not on this approach and also I see Google is not on this approach because the volatility that we saw, we saw websites going in the first page and then completely disappear.

10:44
And when you play with big brands as we play for so many years, Ivana, we have people that they work, they're colleagues, they have families, they have things to take care in your life. And I believe when you're in a managerial position, you cannot take the risk for a whole department or vertical to lose their job. And they don't understand that it might seem easy even that for a lot of the things that they're doing, they say it's hard.

11:14
as hard as building five or six or seven different teams of different levels like the ACO, the social media, the PPC, the content writers, the developers, and work together on a brand. So for me, brand and branding in 2025, we're going to see more and more approach on that. Absolutely. Brand is becoming important. We keep preaching this for years and I believe 2025, I'm going to back you. A lot, right?

11:42
And I'm gonna back you up. I'm gonna back you up 2025. It's going to be a lot about brand. One of the reasons, obviously brand is important. And as you said, you can promote it on social media. People can start to recognize the brand. They can start to love or hate the brand. They can feel about the brand. And then the brand becomes viral and creates the traffic so you don't have to do any tricks to it. But the other thing is AI overviews are coming. Maybe not for iGaming right now, but they are coming. They are coming to European Union.

12:11
Sooner or later, we're gonna have that, which means we need to be there. And it's going to be all about brand and all about mentions. That's the first thing you can do when you have AI overviews. You need to be there as a brand. So if you have Casino 0012345, it's not a brand because you're gonna have Casino 0012346. And it's not a brand to build and it's not a brand to love and it's not a brand to appear in AI overviews. And AI overviews are all about good brand.

12:39
and you build that brand and brand awareness over years to get to AI overviews and you build it on social media. We know that AI overviews in Google are being trained on YouTube. So be there on Reddit. You need to be there. Wikipedia, if you manage, you need to be there. So you stand a chance to have a brand mention and there from there, you can start to rank. But my prediction connected to this is we already seen this several years that the zero clicks.

13:09
positions are growing, right? You get more of the carousels, you get more of the people also ask and all these quick wins out there, which of course are completely okay if you manage to get there. But you're being moved. Position one is not what it used to be. You don't get the amount of clicks. The CTR is not the same. Therefore, you have to be visible in the AI overviews and you need to invest in that brand. So brand building and working on your strategy for zero clicks are definitely...

13:36
two huge predictions that will definitely come true in 2025. And to add something here, advertisements, ads on AI that I'm sure we're going to see. AI overview ads. They're too big for sure. Google is a business. They love money. So, for sure. Okay. What else do you have up your sleeve for 2025? So, I strongly believe in returning back to the black hat. I believe that 2025, we're going to see more hard approaches.

14:06
As you mentioned with the 301 redirections, I believe that Google is going to start seeing all these patterns because me personally, I've seen also patterns on the way of creating websites on the same theme, for example, and they catch the patterns of the websites. You create an amazing website and the owner says, oh great, let's create 50 of them with different slight different colors and logos. So I think right now...

14:34
We're going to see more hard approach and I believe not only it's fair, but I think it's coming out of the quality of the results that we're getting. Right now, Google is not what it used to be because even when I teach on the university, I say to the people as an example, you are on TikTok or on Instagram, right? And you see an ad of a product. Let's say the Massager as an example.

15:01
And the first thing that you're going to do is not to click the CTA button from the social media. It's going to go to Google, correct? Yeah. You're going to go to Google, and you're going to search for this product. So if we're keeping seeing manipulations on the ACRPs, we're not going to find the quality that the user initially was seeking and searching in the search engines. And that's why I think it's not that I have anything with the people that are doing this type of work.

15:31
It's that it doesn't bring quality for a lot of other people. And you know, the biggest excuse that they use is that you cannot rank in competitive niches nowadays without black hat techniques. And this is a misconception. You know it, I know it, and I think a lot of SEOs know it. But in the end, you and I, we are not selling black hat PPC or black hat SEO, and it is a lot of money in it. And if you approach someone who doesn't understand it and you tell them like,

16:00
Oh, look, you are trying for three weeks now and you are nowhere. And I can get you ranking by end of next month for every competitive keywords. We'll just do this, this, this. And it costs you going to cost you only, I don't know, 50, 90, 70,000 euros a month. But in think of that money coming back, if people don't know, and they really want to see fast results and a lot of people in our industry want to see fast results, they don't have the patience, then they're going to go for it. And those people are good salespeople.

16:30
create a contract and say that if the website tanks, what happens to you? If the website gets penalized and sign this contract for me and let the business together. Exactly, I would love to see this. If people are offering this then it should be like, if we pick up penalty, then you have got this financial penalty. It's not just like, please clean it up because cleaning up any negative SEO attack, which Blackhead PPC is very similar to that when you think of it. So horrible links.

16:58
But sorry, to leave black hat even that I'm wearing the black sweater here. The thing is that in terms of the predictions and in terms of AI, I believe that AI in 2025, and there are going to be tools that instead of just content creation, like how we created the custom profiles and we gave the description and the instructions, right, in custom GPT.

17:27
I believe it's gonna be way more easy by just showing what is the target audience. My target audience is this, please create everything for me on the website. I would see something like that as a product. That would be good. That would be a nice prediction. That would be a really nice prediction. AI can help and I'm really truly not against AI, don't get me wrong. I just don't like the abuse of AI content that is obviously AI content. I don't like the people selling links on websites that were built just to...

17:56
sell links on this website and it's pure AI content and there's traffic manipulation. It was zero traffic in September. Now you have 30,000 clicks. It's a bot. It's not real. So this is where I don't like the AI. But I'm not saying AI is a bad thing. I'm saying AI is great if you know how to use it. Steli Eftiopoulos And I can say 100%, I have an amazing colleague and she worked on a project, I cannot disclose details, but she used AI in...

18:25
the combination with crawling. And the way she used that with the APIs and everything, the results that we're getting, and it's not content creation though, that's why there is a space for AI and I think a lot of the people lose the idea of where to use it. Because it can do miracles in things that people, even a lot of people could take months to go over that. True. But you need to be creative and you need to truly understand your job.

18:53
and what the purpose of what you're trying to do with that AI and with the prompt. So it's not like you can just pick up someone off the street, tell them this is JetGBT creative website. You know, it's a, it is not that easy. So I'm hoping that, yeah. So I'm hoping that in 2025 we get good tools and we get good understanding of the tools. Good, so we have got tools, we have got AI overviews, zero clicks, blackheads, brand, anything else. I mean, it's quite a lot of predictions already, but.

19:22
anything to wrap it up with? I think we're good. I think we're good to wrap it up. And I want to say to all the people who listen to us, just trust what seems a little bit more difficult. Trust this. When someone tells you something that tells you, it's not going to be easy. It's going to be difficult. Trust these people around you. And don't rely on.

19:49
easy things for everything because if it was that easy, that means everyone could do it. I hope it's not a prediction, but I hope that people in 2025 are going to start judging by results and judging by the long term and not chasing the quick wins that we see, not only in SEO, to be honest, all over the business right now. The quick wins everywhere. Yes, but nothing good ever comes.

20:19
easy to you. Nothing. The quick wins don't exist. Like, I'm sorry, it does not exist in normal life. It doesn't exist in SEO. It doesn't exist in marketing and it doesn't exist in product. So for me, what we're seeing here and what I keep hearing from other people, because I recorded a lot of predictions, is there's going to be split between people that believe in long-term and they're going to do really proper marketing efforts from building brands to cooperating with other departments to building proper good. Good.

20:49
based SEO that is going to last years, and people that want to do quick wins, SEOs that are gonna be doing blackhead, and it's gonna work for weeks, two months, and then you lose everything. So I think this is going to be the biggest split we're going to see in 2025. Let the best SEO win. Ivana, I'm Greek. Ancient Greece, we had a phrase, and we say, when you easily go up, you easily fall down. Now can you say it in Greek for us, just so it sounds festive? Okay.

21:17
Whatever rises quickly, falls quickly.

21:43
Thank you very much for listening to us. I wish you a Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and let's have hopefully better 2025 from the SEO and marketing perspective. Happy holidays.