iGaming Daily

Ivana (00:00.866)
Hello everyone and welcome back to the iGaming daily podcast by SBC to the part where we talk about iGaming digital marketing and iGaming SEO. Today I have a fantastic guest, and Andy will help us explain SEO forecasting and the value of SEO forecasting and the power that it has for commercial growth for any of our iGaming websites, affiliate or operator. Andy, welcome.

Andy (00:27.502)
Thanks, Ivana.

Ivana (00:29.912)
So we're just going to be talking about the obvious thing. SEOs many times forget or fail to forecast and show their value. And we discussed this previously and you told me how you would forecast and where SEOs short, fail short. So what is the basic rule that SEOs do wrong and what should they change when showing others, especially the C-level, let's say CMOs or

Andy (00:42.403)
Mm-hmm.

Ivana (00:59.094)
or anyone that holds budget to tell them if, then, and this is how we can grow.

Andy (01:02.168)
Hold the Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it has to be one of the most or least covered topics, I guess, in the area because, you know, the commercial value of your job is so important and the ability to forecast the value that your channel has will obviously influence, you know, what budget you can get allocated and like how seriously people take what you do. And, you know, you consider yesterday, you know, former Twitter CEO

Jack announced there that they're letting 4,000 people go because they can replace them with AI. The thing I would say to anyone listening is it's never been more important to be able to not only celebrate your wins, but be able to visibly show them and to be able to show not only what your recent wins were, but what are the wins in the future that you're going to have. In that context of why commercial forecasting is so important, I think that we live in such

an uncertain world, uncertainty is such a big part of SEO. It's such a big part of, you know, not knowing what your, you know, what your next, you know, days, weeks, months of rankings could be, what those traffic trends are going to be. And so the ability to start to think about it from, you know, from less to do with the whole thing of like technical and content and links, but actually just starting with the commercial and going, okay, what's the market opportunity?

I mean, I was very fortunate that, you know, when I started working, you know, as head of SEO for powerplay.com, like they gave me the freedom when I started to like, okay, Andy, before, you know, we allocate, you know, budget or dev resource, why don't you go and take a look at like, what is the market opportunity? What is the next, you know, quarter, six months, 12 months look like? Come back to us with hard data.

And then let's have a grownup conversation about it. And I felt really lucky that they gave me that freedom to go and build like first and foremost, the business case so that when I then was able to come back and go, okay, here is my initial, you know, 12 month forecast. Here's what might happen in the next 12 months, subject to all of the different levers. Then you were able to have like a much better conversation around, okay, what are the things that will have the most commercial impact?

Andy (03:23.01)
When should we do those? how do we get the resource and the sign-off for that? So I think maybe there's a commercial muscle, for want of a word, that if you think about if you worked in paid media, you're used to looking at numbers and spreadsheets a lot of the time. You're used to doing those kinds of forecasts or those kinds of uplift probability. I think maybe an SEO, particularly because we're very geeky and we're very nerdy,

we're probably guilty of just kind of leaving the commercials to last and actually being so obsessed with the work that it's almost treated as like an afterthought. Whereas actually that's very much cart before horse. Like I would argue if you genuinely want to be really good at what you're doing, you got to make really good decisions. Your decision making has to be commercially driven.

Which look, I get that that sounds incredibly obvious, but like we all know we're supposed to eat healthy, get exercise and do the right things. Doesn't mean we're gonna do them.

Ivana (04:31.182)
Very true, but I think this is where we are really mistaken because many times you come into a company on whatever level of SEO and there you have got this budget by 5,000 euro worth of links for Finland every month and you have got 2004 content. And sometimes it makes no sense because maybe you cannot buy that many links or you need to buy many more links and you cannot make the argument because the basics of the commercial forecasting is missing. But we usually come to like

set up thing. So how would you go about this conversation? You come to a company that is not as nice as your company and give you the freedom to explain them that SEO is as well a commercial channel as much as marketing and as much as technical, but it just tells you this is your budget. And this is where it goes wrong so many times because either the budget is absolutely off and 3000 euro for 20 markets is simply not enough or it's extremely huge and you cannot get that

Andy (05:27.234)
Mm-hmm.

Ivana (05:29.794)
How would you go about this conversation? What would be the practical tips? Because obviously you have got a commercial brain here as well as SEO because coming from paid media, as you said, that's what you get.

Andy (05:37.226)
Yeah. So look, if you think about it in terms of, know, whatever platform you want has a set of strengths and weaknesses. And so it's not very technical, but this is what I generally say when I'm talking to C-Suite. Just imagine it's like a bucket. Okay. And you're putting like water into the bucket. It doesn't matter whether it's like content or links. If the bucket's got holes in it, you're just throwing away the value of the work.

And this is why when we talk about the technical, you know, it can be really difficult to say, well, hang on, like, you know, I need this amount of resource because I'd like to do these technical tasks. Well, how many FTDs is that worth? Or like, what is the commercial value of that? The mistake in the trap is to not fall into, you know, trying to put a value on a single individual, like let's say hygiene task, which you're really doing is you're saying, okay, if we look historically, like even just the last 12 months, there is a data trend.

Okay, you've got a data trend of how many, like whatever your conversion KPIs are that you want to pick, but like, we just go with FTDs. Like, you know how many FTDs you got in the last 12 months. You can map the trend. You can draw a chart. You can look at what was your lowest day in the whole year? What was your highest day in the whole year? Okay, now you've got a range. You can now map out your low, your middle, and your high end of the range. So it's this thing of being able to work out, okay, like there are obvious things to do with...

sporting events, if there's a Super Bowl, the Stanley Cup. We're very Canadian focused, so there's a lot of events that we'll have in our planning calendar. But even aside from that, particularly on the online casino side, where it can be a little bit more challenging to factor in from week to week or month to month what way traffic's gonna go, you should still be able to go, well, I expect, let's say,

you know, a 10 % uplift in FTDs or a 20 % uplift. I mean, you know, I think about my 20 plus year career and every single, you know, C-suite, CMO, director level person I've spoken to has generally had an annual growth figure that was maybe in the 20 to 80 % range. Now, obviously it depends on the size of the company. You know, if you're a fan, jeweler, DraftKings, your percentages are going to be different than if you're a small company with a lot more headroom to grow.

Andy (07:59.886)
But if you're able to say from the outset, look, I've done a commercial forecast. This is where I think we can land. You'll soon get feedback from the people you report to as to whether they think that's a good target or it's not a good target. And that's where you can start to have the conversations then around what's technically possible in the non-brand space and to what degree are you kind of, know, because especially in the agency side, it's very easy to hide.

SEO performance behind brand traffic. So you have to kind of obviously, I mean, I'm not saying anything radically new here, but like if you separate that out and you start to dig into the non-brand, you can start to do your projections. And is it then, okay, you know, the CMO is dead happy, we can deliver 80 % growth year on year. And that's when the other metrics then can start to, you know, yes, you can talk about visibility and rankings and things like that, but it's really about not forecasting traffic.

so much as forecasting, you what is the uplift? What is that, you know, upside going to look like? And so the more that you're able to say, look, I've got several pieces of work I want to do here by the end of the month, this is the uplift I expect. And that is much better. You know, if you can say to someone, I think we can double our FTDs, but I need to do A, B and C. It just stops the individual task being assigned an FTD. It's kind of like, okay, we've grouped this

you know, several pieces of work together and by the end of the month, we expect to see some kind of uplift. And so that is the beginning of, you know, starting to do the math. And, know, if you are kind of in the trenches, your blinkers on, and every day you're looking at, know, your content lever that you're pulling or your link lever that you're pulling. I mean, in a world where AI is taken over, Google is deliberately turning the dial down on what links do and turning the

dial up on Entity and it feels like they're, you know, they don't really know what the balance is yet, then there's so much that, you know, there's so much uncertainty that you're going to make the people that you work for feel a lot more confident that this channel is still worth investing in if you're able to say to them, look, I can see where the growth opportunity is. I can see that it fits within this range. I think it'll cost this much to go after it.

Andy (10:24.509)
is this something that like as a marketing team we're comfortable going after? And you're not just creating content for the sake of it, know, doing outreach and getting links for the sake of it, but you actually know there is a, you know, commercial model underneath all your decision making.

Ivana (10:43.384)
Fantastic. And we're going to be talking about how to prepare for World Cup and how to predict FTDS from that. So stay with us even after the short break. Short break is over. OK, as as we forecast before this short break, we're going to be talking about the upcoming World Cup. That is a huge thing for all of us in iGaming. Even if you're an affiliate, if you are an operator, we all want to get the sweet FTDS because we know they're coming.

However, it's time to prepare. think if you are in SEO, it's maybe a little bit too late. We are in the end of February already. But how do you tell people like, okay, World Cup is coming. We should do this, this, this, and this in order to get this. Because I tend to fail in this. I try to prepare always like six months before, but then designer is like, oh, my gradients is not perfect. And then the CMO is like, oh, we have got enough time. Don't worry. PPC doesn't need that much time.

I think SEO is extremely misunderstood. How do you prepare for this and what is the conversation and what the conversation should look like from the commercial SEO point of view? How would you go about it to make sure you get all the support you need and you get all the time and all the budget you need? Because that is where we are like,

Andy (11:49.346)
Yeah, so...

Well, yeah, I mean, that kind of reminds me of that idea of you drive the car that you have, not the car you'd like to have. And I say that a lot with people I work with, you know, because, you know, there will be media companies who, because of their footprint, will dominate. So, for example, in North America, CBS Sports completely dominate.

Ivana (12:03.15)
Yeah.

Andy (12:17.667)
everything to do with sport. I would not be surprised if they dominate everything to do with the World Cup. So you do have to pick your battles and figure out, you know, if you are trying to attract, you know, first time players or re-engage with people and you're trying to tap into that kind of World Cup market, you really do need to start with like, okay, what do we estimate that the, you know, the

traffic opportunities going to be. So for example, if you take on a day-to-day basis, I'm looking at Canada, I'm looking at Ontario, you'll get the kind of official industry reports that come out about this is what, let's say, the sports book market is worth in Ontario in the last three months. And this is how it's split roughly between certain types of companies. And you can do the research and start to see where

the economic landscape of that market lies. And then you can start to ask yourself like, and this is the thing, SEOs are maybe thinking about who they can outrank. What they're probably better thinking about is, okay, whose lunch can we eat? Like whose market share is vulnerable? And I think commercially then you start to dial into, okay, so with the World Cup, there may be certain topics that are, you know, hyper saturated that the media companies will just dominate.

And so it's up to kind of sports books to kind of understand it's going to be difficult to outrank a media company for certain things, but you do have your own, you know, not only your own brand voice, but you've got your own expertise where you can lean into, you know, whatever it is that you feel, you know, like what is your best foot forward? You know, do you really want to lead, for example, with like player props or, know, some kind of

angle where you feel like, you know, this is our attack angle, you know, this is the tip of the spear. This is where we feel, you know, we can, we can, we can rank, you know, like we can count, like the questions I would ask are, you know, how much traffic is on the table? What is it worth? What percentage of it do we need to get to make this a viable project? You know, and then ask yourself, okay, well, based on, you know, our existing conversion rates,

Andy (14:38.816)
If we can get traffic of a high enough intent level, can we sustain those conversion rates that will then deliver the player values through the new FTDs that make it worthwhile? And so that's the kind of math you have to start to work out so that you can go, well, actually, yeah, like if we can capture, you know, X percent of this opportunity and it's worth this amount of FTDs, then actually, yes, it is, you know, in the effort reward equation, it will be worth going after.

And so, you before you start planning out your topic hubs, your outreach to, you know, sports and soccer related websites and doing all that kind of thing, like you really need to know, like, is it worth it? Like, you know, think about how much credibility you're going to lose internally at a company. If you go after the world cup as a, you know, as a type of traffic sources, as a type of revenue source, and you end up losing money because of, you know, the math isn't math.

And a lot of that just comes down to in 2026, can you get traffic? Can you win the click? To what degree has additional ads in the SERPs pushed down results to the point where you're not gonna get the traffic that you were looking for. And so, you would ideally want to be able to measure this against, okay, well, maybe you did a Super Bowl content project or a previous content project where you have learnings.

And you're able to, at the very least, work out what you're doing right, what you can improve upon. And then ideally you're able to kind of go, okay, well, we think this is what our customer base are more interested in. Because, you know, at the end of the day, whether you're working with a, you know, head of sports book or head of casino, they're the people in the front line that know what's making money. And so it's much more important that you have that in the loop so that you can almost allow them to help steer you in terms of

You know, there's always a multitude of things I can work on. I want to make sure that I'm working on the things that, you know, a head of sports book or a head of casino knows that's what the most important things are. And, know, for the World Cup, I would argue there's such a very large amount of content you could create. You you think about all the teams, you think about all the players. I mean, there's just so many opportunities there that I think as long as you don't fall into the trap of, we'll get AI to create it and it's vanilla and it's middle of the road.

Andy (17:03.812)
I think without that kind of uniqueness or without the stats to kind of make the pieces valuable, then I think it'd be very easy for Google to go, yeah, look, I'm just not interested. I'm not going to rank this. And all of the evidence that I'm seeing on a day-to-day basis is that Google is aggressively de-indexing as much lower quality stuff as it can. And so therefore, I would say just on a quarter to quarter basis, if you're not raising your game,

as we say at Powerplay, if you're not raising your game every quarter to satisfy the higher bar for quality, then don't be surprised if your rankings fall and your KPIs drop because this is very much a situation where as AI makes it so easy for anyone to create baseline vanilla content, then it will be those kind of more opinionated voices or those kind of more stats driven voices that people want to engage in.

And ultimately it does come down to like, is this good enough that you would want to actually read it? Would you want to share it? And yeah, like I think the World Cup will be a really good example of showing the difference between the people who do invest in the right things versus people who are like, actually, you know, we believe AI will solve all our problems and then wonder why it doesn't rank and it doesn't drive the KPIs.

Ivana (18:31.928)
This is the trap we all start to fall in. It's good enough. And good enough is not good enough for Google because through last few years, Google is starting to save up money, right? The page that used to crawl with what, 15 kilobytes now is two. Then they took away the 100 parameter from us and they just de-indexing pages that are of low quality. Our crawl budget was cut what, half in August last year. So.

Andy (18:42.295)
sure.

Ivana (18:55.736)
quality, would say originality and quality. as you said, World Cup is fantastic for it because you have got so much to do. You can do predictions, can do evaluation, but you need an expert. AI cannot do that. yeah. And now in the last minute, I want to ask you, I want to ask you how we, how we brag about being great because SEOs absolutely forget to say, look, we've done this because for us it's like everyday work. Yeah. Rankings are up great, but how, how would you remind them? Please.

Andy (18:56.42)
Mm-hmm.

Andy (19:07.972)
Yeah, I mean, the AI... Sorry, God.

Ivana (19:25.848)
Show us, show us what you would report on when you win.

Andy (19:26.104)
Well, you know, yeah, like I think it does help as well that when you're celebrating your wins, you make other people, not only in the marketing team, but also in the wire company feel like they've played a role in it. So for example, you know, if you get to the end of the month and you've massively increased, let's say your brand visibility, you know, your first time visitors, you know, your regs, your FTDs, you know,

when you're able on a call to share the data, share the numbers and say, look, here's what it was and here's where we are. And, you know, the number goes up and everyone's that happy. But more than you getting into the habit of showing like the results, you know, here is the actual impact of the work we're doing. It's making people feel like they all had a stake in it. You know, like at the end of the day, you want to get

like the web, the dev team to feel like they are making a difference. Like, cause at the end of the day, you are reliant on so many other people. Like if you think about it in terms of, you know, UX design, web development, you know, you talk about PR content, you talk about all the different elements. Like you want people to feel like it's a team effort. And yeah, okay. That might sound a bit cheesy or cliched, but like at the end of the day, if everyone feels like they've got skin in the game,

then when the SEO channel succeeds, then everybody is kind of like, you know, energized by it and feels like, you know, this is a channel that's driving revenue. And then you, you know, the next time you want to push a project or you want to pitch an idea, everyone feels like, yeah, like, you know, the last one worked well and they feel good about it. So it's this thing of, you know, you never want anyone to feel like, well, you know, SEO is just making our website ugly.

or it's making the user experience less than what it could be. So I think, yes, you need to be just upfront about what it is you're trying to achieve and what the wins are. But I think more than that, try to get it out from just it's a thing that you own to a thing that everybody can kind of, not that everybody will own, but everybody can contribute to. And I think that then is a much kind of

Andy (21:47.79)
you're just much more likely then to deliver growth. doesn't feel then like you're competing for resource. It just kind of feels more like it's a baton. If that makes sense, you know, it's kind of more like I'll do my thing and I'll pass you the baton and then we'll, you know, we'll, we'll make sure the design's right and we'll make sure the web dev is right. And then when you hit your KPIs and you, you you achieve the commercial goals that you're aiming for, then it feels like a team win. And I think that's.

I think that's something that people can get behind as opposed to just like, yeah, Andy's done well, well done. It's just easier if we can get everyone on board with like, no, this is a team win and it's because we're shit hot and we know what we're doing.

Ivana (22:36.076)
Very good. So from forecasting and being very commercial and know your maths to being an expert and bringing in original experts to actually celebrating wins and being a diplomat, that's SEO for you. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts. Well, we are diplomats, all of us. It's good. Thank you so much.

Andy (22:49.636)
Well, that's the hard bit.

Andy (22:57.433)
Thanks a lot.