GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 28 - April 2014

If youwant to spend serious time and ef- fort developing your brand, it is worth considering three areas: • Audience: What type of players/users are you looking to appeal to?What are they interested in and how do you ap- peal to their interests? • Positioning: What sets you apart from competitors?How should youposition your brand in themarketplace? • Messaging and visual representation: Are you communicating your brand in away thatwill appeal toyour target au- dience? And does your brand’s visual representationhit themark? Makesureall links are justified It’s tough out there, and in all likelihood you’ll need some paid link placements to competeorganically. In a climate where more and more pub- lishers are wary of linking to gambling brands, all links need to pass the closest of scrutiny. We use the term “justified” link-building to describe the type of paid link-build- ing that will both pass muster with any Google engineer and also put publishers andwebmasters at ease. Linking solely toyour homepage is clear- ly a bad move, and presenting a strong link between the content the link is posi- tionedwithin andon-site content onyour ownpropertyhasgot tobeaprioritywith anypaid link-building. There needs to be a perceived reason for thepublisher to link, and as a result far more effort needs to be put into content development. On-site content can be text-based, but shouldn’t be solely text-based. Work thechannels Affiliates now ignore social media chan- nels at theirperil, and this is truer for bin- go than for most other gaming verticals. If organic traffic is no longer yielding the levels of traffic youneed, thenfill the gap withother traffic sources. Developing interesting content for comple- mentary sectors gives you opportunities to expand your social media following and to target those who play bingo, but may not be too concerned with moving between sites or with the bingo commu- nity ingeneral terms. It’s also time to take e-mail a lot more seriously. Data is key, so dust off your lists and work to develop them. Again, this will help compensate for any drop in traffic or revenue that a loss in organic visibilityhas led to. Paid search, particularlyonplatforms less competitive and costly than AdWords, should also be part of your tool-kit of tactics. Cost-effective campaigns can pay dividends but need tobe closely controlled. Think long-tail Focusing on primary keywords will like- ly leave you a very unhappy affiliate. That ship has really sailed for affili- ates, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other opportunities. New bingo brands pop up on a daily ba- sis, and riding their coattails is still ahigh- ly effective way of gaining traffic. If they are spending heavily onmarketing, there is no reason why you shouldn’t benefit from their branded search traffic. The Hummingbird update also now means that Google strives harder than ever to answer question-based queries, so consider placing glossaries, FAQs and Q&A sections on-site tomake themost of this development and pick up the traffic interested in those types of searches. You’re ingoodcompany Say you’ve been penalized by Google and are virtually starting over in terms of building authority, trust and organic rankings. Join the club. You would be hard pressed to find any affiliates who haven’t got the same story to tell. Bingo is hugelycompetitive, but thatdoesn’tmean that using a variety of channels to drive traffic and revenue isn’t a real option. Organic search used to be the best value channel for a lot of affiliates, requiring little investment for significant returns. That is no longer the case, but a renewed approach to SEO can pay dividends in other channels. Developing great content as link-bait also gives you strong collat- eral for your social campaigns. Overall, a mixed bag of tactics accompa- nying organic search is going to be a far stronger and safer proposition moving forward – and it will open up far more opportunities togenerate traffic. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Joel Turner is theheadof content strategyat search andsocialmediamarketing agencyBlueclaw. A trained journalist, hewas formerly thedirector of aboutique onlinePRandsocialmedia agencyandhasworkedon ahugevarietyofmarketing projectsacrossofflineand onlinechannels. Hebringshisbackground inPRanddigital tobear inhelpingclients develop innovativesearchandsocialmedia strategies that integratecreativityand the latest technologywithcommunications know-how. “If handonheart youwouldn’t link toyour site in itscurrent state then it’s time for rebranding and refreshing thesite.” COVERSTORY SEOCorner: There'sstill room for bingoaffiliates