FEATURE
DOES GOOGLE REALLY
DISLIKE BINGO AFFILIATES,
OR DOES IT JUST WANT
THEM TO BE BETTER?
Last month’s cover feature raised the difficulty bingo affiliates face in breaking operators’ stranglehold
over the SERPs, but Stickyeyes’ organic search director Mike McDougall believes there are valuable
data-led lessons to be learned from the affiliate sites that do manage to hold their own in the space,
particularly when it comes to content relevancy, user engagement and brand building.
JUST HOW TOUGH IS IT for
affiliates in the bingo market to break
the stranglehold that the bingo operators
have over the Google search results?
That’s a question that caused plenty
of debate when it was raised in
iGB Affiliate magazine last month.
The sheer volume of operators and
affiliates competing in the marketplace
makes for an incredibly competitive
search market, and the argument that it is
becoming too difficult for brands to rank
for the generic terms has its credence,
but is that a result of Google taking aim
specifically at igaming affiliates, or is it
simply a natural state that the market finds
itself in? And if so, should affiliates be
embracing that situation and trying to
tip the scales in their favour, or fighting
against it?
Figure 1: SEO proficiency scoring – authority, content and engagement space
How ‘SEO proficient’ are
the bingo affiliates?
Let’s start by looking at just how
bingo affiliates are approaching
search. To do this, Stickyeyes uses
a ‘proficiency scoring model’ that
considers three key areas of
proficiency – authority (including
domain authority, backlink profile
factors and brand), content
(including content depth and
relevancy) and engagement
(how users are interacting with
that content).
Using these core metrics, we
can build a proficiency score that
gives an indicative measure of how
well placed a brand is to rank in
their respective market. We can then
overlay this with the site’s current
search visibility to determine whether
a site is over-performing, or under-
performing (see Figure 1).
iGB Affiliate Issue 64 AUG/SEP 2017
27