TRAFFIC
RANK OUTSIDERS CAN RANK TOP
In the David and Goliath world of SEO , even small affiliates can easily feature higher in Google searches than their better-resourced rivals , says Julia Logan of IrishWonder . com
COMPETITION IN THE TOP igaming SERPs has been cut-throat for many years . The recent changes in Google and the new regulations in several markets do not make it any easier for affiliates to rank and get traffic to their sites if they don ’ t have budgets to compete with the leading igaming brands . However , nothing is lost and there are still ways for small affiliates to win at this game .
The strength of small affiliates lies in their flexibility and ability to react quickly to any changes . If you ’ re just a one-person affiliate site owner you don ’ t need top management approvals to tweak your own site to quickly adjust to changes in the SERPs . You can act as soon as you find out about changes .
For example , what ’ s better than ranking number 1 in a competitive SERP ? In case that SERP has a featured snippet , being the source site of the featured snippet is ! It places you above all organic results . In the first screenshot ( Figure 1 ), openodds . com ranks only number 4 for “ sports betting sites ” but , being the source of the featured snippet content , it appears on top of all organic results .
Featured snippets make use of wellstructured information on the site such as lists , tables etc – using schema can also be helpful so that Google places more value on a site ’ s content to use it for a featured snippet . ( Of course , it helps if a site already ranks at
“ The strength of small affiliates lies in their flexibility and ability to react quickly to any changes ”
Figure 1 : Openodds wins the Google race for “ sports betting sites ” least somewhere for the query in question .)
Another example : recently , Google has become much more likely to show Knowledge Graph cards in the SERPs . Sometimes , however , these Knowledge Graph cards leave a lot to be desired – for example , have a look at the Knowledge Graph card appearing in the “ online casino games ” SERPs in the UK ( see Figure 2 ).
What a waste of SERP space … I doubt that people searching for “ online casino games ” really want to see a Wikipedia definition of online casino . On the other hand , if Wikipedia is Google ’ s choice of info for its Knowledge Graph , it ’ s difficult to beat it . But notice the image included in this KG card ? The good news is it doesn ’ t come from Wikipedia . It comes from a site whose only achievement seems to be good rankings of its images in Google Image search .
As an affiliate site owner , you can definitely act on this insight . Have welloptimised , indexable images on your site , and you could be included into whatever meaningless Knowledge Graph card Google places next into top competitive SERPs .
Depending on the SERPs , there can be multiple elements present on the search results page , sometimes several at once . Apart from the Knowledge Graph cards and featured snippets , there can also be images , videos , news stories , shopping results , local maps and “ People Also Ask ” direct answer blocks .
Figure 2 : A Google Knowledge Graph card
22 iGB Affiliate Issue 66 DEC 2017 / JAN 2018