Case Study 4 - A Casino Website

I was invited to provide SEO advice for a casino website. The website was attractive and had probably cost a significant amount of money.

The website had numerous affiliate links. The concept of affiliate marketing is as follows:-

·       Place a link on your website.

·       When a visitor on your website clicks on a link and buys something from the linked website you earn a commission.

·       There are many affiliate providers who monitor transitions and sort out the financial rewards.

·       Some ‘industries’, such as online gambling have high profit margins and are only too willing to offer attractive commissions to any website that can send them business.

The SEO requirement for this casino website was to achieve top page positioning on Google for the relevant keywords.

Numerous relevant keywords were analysed with Keyword SEO ProAll the keywords had keyword difficulty (KD) in the blue or pink range. The new website has a PageRank of 0 and can only compete for keywords with KD of less than 4.3 . None of the keywords the client wished to have top page positioning were in range. To bring in visitors for thse keywords advertisements online such as Google Adwords would be required but these would have been prohibitively expensive.

There are emails and advice on the web from self-anointed ‘Gurus’ who know so much that for a small fee they will impart their secrets. For those new to online marketing, it all sounds very easy:-

• ·       Build a website.

• ·       Optimise it.

• ·       Floods of visitors.

·       Sit back and watch the money pour in.

My advice was that there was no quick means to success for such an online casino website.