In a highly competitive industry like gaming, everyone is vying for visibility on search engine results, Google maps, and social media feeds. Increase your casino marketing ROI by utilizing best practices in SEO, SEM and local optimization to get your casino resort in front of the right people at the right time.
Here’s a brief explanation of each of the components of the Get Found step, complete with examples from the casino industry.
Local SEO Optimization
According to Search Engine Watch, 50% of consumers who do a local search on their smartphone visit a store within a day. You’re leaving money on the table when you don’t incorporate Local SEO into your marketing strategy. Optimizing your website for local search phrases and keywords, as well as proper listing optimizations, will determine your success in getting found by the potential customers near your business. Google personalizes search results for users based on location, so if they search for “Casinos near me” it’ll restrict search results to a specific geographic area. Similarly, users searching for local keywords, such as “las vegas casinos,” will be exposed to what Google believes is the most relevant content for that query.
For example, when you search “Las Vegas Casinos” in Google, this is what you see:
Google has its own local widget that features what it believes are the most trusted and relevant casinos in Las Vegas based on many factors – such as review ratings, number of reviews, photos, relevancy, “prominence,” etc.
Optimizing your casino resort for Local SEO requires updating your Google My Business Listing with accurate, and descriptive information that will help the user decide if they want to visit your business. It also means managing local content and reviews on places like TripAdvisor, Yelp and other online directories where an individual can find you if they’re in the area. Google uses these local business listings, which SEO insiders refer to as “citations,” as one of the factors behind the ranking order of the local listings on Google Maps.
For that reason, your business NAP (Name, Address, Phone) information needs to be complete, accurate and consistent across online Map services ( like Google Maps, MapQuest, Yahoo Maps, etc.). They should also be accurate in local listings like Yelp, Travel Advisor and others. And finally, your NAP should be optimized across your social media profiles (Facebook Company’s Address, FourSquare, etc.).
Moreover, you want to make sure that your casino resort has verified every listing to take full advantage of each local citation. At Alphametic, we use a mix of technology, leveraging Local SEO Software, and manual optimization to propel our casino clients’ presence and visibility on local searches.
SEO Audit and Technical Optimization
With over one hundred casinos located in Las Vegas, only a few get to be featured on Google’s front page. Are you the #1 blue link on Google when you search for the local casino keywords in your area?
You need to look beyond local listings and Google Map placements to fully leverage the power of Search Engine Optimization. Optimize your website content and technical performance to increase your visibility below the Local Listings, Maps and Widgets that appear on search results.
To do that, take a deeper dive into your site with an SEO Audit. An SEO audit is a report that runs through your entire website and identifies areas where you can improve. The technical optimization of a site is all about the code and performance aspects of your site. Are your page links set up correctly? Does your site load quickly? Are there many pages with 404 errors? An SEO Audit identifies these problems and informs your SEO strategy.
For example, site speed is one of the most important ranking factors on Google. Based on data from Alexa gathered by Backlinko, pages on fast-loading sites rank significantly higher than pages on slow-loading sites. You can use many free site-speed tools, such as Pingdom, GTMetrix, or Google’s Page Speed Insights, to determine the loading speed of your site and to get immediate recommendations. At Alphametic, we like to start with the Page Speed Insights software because the speed scores and data come directly from Google. Here is an example from the Mandalay Bay website:
Casino websites tend to be very large and have many capabilities, like booking hotel rooms directly from the site or online gaming portals. You can run into many technical problems, and Google can penalize a site if it’s giving a bad experience to the user by having broken links, slow load times, duplicate content or 404 errors.
A fantastic tool to use for a technical SEO Audit is Screamingfrog. It allows you to see which pages are missing meta descriptions, page titles, 404 errors, identify duplicate content and more. If you want to get deeper into SEO data we recommend you check out Dareboost, SiteLiner, SEOSiteCheckUp, SEMRush, Moz, and Ahrefs.
Keyword Research and Mapping
This is the bread and butter of SEO – keyword research. Keyword research solutions involve identifying the search queries that your target audience uses in order to market your site to them more efficiently by using these words and related phrases in the content of your website.
For example: if you’re a Las Vegas casino, there are many things potential visitors can search for to find you. They may identify your business establishment as a casino, resort or hotel. They can use a combination of these words.
This data is from Google’s Keyword Planner – a valuable tool when conducting keyword research. It tells you how many people per month, on average, search for a particular key term. It also shows you whether the competition for that keyword in Paid Search is high or low and suggests a bid amount if you’d like to run a campaign on Adwords.
Let’s look at another search term:
As you can see here, there is still a good amount of volume on “Las Vegas Casino Hotels,” but it’s not nearly as generic as “Las Vegas Hotels.” If your casino has a hotel, this will be a more strategic word to target versus the broader “Las Vegas Hotels.”
This is the type of thinking that goes into making decisions about which keywords to target organically in your SEO strategies and which keywords to bid on using Adwords, Google’s paid Search Engine Marketing (SEM) platform. Other tools for keyword research include SEMRush, Soovle, UberSuggest, KeywordResearch.io and Moz Keyword Explorer. To find the keyword phrases users put into Google in the forms of questions, check out AnswerThePublic.com. It’s a useful tool to research the items you want to include in the FAQ’s on your website. Learn more about keyword research here.
Keyword-Driven Content Strategy
The content on your site can take many forms: landing pages, blog posts, videos, images, testimonials, etc. Every web page on your site is a doorway, so plan your website’s content in a way that gives your site visitors what they’re looking for while leading towards strategic conversions.
Learn what kinds of questions they ask, browse through your casino’s reviews, identify problem areas to fix on the site, and make things easy to access to remove any barriers site visitors can have from becoming casino visitors or booking a hotel room.
For example: Let’s say you’re targeting The Vacationer persona who wants to visit Las Vegas. She or he is most likely looking beyond the casino floor and wants to know what else there is to do inside or around the casino. As the Marketing Manager, you need to put yourself in their shoes and brainstorm a few keywords they’d type, like “Things to do in Las Vegas,” Las Vegas Events” and “Las Vegas Attractions.”
“Las Vegas Attractions” has a decent amount of volume and doesn’t look as competitive as “things to do in Las Vegas.” Inputting that keyword into Google Search yields these results:
The results seem to be more localized websites and blogs that list top activities in Las Vegas. Can you compete with them? First, you need to have your local content created in a form that Google would see as a good match for those keywords. Creating a blog that communicates local information is a good long-term strategy that includes search terms like “Things to do in Las Vegas,” “Las Vegas Attractions” and so forth. Over time your articles can begin to rank and show up for more generalized searches for individuals seeking local entertainment.
Conversely, when you target the Gamer persona, you want to optimize your gaming landing pages and feature articles on your blog about game tips and strategies. For example, to rank highly on the keyword “las vegas slot machines” you need very strong landing pages with slot machine content. How many slot machines are there on your gaming floor? What are the titles of the top slot machines? What are the jackpots?
This is a simplified example, but a good idea of the kind of analysis that needs to go into deciding what kind of strategy to implement on your website depending on your marketing goals and business objectives.
Backlink Research and Domain Authority
Despite many of the recent Google updates, Backlinks remain a critical Google ranking factor. In the study conducted by Backlinko analyzing 1 million Google search engine result pages, the findings showed that the number of domains linking to a page correlated with rankings more than any other factor. Not surprisingly, authoritative domains tend to rank higher in Google’s search results:
Having a robust backlink portfolio for your site is essential to increasing your Domain Ranking. The Domain Ranking is a metric that backlink tools, like Ahrefs, Open Site Explorer, and Majestic, assign a website based on its credibility and trustworthiness. It mimics the process Google’s algorithm uses to determine the credibility of a site. You can obtain Backlinks by reaching out to other industry-related sites and offering relevant content they would want to feature on their blog or website. Backlinks can also come from PR efforts, infographics and guest blogging.
Here’s an example:
The highlighted words are a link to a casinos homepage. Tripsavvy linked to Gulfstream Park in their article for “Top 4 Land and Sea Casinos in Miami,” and it earned them a backlink.
You can use the free backlink research tool called Open Site Explorer to view the Domain Authority rating for the Gulfstream Park Casino, or any other website on the web. You can also compare the domain ratings of your top casino competitors.
SEM: Google Ads, Bing and GDN
SEM stands for search engine marketing. This is how Wordstream defines search engine marketing: “Search engine marketing is the practice of marketing a business using paid advertisements that appear on search engine results pages.”
Above, you’ll see an example of Google Ads searces for “Las Vegas Hotels.” These are ads that appear at the very top and the bottom of SERPs on Google. Up to four SEM ads may appear on top of Google, giving paid text ads a prominent spotlight above organic links. Bing also has Bing Ads as their search engine marketing platform, which is integrated with Yahoo. Search ads typically work by placing bids for certain key terms and phrases you’ve chosen and whoever has the highest bids/ most relevant campaigns – as measured by the Quality Score algorithm – gets a spot on the first page of search results.
But why invest in search engine marketing in the first place? It’s a matter of strategy and time to dominate in the organic sphere – using SEO techniques is not a short-term game. But with SEM – you can get to the “top” of search results almost immediately. This is especially helpful when you’re a new casino trying to acquire brand recognition (and local recognition) in the beginning stages of your resort launch.
In fact, SEM aids SEO because through search ads you can start driving traffic to your website from the onset, getting valuable learnings and data insights. It is important that these two elements work together to maximize traffic potential and online conversions.
Search engine ads also give you an opportunity to test keywords that you don’t rank very well on organic search yet, as well as advertise and rotate offers and promotions currently happening at your casino. It gives you the ability to test ad copy through A/B testing, track your return on investments, continually adjust bids for different keywords and target specific locations down to the zip code in your search marketing.
It is best practice to use national/local geo-targeting, and zip code geofencing for gaming resort clients, or any other clientele that has a brick and mortar business. What this means is that you set up your SEM campaigns to not only serve a precise location radius in different parts of the country, but these individuals also have to meet the targeting criteria through audience profiling, like demographics, interests, behavior, etc. This allows for a very cost-effective campaign strategy that serves ads to individuals that are warm leads from the start.
As the data accumulates, “personas” will begin to develop for your campaigns that you want to target and remarket to. Track data for player club sign-ups and hotel bookings to create these audience personas and then craft highly-targeted, geo-focused, high-worth zip code campaigns that drive revenue and increase ROI.
Start with Google who has 65% of market share in search engine queries in the United States, and then expand to Bing which has the 2nd most significant market share.
A key tool in search engine marketing is the Google Display Network (GDN). Google defines their Display Network as a way for you to “show your message to potential customers at the right place and the right time.”
Google Search Network shows your ad as a text search engine result. Google Display Network, on the other hand, leverages Google’s vast network of sites across the internet to place your ad directly in front of your target audience.
You’ve seen these before: next time you’re on a blog or booking engine, you’ll notice display ads on various sections of the page. That’s a Google Display Network ad.
Here’s an example of a QuickBooks Google Display Network ad on the Expedia site:
You have the option to hand-pick the domains that your ad shows up on, called “managed placements.” This is a good option if you’ve done significant research on your target audience and the websites that they frequent.
The alternative is to let Google Ads pick and choose where your ad will be placed. You can give Google certain keywords and topics related to your ad, and then Google Ad chooses relevant websites that they think your target audience will be visiting.
A big advantage of using Google Display Network to market your casino is the reach. According to Google, their Display Network has over 2 million sites and reaches over 90% of Internet users. The cost-per-click (CPC) for display ads also tends to be cheaper than that of Search Network text ads.
