Hi everyone, welcome to episode two of the iGaming SEO show. My name’s Alan, I’m the SEO Manager at Big Pond Digital, and I’m joined today by Ari Purnas.

 

How are you doing?
Good — new year, good Christmas break. Had a good two weeks relaxing, not doing much. Checked a few emails in between, as tempting as that always is. But back to it. Ready to go. A full new year of iGaming.

 

Setting the scene for 2025
I always love chatting to you about iGaming specifically because you’re experienced in it and you’ve been in the game for a long time. There’s so much to talk about right now — not just in iGaming but in SEO in general. The buzzword is obviously AI, and just how big an influence it’s having. I’ve been doing this for 18 years and it’s constantly changing, but the last year had a lot packed into it. Loads to unwrap over the next few episodes.

 

Is the cost of entry going up for iGaming?
Now that we’re in a new year, it seems fitting to look at things a bit broader — overall trends, entry points, lesser-known brands trying to get in and grow their visibility. My first question is: do you feel like the fundamentals of SEO are actually changing, or is the cost of entry just going up?
The cost of entry for iGaming is definitely going up. It’s just becoming more and more competitive year on year. I remember back in 2011 doing affiliate marketing — to rank on page one for competitive terms like roulette and blackjack, the investment wasn’t that much at all. You needed an exact match domain, a decent content strategy, and a bit of link spend. I think I put something like four or five grand into one affiliate site in total and it was generating six figures. Those days are over, sadly.
But there are other ways in if you get creative — if you focus on a niche, if you have a unique selling point, a specific tool, or a community you can build around. The landscape has changed and you need to adapt.
In terms of the fundamentals, the core things are still the same: technical SEO, good content, links. What’s changed is there’s an added layer on top of that with AI. It’s not entirely new ground, but there are things we used to do that now need more emphasis and attention. The basics remain, but the landscape is different.

 

Does AI make things easier or harder for smaller brands?
It’s a mixed bag — a bit of both. It makes it easier to automate things that used to take up a lot of admin time, which is a big deal for smaller teams with limited resource. But at the same time, it means things get saturated faster. Websites are popping up everywhere, people are pumping out content at scale, and just because you can automate something doesn’t mean it’s a good idea or that it’s actually going to work.

 

It’s about using those AI tools to your advantage and being creative with them. And in iGaming specifically, trust signals are huge — people forget that. You’re talking about people’s money. Google is going to be strict on that. Money or your life, I think that’s what they refer to it as. So getting your trust signals nailed and your content right is more important than ever.

 

It’s a congested space

 

It’s such a congested space for smaller brands trying to rank. You’re not just competing against other operators — you’re up against affiliates, bigger brands, black hat sites, regulatory constraints, licensing. It’s a combination of everything.

 

And for a lot of keywords, affiliates actually outrank operators. That must make it particularly difficult for new entrants. It is difficult. Most operators when they launch focus on getting traffic through affiliates — negotiating tenancy deals to get listed on sites that already have the audience. But what a lot of them neglect while they’re building that affiliate channel is their own SEO. It becomes very easy for an affiliate with a strong link profile to outrank you even for your own brand terms, never mind something highly competitive like “online casino.” They can just swoop in and rank second with a compelling CTA, and it’s relatively straightforward for them to do that.

 

Have backlink prices risen overall?
Overall, yes. I remember a few years ago doing our own outreach and finding webmasters who didn’t really know the true value of their site. That’s changed — webmasters now understand what links are worth. A lot of them also have deals with networks and middlemen that push prices up further. We tend to go direct, but the prices have still increased because people understand how much operators and affiliates actually make. You do occasionally get someone come back with a figure like seven grand for a single link, which is a hard no — they’re just throwing it out there — but someone must be paying it because they keep sending those emails.

 

Going back to around 2010 or 2011, when I worked in-house as an SEO manager for a casino, you could get links for as cheap as $20. We used to measure things by PageRank back then. The brand I was working for had a £10k monthly budget for tech, content, and links combined, and I’d struggle to spend it — because at $20 a link, that’s an effectively infinite pool of spend. Some of the higher tier links were obviously more expensive, but there were opportunities everywhere.

 

That was also when I first got the bug for affiliate marketing. I sat across from an affiliate manager who was also my boss, and he’d casually mention what some of these affiliates were pulling in. There was one guy with about 10 or 15 websites that looked like they were built in the nineties — heavy on content, entire link profiles made up of directory links bought from services like Directory Maximiser. The commissions we were paying him were around £100k a month across 15 brands. The websites were basically dead by then, just accumulating players over time. The guy was in his thirties and retired. That was the lightbulb moment for me.

 

Black hat sites are back
What actually surprises me is that black hat sites are back in the SERPs. There was a period where you didn’t really see them much, but over the past year or so they’ve crept back. A lot of it is expired domains — sites that used to be car websites or charity sites, with strong authority built up over years. Someone buys the domain, repurposes it into a black hat affiliate site, builds links to it, and ranks. I’ve seen people spending £40,000 or £50,000 on these domains. What’s strange is they’ll spend that kind of money and then put almost no effort into the UX — the sites look terrible. But the average user isn’t thinking about that. They’re just searching, they come across it, they click it. And apparently it’s working, because they keep showing up.

 

The algorithm feels like it’s a bit of a mess at the moment. It’s history repeating itself — patterns you’d typically associate with ten years ago are back. The SERPs are volatile. In iGaming specifically, because it’s so competitive, you’ve got black hats pushing, brands pushing, sites getting removed, DMCA actions, DDoS attacks — it’s constantly moving, especially at the top end of the keyword landscape.

 

Content strategy for operators
What would your advice be to a newer operator wanting to rank through content?

 

For an operator, you’re a bit more restricted than an affiliate, but you can still carve a niche. If your main focus is live casino, for example, you could produce content around live dealer experiences, introduce the dealers, cover the studio — there are loads of angles. But before any of that, the basics need to be right, and that’s something I see multiple brands failing at.

 

A lot of operator sites are primarily client-side rendered, which means when Google crawls them, it doesn’t see much. There’s a crucial crossover between tech SEO and content that operators especially need to get right — making sure Google can actually see and index your content in the first place. Get that sorted first, then focus on building unique content with a clear angle. And I wouldn’t go chasing quick wins by scaling AI content at volume. That’s not a sustainable approach.

 

You have to be realistic as a newcomer. You’re not going to rank for “online casino” or “slots” straight away — it’s just not going to happen. You need to look at what niche you can go hard into. Game providers are a good example. You could pick someone like Pragmatic Play — one of the biggest names in the space — and write in depth about the history of the company, what makes their games unique, why players trust them. It’s about picking the right battles.

 

One thing that’s actually worked well for us is slot game descriptions, served in a format that AI systems can pick up too — structured with schema so it’s easy for engines to interpret. We also found that writing a piece like “five Pragmatic Play slots paying out big in Canada” — something with a real hook — performed far better than expected. It’s now one of our top ten most clicked pages. And the great thing about casino content compared to sportsbook content is it’s evergreen. Sportsbook is time-sensitive — you’ve got a window. Casino content you can write it, let it do its job, and it keeps working.

 

Picking the right battles and gap analysis
The biggest mistake we made early on was going almost exclusively after slots content. There were benefits — we rank pretty well for slot terms now — but you really need to cover the full picture. We’re now writing more about blackjack, roulette, poker. The volume isn’t as high as slots, but it’s important for backing up the overall topical authority. It shows Google you offer everything.

 

In terms of gap analysis, it’s about analysing the volume in your specific market, then looking at who ranks for the gaps you want to target and what their link profile looks like. If you find an opening that looks relatively uncontested, go for it and see how you perform. When new brands come to us wanting to rank for “online casino” with five backlinks, competing against sites that have had 10,000 links for the past 15 years, the first job is just setting realistic expectations.

 

Algorithm updates in iGaming
Do iGaming sites get hit harder by Google updates than other industries?

 

The SERPs are tracked daily and the changes are constant. In iGaming, because it’s so competitive, even a standard update can create big swings. Usually when you hear about an update, you log into your rank tracker and your Search Console and it’s panic stations. The last update was actually a nice change — all our clients got a bump, which felt like a reward for doing the right things consistently over the previous months. But it can always go the other way.

 

AI overviews and entity building
How much should website owners care about AI overviews and targeting AI answers?

 

Compared to a few years ago, when you could get away with a faceless website with no social presence and no listings elsewhere, it’s now much more about building a real brand. Google and other engines need signals to actually interpret authority — so you need listings on relevant sites, a knowledge panel if you can achieve it, social channels set up properly, Reddit presence, Trustpilot. There’s a checklist of things you need to tick to demonstrate that you’re building a brand and not just another site.

 

For FAQs and structured answers, the approach is similar to what worked in the past — tools like AlsoAsked are still useful for building topical authority. The SERPs change quickly though. Things that felt essential a year ago can shift in importance rapidly. It comes back to building a brand rather than just a website.

 

Do you think people underestimate the entity side of things — building presence off their own site?
Yes, definitely. People immediately default to thinking about what’s on their site and what links they’re building to it. The off-site brand-building piece is still underestimated by a lot of people in the space.