Hello. Welcome back to the iGaming SEO Show uh with myself, Alan, and Mr. Ari Pournaras. How’s it going? It’s going good. Been a busy week. Yeah. How are you?
Made it to Friday. Yeah. In one piece. What’s new in the world of crazy iGaming? Happening, isn’t it? It’s like changing all the time. It feels that way just now. Yeah. It feels like whenever we do one of
these, at least it gives us loads to talk about, I suppose. Yeah. It’s exciting though at the same time.
Obviously, you’ve gone from like just looking at primarily one engine to now looking at
across the board. Yeah. I mean, I guess for us, we do it on a daily basis, so we’re like,
you know, hopefully quite on top of it, you’d like to think, but um I suppose for other people, it can get quite overwhelming, right? And how AI is playing a big part in search in general now and SEO and
it’s all the news, man. That’s what gets me. Like it’s all the negativity and all the
news that you get bombarded with on a daily basis. It’s hard to focus sometimes. Well, it is. But, you know, I guess today we’re going to talk a little bit about, you know, just how to win in
general across um both Google and AI search. I mean like you know I’m just
talking from experience here and what we see on a daily basis
but it kind of feels to me like it feels like week on week like each
week now or you could even say each day how frequent it happens it feels like
winning an AI search is becoming obviously more and more important you know
um and it feels because I think for quite a while we’ve been saying like you know Google is absolutely still top
priority like 100% you know AI does its own thing but now it kind of feels like the two are almost balancing each other
out a little bit.

 

Would you agree with that?

Sort of. I mean like I said that on the previous podcast that we did too. Um
nobody’s really talking about the fact that Google has actually grown massively over the past like year.
Yeah. Like year on year the searches. Yeah. And they reported that but obviously you know it doesn’t have that attraction to
it. Whereas like when it comes to AI, ChatGPT, Gemini, anything that you
actually mention about that, it’s like the hottest topic right now. So, it’s going to like any other news
are going to be buried like and that’s going to be like the new thing that everyone wants to talk about. Yeah, I guess that must be
quite tricky to because you’re writing what you say like because it’s the hot
talking point, maybe that makes people think it is what you should prioritize when really maybe
that’s not true. Yeah, you know, I mean, what

 

For iGaming brands just now, do you think Google still is the main priority?

Yeah, 100%. Like when we actually
look at the FTDs and the numbers, that’s where we get, you know, the majority of them. However, we’re seeing quite a lot
actually coming through ChatGPT more and more and that’s increasing. Yeah, cuz I feel like it used
to be when you saw AI numbers coming through, whether it be traffic, conversions or whatever, it was a bit
like, wow, we actually got a lead through ChatGPT today, like that’s crazy. Whereas now it seems to be more like the
norm, right? Yeah. More like it’s become like a little bit more consistent. There’s more feeding into it.
Um, I think that’s going to increase. I mean, more and more people are actually using AI to like bypass Google even for
simple things like day-to-day things. I think that’s going to like move into all the different categories like gambling
and iGaming. Um it’s going to potentially maybe affect affiliates and operators and if
you don’t have the right things in place to ensure that you’re actually appearing across the board,
that’s probably not a good thing. You know, you should now is the time you should be looking into these things
and future-proofing your brand. Mhm. you know I was actually reading something earlier on and I guess like I guess you
could argue this applies more to like maybe ecom than it does to like iGaming for example but it is it’s obviously very tricky to because I think you’ll have a lot of people won’t you who will do the
research phase through AI right then they’ll hop onto a search engine and find their product or their service.
Yeah. So it becomes hard I guess to attribute the value doesn’t it in a sense because you’ve used both tools to
reach your end point. Yeah. So I guess it’s like you know

 

Do you think that comes into iGaming?

Well I think the whole attribution thing is quite messy overall. Um, like even
for example, when you get like a player through organic and we attributed to organic, it could have been like they’ve
seen an ad somewhere or like they’ve actually clicked on a PPC ad. True. True.
They could have read a review on an affiliate website and then actually gone to Google, Google the brand and then we
get conversion. Likewise, the same with direct and maybe other channels. Yeah. Um,
I guess attribution, it’s always been tough, hasn’t it? Attribution like it’s always been Yeah, it’s always been tough. It was more
straightforward like a few years ago. Um but there’s multiple touch points
that contribute to somebody actually making an informed decision and actually buying something. Sure.
And that’s going to continue. Mhm. um the key thing that we’re seeing just now is as you said people do a lot
of the research in ChatGPT and Gemini Claude whereas in the
past you’d manually scroll through like a few different results on Google
and do your own research now it kind of like does it for you and
you trust it. Yeah, for sure. For sure. I mean, what do you think about like

 

Do you think iGaming operators are still underinvesting in SEO compared to the likes of PPC maybe or affiliates?

um I think certain ones are for sure.
Yeah. Um and that’s because obviously when you first launch a brand
if you lead with SEO it’s going to like take a lot of time to actually get those FTDs in. Whereas
with affiliates they’ve done the work for you. they’ve got that traffic there sitting.
You just need to actually negotiate a deal with them and you get those FTDs through. PPC on the other hand is quite good, but
it’s also quite expensive. Um, so the main issue that I see
with a lot of the brands is they get stuck on one channel and they build a brand based on that.
So that’s affiliate marketing. So I see them almost like exhausting that channel and then there’s nowhere else to really
go. Um and I think if you underinvest in SEO and if you don’t invest in SEO from day one in the background say um you could have problems on the line
cuz like obviously affiliates are actually getting squeezed too when it comes to all these changes. So
you could be doing quite well and then you reach a point where affiliates actually getting squeezed, they charge
you more money, your margins actually, you know, um it’s not profitable
anymore. Um and you have to look at other channels and then you panic and then you do PPC and it’s super expensive and then
you start invest in SEO. So like a lot of the operators that we see um that don’t
invest in it from day one actually go to that channel maybe after like a year or two or like being exposed with
affiliates. I was going to ask you like for the um operators that don’t invest in it and maybe just rely on one
channel as you say, whether it be PPC or affiliate marketing,

What do you think puts them off investing in SEO?

 

I think it’s because it takes time to actually get the FTDs through. It’s like an upfront investment
for months. Yeah, it’s like a gradual thing, right? Gradual thing. Like long-term wise, we know looking at the stats and
looking at the channels like SEO traffic is the most profitable, right? But like no, like not a lot of people are willing
to make that investment, you know, wait for a year to actually get the results in.
Impatient basically. Well, there’s that. There’s probably pressure from investors, you know, like there’s
you need to you need to get some traction and see how the website converts, how it’s actually working, get
some money into investing other things. So, yeah.

Do you think every SEO campaign for iGaming operators should have an FTD forecast?

 

100%. You know, you need to be organized. Do you think that’s something not enough people do?
Um, I think there’s some companies that we obviously work with that do it really really well.
And there’s other companies that it’s like kind of like a bit of guess work. Um, and you can’t really leave it to
guesswork. You need to be you need to be focused that not just for SEO, especially if you’re doing like affiliate marketing and any
other channel, you need to know how much it’s actually costing you and how many months it actually takes
for that player to become profitable. Yeah. Want to chat a little bit about like um
how much overall I guess like search presence affects your Google rankings like you
know overall. So I guess the question is like

Can you rank well in Google but still have a kind of weak overall search presence?

Uh yeah you can do that. Yeah, you can do that because I think one thing you
hear a lot of now is that um Google’s knowledge of your brand is
becoming more and more important, right? Like entity SEO and all that kind of stuff, right? Like you have to
tick that off. Yeah, 100%. Well, do you I guess that’s the question. I suppose you could yeah you
could be doing traditional SEO um doing all your you know focusing on non-brand
and doing really well not having like a knowledge panel not having like you know
socials that’s not really like something that’s going to like future proof your brand.
So the answer to that is yes you can still do quite well but if you are doing quite well you’re probably in a good
position to actually take some of those profits and invest into actually future-proofing your brand for AI search. Yeah.

What about third-party mentions of your brand anywhere online?

 

I guess mega important right now.
I guess a lot of it depends on where it comes from, right? But yeah, you can uh I mean this there’s
platforms out there just now that we’re actually using you can actually go and buy them um which is great. You can go and buy mentions and that’s you know
going and buying like content on a website that gets placed without a link. It’s a citation
and I guess that’s come off people realizing how valuable this is, right? Yeah. It’s particularly
comes back to that entity SEO thing. Yeah. It comes back to like ranking in AI overviews and also in AI
search. And yeah, it’s a whole thing of you’ve got your website as a hub of
information that tells the internet and everybody else what you do, but you also need external sources
validating the information and basically saying, “Yes, that’s right. This is what they do across socials, review sites,
forums, you know, industry websites, you name it.” Yeah. Here’s here’s a question
for you to throw out there. So, you know, I guess this could answer a lot of the this could answer the bigger
question of, you know, Google search versus AI search and like the value in both. But I mean, where we’re at today,
you know,

 

If an operator came up to you and said, ‘I’m ranking number one in Google for all these strong, high-volume keywords, but on things like ChatGPT, I’m nowhere. My competitors are ranking for all those keywords.’ Would you say to them you’re in a good situation or you’re in a bad situation just now?

I’d say you’re in a good situation cuz you’re early,
right? And you’ve got a base there. You’ve got like a successful business. Yeah. Ranking in Google, bringing in the FTDs.
You probably have that invest that money there ready to actually invest
um in AI search. And now is the time, you know, and it is basically early
cuz every day we get like LinkedIn messages from people sending tools, AI trackers,
and it’s all like constantly changing. Um, I think that’s a good position to be in. So, if you are doing
well in traditional SEO, but not appearing in AI search, there’s a few different layers you can actually add
into your strategy. Yeah. Well, that was going to kind of lead me on to my next question, which is I guess that operator would be thinking,
you know,

 

I’ve been told good SEO is good GEO. I’m number one for these keywords. Where am I in these AI search results?

Do you know what I used to say that too? I think we did. Yeah. A lot. Yeah,
we used to say that about a year ago. This is what I’m saying when it’s like it’s changing so fast, right? Changing. So, I think that I think that used to be
the general kind of rule of thumb, right? Yeah, it’s like you know you’re number one in Google for these things. You’re
well known in Google. AI will pick you up. But do you think we’re going away from that a bit now or Listen, to an
extent it’s true, right? So if you don’t have good SEO, you’re
probably going to struggle to actually get good GEO and AEO out of that. So that’s the base. So that’s the hub. your website has all the information that you want to feed and like you know um to the
internet and um sort of like more information about your brand. But
yeah, as time has gone by like I’ve changed my opinion just by like testing things. Yeah. So now you need a few different things
on top of a really good SEO strategy um to actually start appearing and start
taking some of that market share from AI engines.

 

What’s at the top of that list, would you say?

So I’d say building a brand. That would be like your number one priority. Yeah. Because that’s kind of
like a broad thing, right? I think this comes back to like the mentions, right? Like Yeah, building a brand is obviously like
a very broad um thing to say. Um but essentially
it’s all the other stuff that you do outside of the website
that counts. Um, so your website, great SEO, that’s fine. You need third
party sources. You need your socials. You need your mentions. You need to be visible on forums. And one of the key
things is you could be getting like amazing quality links that do great for your SEO.
Those links might not necessarily like actually move the needle for AI search. Well, that’s what I was just about to
come on to. Yeah. I was going to talk about links a bit further down the line cuz I know that for AI and whatnot that’s a big factor and again it comes
down to the thing of if good SEO equals good GEO then those links will do the job right but maybe that’s not
becoming the case so much anymore not necessarily so that you’re seeing a bit more of maybe like a split in terms of links so
valuable links for SEO valuable links for AI I’d say so um yeah you’d it’s almost
like two separate things that you almost you know you need to be focusing on at the time right now to be building equity
in both. Um, so yeah, you got your good traditional SEO links that help you rank, you know,
the links that we’ve been building for years now. Yeah. But then there’s like certain publications and it’s to do with the
whole harmonic centrality thing which we can discuss. Um, there’s certain links that will help
you appear in AI search and those are like different. It’s like different buckets.
Okay. Yeah, I’m really interested in that though. So can you give some examples? Yeah.
Like I guess it’s pretty well known probably to anybody listening to this what a good link for SEO would look
like. A traditional link from say like a popular Well, let’s dive into that before.
Yeah. Like a news website or something, you know, or like a kind of related article for whatever your niche is.
Um traditional in-text hyperlink. Yeah. um that leads to your the landing
page that you want to rank using the right anchor text etc. I guess we kind of know the rules
but I mean

 

Could you pick what you would consider to be a good link specifically for AI? What would that look like?

It sort of depends on your industry and
the biggest websites that are like in your industry’s sort of like knowledge panel. Mhm. and how they’re interlinked
and the closeness of that too. So, for example, with traditional link
building, as you said, you would go for, say it’s a casino site that has quite a
lot of traffic and you get a good link on a page that has rankings, has that relevancy, feeds into your website,
boost your rankings, that’s great. Um, when it comes to AI, it’s more
other type of websites. It could be like maybe like an industry website. It’s actually very central
um to that network of links and the closer you can get to actually link
to that and get a link from that website Mhm. and the more of those websites you
can actually get the better you can actually appear in AI search.
Okay. But that is not necessarily a casino site. It goes back to the concept
of actually building a brand. So it could be having all the sort of like
B2B industry publications. iGaming ones. It could be having presence on actually
YouTube and all the biggest social channels. Uh having a big community on like a major forum. Um and then it could
be as simple as an industry publication. Mhm. is I find that really
fascinating the kind of difference in I guess types of links that you would need to
achieve your goals. Yeah. And it goes back to that um thing that we talked about the validation from
external sources. Um a traditional casino website that’s actually ranking
quite well that’s a good link for SEO and for ranking might not necessarily tick those boxes.
And I think that’s maybe one thing a lot of people don’t realize, right? Because you know say an operator could get what
they consider a really really valuable backlink and it would still be I guess for purely for SEO.
Yeah. But it might not be giving them the AI value that they think it is giving that entity value that they need. Yeah.
So that’s something that’s maybe worth looking more into. Right. 100%. Yeah. 100%. It’s like do two different things
that are intertwined um your traditional SEO and obviously
creating a brand and creating those entities and ensuring you’re appearing
across the board. What about um I guess I mean we’ve
already briefly touched on how SEO takes time, right? It’s an investment of time.
Everyone knows that. Everyone who signs up to it, you know, eventually comes to know that. Most people do. Yeah. Not everyone. That’s very true. Yeah. But if someone came to you and said,
you know,

 

I’ve already really heavily invested in SEO. We’ve done it for a few years. What would you say in terms of expectations to see results in AI? Could it take just as long, or could it be quicker?

I think it’s could be quite a lot quicker if you’ve got like an established base there you can actually
build upon. Um and also like I find it can be a lot quicker with newer brands and I’ll
explain why. Yeah, that’s interesting.

Why do you think it can be quicker with newer brands?

Um I think it’s because you know brands
that have been around for years, right? um have citations and links and things
all over the internet all over the place, maybe outdated information.
Um so when you actually gather all that information from like thousands of different places, it could paint like a
bit of a mixed picture. Whereas if you’ve got a new brand, say like a crypto casino that specializes in, I don’t
know, roulette, say, you can actually go out there and build those citations a
bit a bit like we used to do with local SEO. You need that consistency. You and you can be consistent across the
board and it paints a more sort of like structured picture for
engines to pick up and rank you. So it’s more consistent.
There’s not like loads of piece of information that contradict each other all over the place, you know, from
like different areas of the internet. It’s more of a structured approach and it can be easier for like newer brands to have the budget to go out there and say this is what we
do, this is what we specialize in and influence AI. So do you think what I’m basically
getting from that from what you say Would you agree that it’s now more important than ever if you’re focusing
on your link building or I guess it’s more accurate to say your link profile in general?
Would you say it’s now more important to

 

Before going out to source new links, should you look at what you already have?

Yeah. And almost audit what you already have. Audit what you already have and also like audit what the internet says about
you. Mhm. not just the links, it’s all the third party sources, citation, socials,
everything basically. So maybe as like a first step before going out there and trying to get all
the good links that you can, look at what’s already pointing to you, look at what’s already mentioning you
and maybe try to tidy that up a bit and ensure that the information is actually consistent across the board. So
for example, keyword consistency, right? That’s really what you’re going for. Keyword and even like the text or like
surrounding it. So like you’d have like the so like other relevant keywords within
that but like that needs to be consistent. Um so if you’ve rebranded over the years and change your approach
there could be quite a lot of like messy information out there. So you want to audit that and streamline it as you say.
Yeah. Especially from for well established brands right or I guess brands that have just been around for a while. Yeah.
Um it’s something you really want to audit. And I think that’s a good exercise because it means you can have all the information um like in one
sheet. It’s a good exercise general I would say. I mean I know we’ve spoken about it
here before about things like disavow. I know that’s maybe not quite as I guess
important as it used to be. Uh mainly because Google’s getting smarter with links right and it knows what’s junk
and it knows what’s you can still use it for sure if you’re getting attacked. Yeah.

 

Would you say disavow is something people should still use?

Yeah, I mean there’s cases where even
recently where it has been used for like a serious like negative SEO attack and
has been successful but it’s not the case that you use it like we used to use it like you know six or seven years ago
disavowing links all the time and because you get so much spam and in iGaming obviously everybody knows like the common spam that everybody gets. Yeah,
telegram stuff, all the link sellers. Yeah, I haven’t seen any cases where
removing those links or disavowing them has actually had a positive effect. Interesting.
Yeah. I think as you say, it makes sense that it was something that was a lot more valuable a long time ago um before Google could
better establish what was true and what’s not, I guess. But if it’s a sophisticated negative SEO
attack, then for sure that’s a good backup to have, a good kind of counter strategy. Yeah. Well, it’s good to know it’s still there
and it’s something you can still do, right? Um, there’s a few kind of few terms I’ve heard you mention and I
kind of want you to elaborate on a little bit.

 

What is Common Crawl, and why should iGaming brands care about it?

Yeah. It’s basically like um how do I
explain it? like a massive crawler that crawls the internet and um AI engines
like ChatGPT heavily rely on that information uh instead of Googlebot I mean they look at Google too obviously but if you are in the Common Crawl data
which you can actually look up yourself you can visit Common Crawl and look at the latest um index So just
to be clear this is a tool this is um an organization that
basically regularly crawls the internet. Okay. Has been for years, right? Yeah. Um
and you can go onto the website, you can look at the latest index like say for example for August and you can see you
can type in your brand or your URL. You can see if it actually appears um and it will give you like almost like
a time stamp. Oh, okay. Um, one thing that a lot of brands actually get wrong is
you look at the robots.txt file in the block CCBot, which is the CCBot.
Ah, okay. So, they’re basically blocking Common Crawl. It’s one of those kind of like under the
hood things that people don’t really realize. Yeah. I’ve seen a lot of brands actually do that. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re
not going to appear in AI, but it’s going to limit their chances. So, you want to be appear to be visible.
Yeah. Yeah, indexable and uh you want to be in those timestamps basically.
I’d love to know how many big sites out there aren’t even aware of that, you know. A lot. Yeah, a lot. I’ve seen quite a few.
How did you come across that? Just researching basically and looking into like how to like rank in um AI engines, looking into different prompts and
testing things. Uh, there’s been a lot of good SEOs that have done presentations on that too. uh
like into Common Crawl and harmonic centrality and all that stuff. Brings me on to my next one.

 

What is harmonic centrality?

Yeah, basically it was what I was explaining before. So, um, when you look
at traditional SEO compared to like GEO and AEO, um, the links that you would go after to
actually rank quite well for online casino or like a major term are not necessarily the links that you would go after to influence AI.
Mhm. That’s where the concept of harmonic centrality actually comes in. Okay. So, it kind of covers a little bit
of what we spoke about before. Yeah. It’s basically if you can imagine like the internet like as a network
sort of like connecting to each other um within the iGaming industry for example would be looking at the most
central websites within that hub and how closely they’re actually connected to each other.
Okay. And actually getting links and mentions from those websites to your brand. Mhm. um
so again that could be you know industry publications you’d
have to look into p industry but there might be a bit of an overlap
with traditional links that do like increase your you know your rankings
uh but in a lot of cases you can actually see that it’s links that you know SEOs wouldn’t really think
about so it’s almost trying to separate the two but clear separate the two yeah and you want to be building across the across both ideally
I guess again it just underlines how much what we spoke about earlier is coming into play, right?
These this kind of separate link value if you like. Yeah. It’s really interesting seeing how that’s how that
much that’s actually changed. Yeah. I mean literally I had a call just there with a new potential client
looking into that and they have their own in-house SEO team doing all the
normal stuff that we do. Um, but they need a bit of support when it comes to like GEO and AEO
and looking into sort of better optimizing their content
for it and also looking into harmonic centrality and looking at the types of links and the types of third party
sources that they need to be listed on to be able to appear more in AI. Yeah. I guess just to kind of like summarize everything from the link chat
if you like what we’ve just spoken about today. You know, say there’s an operator
listening to this that has basically budget. Yeah. Ready to go for links. Like I’ve separated my link budget. That’s what
we’re spending it on. You know,

 

How would you spend a link budget differently today than you would three or four years ago?

Yeah, I’d say
because I think previously it was probably just straightforward as like okay let’s calculate the average
cost of a backlink compare that to our budget. This is how many links we can get on average from quality sites. But I’m guessing based on what we’ve just spoken about, you would probably want to look at that
budget a bit differently now. Yeah. I mean, I would continue
obviously the normal SEO tactics. Um, but I would maybe carve out a bit of
that budget or maybe add a bit on top um for AI engines and looking into, you know, maybe mentions, maybe actually getting maybe supporting clients with
actually getting more third party sources, even social channels actually linking to
them. cuz you know, you look at a lot of these clients and they might be active on one channel, but they’re not really
active on everything else. And you need to be ticking certain boxes. I think that’s pretty common. We see
that a lot. Yeah, we see that a lot. Yeah. So, it’s not necessarily something that we would take on as a full project, but
more of a, you know, let’s allocate maybe a bit of budget on mentions, allocate a bit of budget on um getting
the right type of links that will um help you show up in AI and also educating maybe their internal team on
how to actually build profiles and make sure the information is actually consistent across the boards for social channels,
review sites, you know, all everything that actually surrounds a brand apart
from the website. I get this. This is probably really tough to answer because, you know,
everything costs a different amount, etc., etc. It’s really hard to say, but

 

If you had 50k, what would you roughly do in terms of a split between SEO and GEO?

That’s a that’s a difficult one to answer because like it really depends on where the brand
is at that point like what’s actually delivered in terms of FTDs but say it’s an established brand that’s doing quite
well in SEO you know I would probably take maybe 20% of that budget and point it towards um all the things that we
discussed 20%. Yeah. And what about for a brand new brand say coming on for a new brand it as I said could be
maybe a little bit easier when it comes because you’re not really going back and forth and changing things. Sure.
So I would start with like entity links for a new brand and a lot of them are actually free.
You just want like a mention and it’s consistent across the board. I would start with link building
traditional SEO and I would also like buy mentions too. Buy mentions. So it’ be quite interesting to see with a new brand how fast you can actually
appear in AI search over Google. Yeah, that would be an interesting Yeah. point actually to see how that would
work. Yeah. But um I guess that kind of leads me on to my next question which is but let’s take the example of a
better established operator in a competitive market. Yeah. You know

 

What should an established operator in a competitive market realistically expect after investing in GEO for six to 12 months?

I guess just like more mentions or Yeah, I think if they’re doing it properly um like we’ve audited quite
a lot of tools and the issue that you get is when you look for something in
Gemini from device to device you can get like a slightly different answer in some cases could be completely
different. So, it’s hard to track, but essentially competing for a share of that um for a percentage, you know, of
that of that prompt. Um so, what you want to be doing is you
want to be tracking everything from day one and you want to be obviously moving in
the right direction. So, you want to be seeing the brands appearing for more and more prompts.
Yeah, that score actually increasing. We actually use a tool that it’s a bit of a leaderboard that shows you how you’re
actually performing in ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and all the other tools and how that score actually compares against the
competition. Now the competition could be websites that actually come up in AI search
specifically, not necessarily Google. This is just for AI. Yeah. I mean like prompt tracking was something I was going to
Yeah. I was going to bring up because I find it really interesting cuz you know naturally tools that we’ve used and
other people have used to track organic rankings obviously they’re going to get on the prompt tracking right cuz it’s
like the big thing evolution of search but see like where we are right now

 

How accurate do you think prompt-tracking tools are?

It’s nowhere near close as to what we’re
used to with traditional rank tracking. Yeah. Uh because obviously there’s so
many variations of prompts and the results can be quite different.
Yeah. Um, but you want to be covering as much as possible and tracking that. And
as long as you’re tracking that over time, you can actually see a clear graph that you’re actually appearing
more and you can actually see the numbers coming into. You can see the FTDs and everything. Yeah.
That is a good indication you’re moving in the right direction. Yeah. No, it’s um I guess they’re good for giving you an idea, right? Like a rough idea of where you sit. They’re nowhere near close to being, you
know, super accurate. Yeah. Yeah, it’s one of those things that it’s almost it’s almost like you can’t rely purely on a number, right? I
mean, organic rankings are quite different. You’re looking at like a list of search results, your third or your
fourth or whatever. Yeah. Whereas for I feel like for things like ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever, it’s a
bit harder to put like a number on it cuz you’re not really just coming up in a list. It’s like a mention, right? So,
I mean, even rankings have been like really unstable the past year. I mean, with all the different changes, it’s crazy. Yeah. I don’t think I’ve
ever seen such instability. But at the same time, I guess you can understand why because
the search landscape in general is just changing so much. It feels like, as I said earlier on, it’s it feels like it’s
changing on a daily basis. There’s always something new popping up. Whether it’s like an AI snippet in the middle of pages,
you know, search results or the top or the bottom, it feels like there’s always something new. So, I guess for traditional ranking trackers, it must be
a [ __ ] nightmare. Must be a lot more expensive for them. Oh yeah, for sure. For sure. Yeah.
Um, what about looking ahead then? I mean, I kind of I feel like a similar question
was asked on a previous podcast. Okay. But because things are changing so fast now, maybe you have a different thought
on it today, but

 

Three years from now, where do you see Google SEO and AI sitting in terms of priority?

Hopefully, we’re not dead in three years from uh AI robots like coming after us and killing us, which is like what you’ve seen like in the
news. Yeah. Don’t don’t even This scares me. Don’t even go there.
When it comes to SEO, um yeah, I think I’m I think we’re probably
going to see like cuz obviously there’s a lot of like engines
and businesses competing against each other. So I think we’ve got to maybe settle maybe like a couple.
I think that’s what’s happened throughout history, right? Like you get all these different even when you look at the evolution of browsers
and search engines. Um you have all these different search
engines competing with each other and then that gets consolidated into like one
that has 90% and then maybe a few others that have like that fire over that 10%. I think I
mean in my opinion it’s just a race isn’t it? Do you not think it’s really who gets there first? Although you might
actually see that ChatGPT actually comes out first for more sort
of informational stuff buying things comparing things and then
for productivity and like actually doing things which seems to be at the moment
but yeah who knows but I think it’s going to be you know a couple of players are going
to win. I think a lot of it is just the first name that you hear because I think people are very like they settle on what
they know. What they know? Yeah. Do you get what I mean? Like I feel like back in the day if someone said to me, “Ask Jeeves is better than Google.”
Yeah. I wouldn’t care. I’d still go to Google cuz it’s just the name, you know. You know what? I don’t think I’ve ever used Ask Jeeves in my life.
Maybe once when I was like 12. I don’t know. I’ve seen I know the logo and all that, but like I never actually I think I just went on it for curiosity.
I didn’t have actual any interest in using it. I was just like, “Oh, what’s this?” You know? Um, but it’s an
interesting one. I think I agree with you. I get what you mean. I think you hear about so many different names
for like SEO to or not SEO, but you know, AI tools, right? But I think it’s probably going to be narrowed down to
a handful that will actually stick around that people will actually use for this side of the world. You
know, when you look at Russia and China, they’re obviously going to have like their equivalent tools like, you know, they’ve got Yandex
now as a bigger search engine in Russia and Baidu, obviously. So, um, yeah,
they’re on top of that. Yeah. And

 

In five years, can you see links still being as valuable?

I can see them being equally valuable to what they are now.
So, you think that will just stick around? Really? They’re always going to be a deciding factor.
Yeah, cuz I mean that’s the way that the algorithm was programmed from day one. And um I think it’s
difficult to actually undo that, you know. Sure. Um and then obviously all these
different engines actually rely on Google. They crawl the information and use it.
Uh I don’t think links are going to change. Maybe our tactics will like they’re changing right now with AEO and GEO about how maybe to obtain them or maybe what’s more valuable and other
things. I think that’s something you always have to keep on top of, right? So, um
I mean I guess okay I guess to kind of like round off I think we always like rounding off with a one of the big
questions you know big broad question so I’ll hit you with it. So

For an iGaming operator today with a serious SEO budget, what is the one thing they should change about their search strategy?

Your agency you should work with us. Yeah. Drop us a line. Uh, we’ll take care of everything. So that’s why you put it in there. Sneaky. Sneaky. I like it. I like it. Go to bigponddigital.co.uk. Link. Yeah. Um, but no, I mean like does any one thing stick out to you would you say
about what you should change about your overall search strategy in the next like 12 months? If you could
like pick one thing, what do you think? So I’d focus on you know what we discussed like in this podcast. you want to focus on looking ahead and looking at those engines that might
equate to like 5% of your FTDs now and in 2 years from now maybe 30% 40% or
even more you just don’t know um so you want to allocate that budget
wisely and I think SEO is like a great channel like in the long term it provides the
best ROI like compared to like most other channels that you see like streamers PPC Yeah.
And I think that’s like the main message, right? Yeah. That we want to get across. And we’re not just saying that because we’re an
SEO agency, but I think a lot of people have this idea of SEO. I mean, how many times have you heard SEO is dead in
since I started 20 years ago? Yeah. There’s always here comes the SEO
killer. It was dying when I started pretty much. Yeah. And PPC was a new thing. And yeah, like It’s just not the case. Like it’s
Yeah. So, I’d say like even if you’re not like a massive brand, if you’re a small brand that has
some budget, like I would start putting some of that into these tactics and future-proofing your brand and making sure you’re building a consistent picture across the internet.
Yeah. It’s a really interesting chat and thanks a lot for your time. It’s a good chat as always and you know
hopefully this gives you guys a better idea of where you should be putting your priorities to help you win in
search. Um so thanks Ari, thanks for your time and we’ll see you guys again
soon.