Hello and welcome to The iGaming SEO Show. Dylan, nice to see you. Nice to see you, Ari. How’s it going? Good — busy. Mid-March already. I’ve just had a bit of time off so I’m back to it feeling fresh — kind of. I had a cold, but all good. Things are going well at Big Pond. We’ve been super busy over the past couple of months. January is always quite slow getting back into it, by mid-February it’s the same, and then it kicks in and you’re going again. We’ve been doing a lot of work for clients on the topic of today — brand protection in the iGaming space. It’s a very important thing to do, so let’s get into it.

 

What do we actually mean by brand protection in iGaming SEO?

Brand protection means protecting your brand against other websites — typically affiliates — coming into the space and taking your traffic. One of the biggest acquisition channels when you launch a brand, whether it’s a sportsbook or a casino, is affiliate marketing. It’s a way to quickly get traffic. You obviously pay for it — in commission, CPA, rev share, or tenancy — and there are several different models, but it’s a very effective way of actually launching your brand and getting traffic.

The issue is that a lot of brands, when they first launch, don’t have a link profile. They don’t have authority, they don’t rank well in Google, and they might only rank for a few of their own brand terms. It’s easier for an existing affiliate with authority to come into the space, create a page — usually heavier on the content side — and start ranking for your branded terms than it is for them to rank for non-brand terms. So you need to do as much as you can to protect those branded rankings.

 

Why is it such a big issue when affiliates outrank operators for brand terms?

Because you’re already paying out margin to affiliates — it could be 30% or more. And as an operator, you’ve got all these other expenses too. You’re essentially paying them to rank for your own branded terms, when they should ideally be introducing people who don’t know your brand to your casino. It’s an easy win for them, but for you, it’s wasted marketing budget — because that user would have come to you organically anyway. They already knew your brand name and searched for you. But the affiliate’s page can look like the official site, someone clicks in, and you’re paying them to get a lead you already had.

Affiliates run a page with a very clickbaity CTA, they get the clicks, they get the FTDs, and you’re essentially paying them for your own brand traffic. It’s a real problem, and we see it a lot with our clients.

Why do affiliates outrank operators so often?

It usually comes down to websites that have been live for years and have built up authority. It’s easy for them to put up a piece of content, and if you’re a newer brand that doesn’t have much of a profile online, they can appear on page one, top three, within a couple of days. The strength of their link profile is their competitive edge. Content is the other half of it — a lot of newer operator platforms are all JavaScript and difficult for Google to index, whereas affiliates are usually SEO-friendly by design and go very heavy on the content side.

 

What mistakes do operators keep making?

They don’t prepare in advance. You could easily prepare two or three months before launch. By the point you’re actually activating affiliates, you want a website that already has some traction. You can do that by having a welcome page with some content and information about what you’re launching, and starting your link building from that point — before affiliates are even activated. That way, when you get to launch day, you already have some profile in place, some links pointing back to the website, and a bit of history in Google to protect you from affiliates coming in and taking your traffic.

Building on that, another important planning step is thinking about your online footprint ahead of time. What do you want it to look like? You need to be on all the right sites, and that’s where the concept of entity SEO comes in — you want to create a clear, concise, identifiable online entity for your brand so Google and users can see you’re consistent across the internet, and that you’re the official one. That’s obviously really important when you want to show you’re the official site versus an affiliate.

Even if you don’t have a fully optimised site up yet, you can still start building social media profiles and putting the groundwork in, so that when your site is live you can instantly start promoting it, the socials are linked from your website, and it all kicks in. Social media channels and Trustpilot already have a lot of authority — go and build a profile there and you could be protecting a spot on page one. Thinking of your ideal SERP: your official site’s ranking top, and you’re dominating all the real estate with your social profiles.

 

What does it actually cost when an affiliate outranks you for your own brand?

It’s a lot of wasted marketing spend. Taxes are going up in a lot of countries, then you’re paying out 30% or more to affiliates, and there’s a long list of other things operators have to pay for on top. If you invest in TV ads or other channels that push your search volume up in Google and affiliates are coming in and taking that, you’re just paying twice for the same user. You’re getting more brand awareness — which is what you want — people search for you, and it’s the affiliate that comes up and sells the click back to you.

SEO is a longer-term strategy you want to do sustainably, so that you can eventually become equal to the affiliate sites in terms of link profile and then dominate your own brand.

 

How does this affect paid media and CPA?

It affects paid costs too. If you don’t control your organic footprint for the top results, you’re relying on paid search and paying Google Ads to protect your brand. If you plan in advance and invest probably a fraction of what you’d spend on Google Ads, you can protect that organically. Brand SEO isn’t as expensive as non-brand SEO — you’re not trying to rank for “casino”, you’re trying to rank for your own brand — so it’s pretty straightforward if you have a plan in place. It’s all about planning, and involving everyone in the decisions. Not doing stuff in silos. Making sure SEOs are on the same page as web developers. So much can go wrong when someone makes a small choice like editing a URL, and it screws up all your link building and internal linking. It’s high stakes for tiny errors.

You do get brands that get it right from the start, but a lot don’t. It comes down to decisions like picking the right platform, and speaking to your platform developers early, giving them your plan, and asking them to provide feedback on what they can do to make the whole process SEO-friendly. A good example: we’ve been doing this work for a new client and they went to their platform provider to ask if they could add a certain page — a reviews page — and the provider said no. But you need that page for SEO protection. You want to start protecting “brand name reviews” as a search term. If you’ve got nothing on your website that can rank for that, how can you protect it against affiliates creating reviews pages to capture that traffic? It’s important to work with your platform provider so they can do everything with SEO considered, rather than just saying no. They might be looking purely at UX, but there’s always a balance.

 

What should an operator’s ideal brand SERP look like?

Ideally you rank first, page one, for all your core brand terms, with site links so you take up a lot of page one real estate. Then you want things like Trustpilot ranking — it usually sits in second or third for brand terms. Ideally, you have good reviews there (a tricky one), and clicking through Trustpilot should lead back to your site. Then you’ve got social profiles ranking. If you’re a bigger brand, you could have a knowledge graph, and you could have AI overviews coming in too. You want to control as many assets as possible on page one. If affiliates want to snoop in and take traffic, you want them at least below the fifth or sixth result.

You also have to think about mobile — mobile real estate is a lot more shrunken down, so what actually fits at the very top matters. Google varies in how many results it shows per page. And in some cases you need to do this per country. An example we had earlier: a brand targeting several different countries but without the right international SEO setup. In that case we’re actually building micro sites in different languages to rank for branded terms. You want to secure the main domains per country, plus a few variations. It’s not going to cost a lot, but it’ll save you a lot of money long-term — because otherwise affiliates go and buy them. In some cases they don’t even drive the traffic back to you; they use your position and then send the traffic to another casino. Quite cheeky. It’s gambling — we’re working with what we’re working with.

 

Which core pages should every operator have for brand protection?

We have a brand protection audit we run. Off the top of my head: the homepage, a login/signup page (targeting “login”, “sign up”, “sign in” — big terms affiliates target, usually with a page showing screenshots and content explaining how to sign up), a reviews page, and then the different brand variations — brand + casino, brand + sportsbook, and country variations. Basically any variation of your brand plus something.

Then one of the really important ones: bonuses, promotions, casino welcome bonuses, cash back, anything to do with an offer. Affiliates do very well out of those terms. Another one is “legit” — is this casino legit? Is it safe? Those searches always come up, and even if you’re a new brand not getting volume for them now, you almost have to predict people will search for them in the future.

I remember an affiliate that used to rank second or third for multiple brands, titled something like “scam or not” — “is this casino a scam or not?” Very clickbaity. It worked really well, and I think it’s still going. So it’s not a scam — the affiliate is definitely not a scam, it’s a pretty good business model. Making someone rich.

 

How important are site links and internal linking architecture?

Super important for SEO in general, but especially for brand terms — if you can generate site links, you’re taking up two or three positions, and on mobile that’s enormous. You’re essentially protecting yourself very well. You achieve that with good structure, internal linking, and external links pointing to your key pages too.

External links can have a much better effect on certain parts of your website if your internal linking is right. If you’re creating content hubs or internally linking all the relevant pages together, links built to the folder have a better effect on all the pages underneath it. You could be pointing a lot of really good quality links to the root domain, but if your internal linking structure isn’t optimised, that equity isn’t trickling down to the deeper pages the right way. You’re just not getting the benefit.

What role do external links play in brand protection specifically?

Very important. Unless you’re in a market without many affiliates or you’re not really activating affiliates, then maybe not as critical — you can get away with a few links and rank for your brand. But if you are activating affiliates, you need to start investing in links ideally two to three months before launch, with a welcome page in place.

Links still absolutely move the needle. A lot of SEOs argue about how important links are, but they’re still vital for getting in there and staying there. And it’s the same with all these new search engines and LLMs — Gemini, the rest — they rely on backlinks too. That’s not going away.

Consider it as a digital footprint overall. Don’t just think of links as guest posts — think of links from all the right platforms and channels Google trusts: Web 2.0s, social channels, citation sites. A Wikipedia link is the gold standard — really hard to stick if you can get one. A lot of these links are free. It’s not so much raw SEO value — it’s that Google sees you, sees you’re listed on all these networks, and recognises you as a real brand. You tick a lot of boxes and take up positions on page one at the same time. Win-win.

What I say to new brands coming in — because it can be overwhelming when you tell them they need profiles on ten social sites, review sites, and citations — is we can just build out an initial profile so you have the presence. You don’t have to be active everywhere. That’s unrealistic. You might be active on one or two channels initially as a small team, or even as a big team. But if you have that initial profile ticking the boxes, down the line you can start becoming more active and plan a content strategy. And always link to your website and your socials — it’s easy to miss but it all filters through to your knowledge graph eventually.

Can operators realistically push affiliates down the SERP without starting a war?

Quite controversial, but yes — using the same methods. One thing we’ve seen recently, mainly from black hats, is parasite SEO — using Trustpilot, for example, to rank. Because it’s so effective and Trustpilot has a massive link profile, operators can do the same thing.

We’re doing this at the moment for a brand where, one or two months before they’d even launched, there were already parasite micro sites ranking for their own brand terms. The black hats had registered similar domains, built websites through tools like Claude (really simple AI-generated sites — which is crazy in itself), ranked them in positions one and two, and sent the traffic to rival casinos. So we’re actually doing the same for this client. We’re building up the main URL’s equity in Google through links and authority, but we’re also building a number of micro sites in a better way than what they’ve done — ranking them and pushing the black hats down.

You can do the same with socials, any site you can get a profile on, and as an extra — if you really want to push things down — you can start building links to those social profiles or Trustpilot pages and rank them even higher, displacing affiliates.

 

How do you prioritise brand protection against non-brand growth?

Always start with brand protection if you’re going heavy with affiliates. Then in the background you start building long-tail, finding a position in the market and a niche you can go in and own. Going in from day one and saying “we’re going to rank for sportsbook or sports betting” — it’s just not going to happen. You want to build that slowly. It also builds confidence: if you can drive growth through non-brand within the first year, you start building that channel and can justify bigger budgets and more link spend.

It’s about picking the right battles — something you can actually move the needle on, so the client buys in. Focus on a niche where you’ve spotted a gap you can own and build from there, unless you have a crazy budget (which a lot of people don’t).

 

Do operators need a separate link strategy for brand protection?

No — if you’re doing SEO, brand protection is part of the remit. You’ll take that off first and then move into non-brand. If you’re not planning on doing SEO, but you’re relying on affiliates, streamers, and people Googling your brand as your search volume grows, then yes — you do need a dedicated brand protection budget. It’s not going to be as expensive as a non-brand campaign, but you need something going in monthly. The more buzz you get around your brand, the more competition you’ll get for page one.

 

Should operators build links directly to brand pages?

Yes. Depending on the platform and the assets you have, you want to be protecting the core brand terms — brand + login, brand + review, brand + signup — and all the variations of subcategories like casino, live casino, roulette, blackjack, sportsbook, plus bonuses and cash back. If you don’t have branded pages in place for those, that’s something you need to build — otherwise someone will take the traffic.

 

Socials vs traditional SEO links — which carries more weight?

Both, everywhere. Everything Everywhere All At Once — that’s the answer. If you can. But as I said, you don’t need to be actively posting on every platform. It’s almost impossible for a new brand — you’re strapped for time, you’d need a team. You can have a plan where you build profiles on all the relevant sites, be active on one or two, and then focus your effort on link building. That gives you a nice balance.

 

What’s the fastest brand protection win you’ve seen?

One we’re doing right now. The main website hadn’t launched yet, and it was going to be heavy JavaScript — difficult for us to push changes through. So we built a micro site in plain HTML to rank and protect the brand before the main site even went live. It’s kind of crazy to be able to rank a plain HTML site like that, build links to it, and have an asset you can use forever. Smaller teams can move fast because you’re not running everything through layers of managers, building a case, and waiting for permission.

 

Should operators work with affiliates who are ranking for their brand?

You don’t want to annoy them too much if they’re also delivering non-brand traffic. You need guidelines in place — a lot of affiliate programs do. There’s a balance. In some cases there might not be a lot you can do, because the affiliate is also giving you good-converting non-brand traffic. In that case, brand protection is the job — don’t interfere too much with the affiliate, just indirectly push them down the SERP.

 

Is legal action or trademark enforcement ever worth it?

I’ve never been involved with that. It can take a while. I know black hats sometimes lodge DMCAs — that’s actually a black hat tactic too. Ideally I’d like to avoid legal routes and control things myself rather than going through a third party. It’s a last resort, and it also depends what country you’re in — trademark and copyright laws vary.

I’ve heard of situations with casinos ranking on page one for prominent terms where someone’s filed a DMCA, the site gets taken down, and by the time it’s back up they’ve lost a bunch of players — often at peak times. Very sneaky.

 

Can brand protection be overdone?

I don’t think so. Once you’re well protected, you can start investing into other things — but you still keep an eye on it with a rank tracker and maintain what you’ve built.

 

If an operator is losing brand SERPs right now, what’s step one?

Step one — get in touch with us. Kidding. You need to map out all the keywords and areas where you’re losing traffic to affiliates, then come up with a plan. Look at your technical side — make sure your website is actually indexed and found. Look at your content — are you missing key pages? And look at your links. Deal with it query by query: brand reviews, login, signup — have you got all those pages? Cover everything off, then build a plan for link equity and the other assets you need to protect against affiliates.

 

How long does proper brand protection SEO take?

Initially — when you haven’t activated affiliates yet — it can be quick. You could rank very well within a couple of weeks. The issue is when you activate affiliates and bigger sites with bigger profiles come into the space. At that point they might rank second with a better CTA than yours. I’d say invest in it for at least six to eight months to build up link equity, then evaluate and either renew or start investing in other areas.

 

One-off fix or ongoing strategy?

Ongoing strategy, especially if you’re growing and going into different markets. It’s ongoing until you reach a point where you have a decent enough link profile to protect you from affiliates outranking you. If you move into non-brand SEO after that, it just enhances the work and keeps building the profile. It used to be a one-off years ago — now there are too many sites that can outrank you on page one. You need it in place.

Good to catch up. We’ve got a few more episodes coming out soon with different guests to mix it up, so it’s not just the two of us. Thanks for tuning in — if you like the content, subscribe, it helps us grow the channel. It’s still in its infancy. Cheers.