Before gambling, I was engaged in client SEO for a long time, and at the first interest of working in the field of online gambling - felt like a blind kitten. What to do, where to start, what features should be considered? - search engines did not give exact answers to such questions, and profile chats poured drops of information.
Short gambling work plan:
The online gambling market continues to grow rapidly, more and more individual specialists and teams are moving from pure client SEO «to the side of evil» (to iGaming, Adalt and similar topics). This begs the question: where to start? Next, I will break down in detail the basics of how an SEO specialist or SEO-team, who are skilled in client site promotion, to start working on online gambling (sports betting and online casinos), I will tell about the general structure of SEO work in gambling and try to answer the main questions that arise from beginners.
And I will start, perhaps, with one of the most worrying issues - legislation, liability, risks.
Many people are afraid to start working on the so-called «gray/dark» topics, as it is prohibited in our country (Russian Federation, many CIS countries). But it should be understood that you are not obliged to work under the traffic of your country. There are many countries in the world where there are a lot of players, and also enough countries where online gambling is either legalized or not regulated in any way. That is, there are a number of countries under which you can safely make online casino or sports betting sites, promote these sites in Google, get a percentage of the players brought, and at the same time, you do not violate any laws.
I can give you a couple of tips from myself:
The very beginning of the beginning is market analytics. Before you make a site, you need to determine what market you enter, what kind of site to make, what features of the population must be taken into account. That is, it is necessary to analyze and decide what exactly you will do, what kind of site.
There are many countries where gambling is quite developed and has moved to the online environment, there are many countries where the majority of the population lives below the poverty line, there are countries where gambling activities are strictly prohibited. All these nuances should be taken into account before trying to enter the market of a particular country.
To select the country you want, you can use information from country section.
Which ones to choose launch countries newcomer:
Difficult countries for beginners to start with NOT recommended:
Tips:
Have you decided on a GEO? Don't rush, let's also weigh in addition information on affiliates. For example, if you decide to make a branded site, you definitely need to see in advance whether this affiliate accepts branded traffic (otherwise you'll have to look for someone to dump cross-branded traffic). To see affiliates that accept traffic from the desired GEO, as well as to see other detailed information, you can go to affiliate program section (use filters).
What to pay attention to when analyzing:
p.s: If you have decided on the GEO and chosen a potential partner for cooperation - do not hurry to register, you have neither a site nor traffic to show them something to work together.
In gambling, three types of sites usually work: branded, casino/bookmaker reviewer, slots. Either a combination of the above.
Most newcomers want to do something big, «high-quality», as they think «useful and profitable» and take up a review right away (I'm one of them). But with time they realize that this is more for those who have a lot of extra money and simply have nothing else to do. That's why you have to start (and most often stay) on small pages.
So, we've decided, we're doing small-page pages for brands and games. This does not mean that you need to make just brand copy or stupidly write a review about the brand/game in a large text portmanteau. It's more important to go deep into analyzing semantics and competitors. There are a lot of players and not everyone is looking for «online casino to play». Queries can be quite different and you can look for clusters that have little competition in the search engine.
It is important to «build up your hand» at the start, so be prepared to do a lot and often. If you have chosen a country, you should not plan to launch one site. You make one site, refine its structure and internal optimization - use the first site as a template and scale it up. Make a dozen sites for one cluster of queries - maybe one will shoot up.
Do it:
Don't even think about doing:
Tips:
You have chosen a GEO, made sites, began to receive traffic - what to do with it? Ideally, of course, send to the affiliate program of the brand itself, under which the site was made (if it is under the brand, not under the slot). This will affect the conversion rate.
But many affiliate programs either don't accept their branded traffic or accept it at a reduced rate.
If you do not want to pour traffic to the target brand or do not accept branded traffic - then you need to choose an affiliate program that will accept cross-branded traffic (traffic of other people's brands). As practice shows, this type of traffic is worse converted to another brand, but not so much to suffer from it (you will have to experiment). It is important that the second affiliate payments worked well for your GEO (country) and the support could work in the local language of the country.
The domain is the name of the website. It is easiest to start with a domain in the zone .com, The ideal is to have a domain name in the domain zone of the target country (e.g. for the UK it is .uk, for France .fr, etc.). Ideally, of course, to have a domain name in the domain zone of the target country (for example, for the UK is .uk, for France .fr, etc.), but it is not always possible to do this, as some domain zones are prohibited to register for various reasons. Therefore, I recommend to register a new domain or buy at auction in the domain zone .com.
Definitely use a drop domain as a priority. Ideally, intercept a vacant one with good characteristics. Find a good drop domain is quite difficult, and auction options sometimes grow to prohibitive prices. But «the game is worth the candle.
When using newrega (new domain) get ready that the first six months, or even a year, you may not receive positions and traffic, as young sites are in the «sandbox» of search engines.
Since you plan to work with online gambling, you need an abusive hosting that will not shut down your servers at the request of lawmakers from the working GEO.
I worked with the.hosting, virtual servers in the Netherlands. Also hosted sites on virtual servers in Brazil and Japan - more than 3 years everything was fine, but recently the company's policy changed and now when you get an abuza (complaint) you just disconnect the server.
Personally, I'm using hosting right now Zoмroo.
Whatever type of site you choose, to compose its structure you need to understand what people are looking for. Therefore, you need to collect semantics (a list of key queries for which people are looking for information in search engines). The easiest - look wordstat Yandex, but it does not show requests with the word «casino», so the data will not be complete. Well, of course, the Yandex service shows statistics on the CIS.
And for Google and foreign countries you need other services that already cost money. Personally, I use the service AlsoAsked (it does a great job collecting the most popular issues, free to check 3 brands per day), as well as Ahrefs and SemRush (I charge limited rates through a co-buying service GroupbuySEO).
The domain name is registered, hosting for the site is selected and purchased, you can move on to the development of the site.
Whatever type of site you choose, I recommend doing on the engine WordPress (easy enough to handle, flexible due to a variety of plugins).
It is important that the code structure of the site complies with the standards and that your site loads very quickly. The main traffic you will have from cell phones, in addition, in some countries may be 3G and low internet speeds, so the «weight» of the page and its loading speed is very important. It is necessary to choose fast enough themes, for example Reboot from WpShop.
And you can also download a free template (or use the ones that come default when you install WP) to run a blank site of the type you want:
You can buy a good template here: https://themeforest.net/ (search for the topic by tag Responsive - adaptive).
What to do on the site, what structure to create, what pages, how much text? - Competitor analytics will help you answer these questions. Take a few of the most «fat» queries you want to promote your site on, and look at the Google output for the country you need. Look through the sites of competitors, collect a list of what they have, what pages, what modules, what tables, counters, buttons, etc. When developing your site - rely on competitors' sites.
Let's start by installing the CMS and the necessary plugins.
The main task when developing a website for a particular brand of online casino or bookmaker - to make the most informative homepage. Therefore, here is a list of the main blocks of content that (ideally) should be made on the main page of the site.
The homepage of the site should answer all possible user questions as much as possible - closing the intent as much as possible.
You should also think about dynamic data. Search engines give preference to the relevance of data, so it makes sense to either manually update the information periodically and record the date of changes. Or dynamically display today's date in the form of «Data is current as of ...». And it is worth thinking deeper - for example, to make a table with limits on withdrawal of funds and monetary limits to display dynamically with a link to the exchange rate of local currency, in connection with which the data in the table will change daily (show the current limits).
If you have been as responsible as possible to create the main page of the site - then, we can say that 80% of the site is already realized and now you can move on to the next site/copy. But if you want to develop the site even more deeply (and if your competitors also have more than one page), then I recommend you to work on the development of the following pages:
At the bottom of the site, you need to put information:
If you find some game under some country that you want to make a site for, make sure you read on this article. In brief:
If you want to make different languages for one brand, there are two ways to go:
Which one is better and more correct is hard to say. But if you have the opportunity to register a local domain for the necessary country (for example, for Brazil it is .br or com.br), then it makes sense to make a separate site for each country.
If you want to take a more economical way - then make a subfolder for each language (for example, the main site in English, and the version for Brazil will be in the subfolder /pt-br/). That would not buy additional plugins translation sites, you can go a fairly simple way - cloning the site, and the versions in subfolders to implement through the official mode of WordPress, which is called multisite. In essence, you will have one admin, which will manage different sites (copies of the main site), each of which will be placed in a separate subfolder. The sites can use the same template, the same database, but each site has its own content tables in the database.
You can use the plugin to link sites to each other Multisite Language Switcher. It will also add a language switch.
Developing a website and filling it with content is not a difficult thing to do. The next thing to do is to make a number of improvements that will help your site get closer to your competitors, and maybe even surpass them.
Be sure to review your list of basic internal optimization tasks and implement everything you can if possible.
As soon as the site is fully filled and all internal links are working, we open it for indexing. Then follows the stage of linkbuilding - building up the link mass. Your site needs a good kick in the eyes of search engines, and they love it when the site refers to a lot of quality links from other sites.
Gambling is a shaky topic, many of the usual link exchanges send our sites far away, but still there are some platforms where you can buy links to gambling sites.
In buying links, it is important to understand one thing in advance - it will not be cheap. You either buy (and these are not small sums) good links from someone, or spend a lot of time to establish these links yourself. How is it independently? - Yes, at least register on different forums in the country you want and communicate on them, and then accidentally so in response to some topic to leave a couple of links to your project, hoping not to be blocked. If the link is not just «just to be», but organically integrated into the topic of communication, there is a high probability that it will not be blocked, and your profile with it.
There was a question from a reader, where exactly to buy links for a particular country, as in exchanges links to the desired GEO may be almost not? - It is not necessary to look for links from sites of only one country, under which you are promoting your project. More important is the quality of the site (donor). For example, if you make a site for Brazil, it will be no big deal if you buy links from different English-speaking sites.
Your site is launched, its structure and content is not inferior to your competitors, the domain is newreg or drop (as well as competitors), you bought or put links yourself. Next, we go back to analytics again. Think about what exactly users want to see on their search queries? - Give them that on your site. For example, add a table with deposit or withdrawal methods if your competitors don't have it. Create a page with bonuses and describe all the details in great detail: what is the essence of the bonus, how to get it, what are the restrictions, how much wagering, etc.
Add useful content to the site, which helps in solving different problems of visitors.
Make your site more convenient and more informative than your competitors. And also do not forget about the speed of site loading, adaptability for mobile devices, and in general do not forget about the internal optimization, which I've mentioned before.
...better not only in terms of content, usability and structure, but also in terms of link mass. Increasing the number of links to the site is one of the main tasks in the work about SEO in this area.
To track the dynamics of your site - you need to keep track of positions in the search engine. I take positions with the help of the service topvisor.com - quite convenient service with democratic prices.
Got one site up and running? - start the next one. You want to make a copy of this site on another GEO, and you want to take another brand or slot. But the goal is the same: more sites made - more chances that at least some of them «shoot». Even if you «polish» to perfection one site - it does not mean that it will be successful. Search engines - ladies capricious, and running dozens of identical sites - traffic can start to bring a couple of sites, and may not even one. On the other hand: you may be among the lucky ones who made a couple of sites and both became profitable. But I still recommend:
Now we consider the promotion of gambling sites purely under Google. After launching a new site, its indexing, the search engine reads the information and gives your site visibility on target queries. So to speak it needs to check how much your site is good. Usually it looks like a sharp spike in visibility (look at the Google Search Console) and some traffic to the site starts. Rejoice early, your site is being checked. But there are other situations: smooth growth of visibility and traffic, or «dead» silence in general.
What to do with such sites? There are basically three options here:
For more insight into what happens to projects over the course of a year in different GEOs and under different influences - here are the following examples with screenshots from my practice:
Branded site under online casino, country Colombia. After startup, it jumped to life, then went down, and so three times, until completely zeroed out. With the project did not do anything after the launch, not a single link is not bought. The domain is fresh newreg (.com), content AI.
Slots catalog, multi-language, main under Brazil. Domain fresh newreg (.info), AI content. From the start minimal performance, then zero, after a while a little revitalization. As a result, slightly changed the content of the main page and changed the main language from Portuguese (Brazil) to English (in the picture this moment is marked with a red line). After a while the site has significantly revitalized. Not a single link has been bought.
Branded site for online casinos, multi-lingual for a large number of countries. Main language is English. Domain fresh newreg (.top), content AI. During the year of stable slow growth. Not a single link is not bought. The main traffic is from Indonesia. The yellow line indicates a drop in traffic, presumably due to the Google update in April 2025 (shook a huge number of different sites, particularly branded sites).
Another branded multi-lingual project. Here the situation is a little different, but decided that it will also be useful to take into account in some moments of work. Very good growth of the project, not a single link was not bought. But one of the servers was hacked (on which this site was lying), and backup was not made. As a result, it was decided to restore the site on the web archive (with the help of archivarix). The red bar marks the approximate startup time of the restored project. In the future, the miracle did not happen, the restored project did not like Googl's. I keep watching, in case a miracle happens. But for the future - I will try to avoid restoring projects from the web archive (and, of course, make backups). The domain is fresh newreg (.com), AI content.
Slots Catalog, Japan. First experience on this country. Site launched on an interesting drop (.jp), no negative history, with a couple of government links. Content AI. As a result, a sharp increase in low-frequency queries and then a gradual decline in visibility to zero. I did not buy links, the project was mostly a test project, so I did not do anything else on it.
Branded site under online casino, country Azerbaijan. The domain is fresh newreg in .com, AI content. Situation as described in the quote above - the site got increased visibility and traffic, but after a while went to zero. For a long time it just lay there (continued to work). The blue bar marks the moment of gluing. I bought an old Azerbaijani drop in the zone .com, almost without indicators and which was previously used for some garbage with Asian characters. Basically a couple of links and some history, no more value in the drop. But surprisingly it gave a boost to the site and a slow increase in visibility. No links had been bought previously. About February 2025 bought links, but no tangible impact on the site yet.
Branded site under online casino, country Mali. Domain fresh newreg (.com), AI content. Right from the start got visibility, which gradually decreased. I didn't buy any links. The project went to zero. Did nothing and now it has revived and continues to grow. Apparently it survived the «sandbox».
Branded site under online casino, country Peru. Domain fresh novoreg (.com), AI content. Similar to the previous project - sharp growth, then a drop. After some time again growth. Again, most likely the «sandbox» is passed.
Any questions? - write below in the comments or on Telegram. And I will write answers to them here, below:
An EMD (Exact Match Domain) is a domain that has your main keyword query or brand in its name. This significantly increases your chances of getting the best positions in the search engine for your target queries.
I recommend starting with a brandovik - a site for some online casino or bookmaker. As practice shows - such sites are easier to promote to the top than a game site.
But of course, a lot depends on GEO, competition, game popularity and brand.
Prices for one project under Burge.
Domain in .com zone - from 15 Euro per year.
Virtual server hosting (minimal, in the Netherlands): about 6-7 Euros per month.
Chat GPT (for writing texts) for a month - from 15 Euro per month.
Site engine, installation, customization, code edits - on your own, 0 Euro.
This is the bare minimum you need to start. Buy a domain, buy hosting to host the site, write texts and post to the site = about 23 Euros (2400 rubles) per month.
You can place links to the site at the very beginning by yourself, read the section about linkbuilding.
The essence of the question is that a person does not understand why the made site will appear in the search of the target country, what affects this? I can emphasize two main points:
1. The site should be translated into the main, official language of the target country
2. In the text of the site, headings, title, description, mention the name of the desired country
Additionally (if possible) you can buy a domain in the country's domain zone. For example, for Russia it is .ru, for Brazil .com.br or just .br, etc. This is an additional sign for search engines about the belonging of the site. Also will be a good plus to the ranking of the site.
If you're really frozen, you can take a server on hosting in the same country for which you make the site.
Nowadays there are no problems with paying for hosting in crypto, many hosting companies accept crypto. There are even those who except crypto do not accept anything, and it is not known where their representatives are in the world. You can learn more about hosting at this article.
If we are talking about buying domains in cryptocurrency, this information can be found here on the drops and domains page.
Choosing an abyssal hosting for online gambling sites, detailed review, characteristics of web hosts, choosing the right hosting for online casino sites
AffGate.com — независимая аналитическая платформа по iGaming, SEO и digital-маркетингу.
We collect data from official sources, structure information about markets, companies and technologies, and make the industry more transparent and understandable for professionals.
AffGate.com не является онлайн-казино и не предоставляет доступ к азартным играм. Вся информация доступна исключительно в образовательных и аналитических целях.
© 2024–2026 AffGate.com
