Why is Link Building for iGaming So Difficult?

iGaming represents one of the most lucrative – and most competitive – industries in which to gain visibility. The rewards for implementing a strong, creative and committed approach to link building are high, and any site not seeking to augment their backlink profile is sure to suffer from consistently low rankings as more and more brands ascend through the ranks.

iGaming is an infamously tricky industry for SEOs, with very few possessing the right level of experience to ensure strong results. But, when the basic principles of link building remain the same across the board, why is iGaming such a difficult a challenging subject to master?

Keyword Competition

Keywords pertaining to iGaming and online gambling constitute one of the most competitive markets on the internet today. The global online gambling market is expected to be worth around $94 billion, and with the tight restrictions limiting many traditional avenues for marketing, the fight for high visibility and authority on SERPs is incredibly tough.

Companies risk losing a great deal of time and money to link building campaigns that are not built upon longstanding, first-hand experience of the iGaming industry. iGaming Link building is an incredibly complex and frustrating exercise for those who do not know exactly what they are doing.

Blogger Outreach

Finding publishers with applicable, high authority sites is never a simple task – the time and resources required to build relationships with external sites are one of the main reasons so many sites continue to turn to PBNs and paid backlinks, despite the massive risks.

But the iGaming industry presents its own challenges; the list of relevant domains is whittled down further by the thorny moral issue of gambling, and some webmasters will reject any outreach that seeks to promote it.

Without the right level of expertise in this area, clients of inexperienced link building agencies will feel disappointed by the somewhat limited collection of sites used for obtaining backlinks.

There is, however, a rich and diverse market for iGaming link building – a convergence of authoritative and wide-reaching sites, and sites willing to link out to gambling-related content, while the selection of link building agencies with the right experience and industry know-how to source and build relationships with these sites is far more limited. The issue lies more in proficiency that it does in capacity.

Content Creation

The same benchmarks that apply to all high quality content created for any sites’ link building strategy apply to iGaming, but finding topics that are both relevant enough to your site to ensure that keywords assimilate within the piece, and general enough to interest as wide an audience as possible, can be extremely challenging.

Content needs to avoid topics that will deter webmasters and users by providing enough value to offset any trepidation; even if a webmaster is happy to build a link to your iGaming site, they may not wish for the content to be so fixated on the industry. Your writers may well need to be able to forge a circuitous route to the anchor text, via an appropriate topic. That route must exist – the anchor text cannot simply be dropped into the middle of the text – and it must be compelling enough to keep readers interested.

Link building for iGaming is challenging, but it is far from impossible. A creative, modern link building strategy devised by a dedicated link building agency with a strong and successful history within the industry offers the most viable prospect for any site unsatisfied with the obscurity of low rankings.