iGaming SEO for affiliates in 2025

Last week I published an article in the Times of Malta called SEO in iGaming.

I know it got a lot of attention because I got a lot of DMs about it. 

I’ve also seen people talking about the article in group chats and I’ve had a few people reach out asking for SEO help direct. Sweet!

No, I’m not selling SEO consulting but I’ll gladly recommend some friends. 

What I do want is more newsletter subscribers, Affiliate BI podcast listeners and I’m always hoping to get more affiliates to check out StatsDrone which is an app I co-founded. 

Just a quick note that I'm building my Beehiiv newsletter if you want to join that here.

A quick shoutout to sponsors of this newsletter:

• StatsDrone.com you know to track your affiliate stats

• FTDx.io to earn revenue from non GEO optimized traffic

This week, I have just one agenda for this newsletter. Try to help set you up for success in SEO in 2025.

Actually that’s not true, I’m really trying to rank for a few more keywords related to ‘iGaming SEO’. LinkedIn Pulse is a great channel for ranking content and that is exactly what this newsletter is. 

Is this ranking method parasite SEO? I don’t think it is as I’m writing valuable content that will likely rank a long time and I’m not touching Times of India or Forbes for that matter. 

I’m taking everything I’ve learned about SEO this past year and combining some of the learnings I’ve had in interviewing some amazing SEO people. I also geek out on checking SEO data on Ahrefs quite a bit so maybe I have a problem here. 

If only you could doomscroll Ahrefs reports, that would be heaven. 

Here are the SEO topics I’ll cover in this newsletter. 

• Learning SEO

• Branding

• Product

• Google Search Console

• BoFU content & forums

• Video SEO

• Affiliate stats

• SEO conferences 2025

Learning SEO skills

There are 1000s of courses out there and I’m just going to give you only 2 resources to focus on.

1. Product-Led SEO book by Eli Schwartz 

2. IMG Courses

I’m going to give a very quick shoutout to IMG Courses which stands for Internet Marketing Gold. The site describes itself as the Netflix for SEOs. 

I know it is good because I’ve interviewed some of the SEOs there that teach some of the courses. 

SEO books

I started this year with a Facebook post asking what books do you recommend. 

Victor Karpenko immediately replied to read Product-Led SEO.

So I did what any SEO freak like me would do: read the book and asked Eli if he would join the podcast … and he did!

Product-Led SEO

Eli’s book is a timeless book on SEO. 

I personally think that the affiliates that are struggling with SEO would likely change their content, strategy and product if they read this book. 

Here is a quote from the podcast recording I did with Eli that should prove a point on product-led SEO.

Ps I’ll mention Steve Toth’s SEO Notebook newsletter below but quick shoutout for that. 

Branding

Branding is an important topic but I’m going to give it just a short shoutout here.

For me, branding is a sum of all of these components:

• Design

• Personal brand

• Quality product

You need all 3 of these things to work for branding to be effective. 

People buy from people and in the B2B space, this is more true than ever. I think this is just as true in affiliate marketing. If your content doesn’t have realness from an authoritative author, then your site is just another site. 

One person to follow as a branding expert is Martin Zarian.

Just look at his LinkedIn header as it says “do it nice or do it twice”. 

If your site could be made better in any capacity, you should be doing it. 

Product

So I just touched upon branding and gave a big shoutout to Eli Schwartz.

I did a previous newsletter talking about the role of product in affiliate marketing. I think is a worthy read because I think it is one of the most misunderstood roles in the world of business today. 

I’m going to talk about Steve Toth as a great example of a product. 

The Steve Toth playbook

I’m not sure if Steve Toth has an official playbook but what has worked well for him is something that can be applied to other affiliate sites.

Steve has seonotebook.com which is a high quality SEO newsletter. 

Steve publishes once a week and he puts in a lot of effort into it. 

Most newsletters don’t publish quality content, consistently. The same goes for podcasts and you could really argue the same when it comes to a website. 

Using Steve as an example, he’s a mix of personal branding, branding for a company and content marketing. He has built a big audience that he can sell any product he wants including his own. 

You can read one of my articles about newsletters as an asset class.

Google Search Console

Over the past year, there have been 2 people that have shared some insights about how too many SEOs overlook Google Search Console (GSC).

Those people are Kyle Roof and Karl Hudson.

Karl, in particular, is often sharing tips of how he uses GSC for technical SEO and making small SEO wins that compound over time. 

A few quick tips from them involve looking at any data related to the mobile experience of your site. You have Core Web Vitals as one means of knowing if your site or pages need a better experience for mobile users.

Another tip I got from Kyle Roof is to export your GSC data to look at the CTR which is your click through rate. If you have pages that seem to have decent impressions with a low CTR and perhaps keywords that are outside the top 3 for Position, then you’ve got some good optimization homework to do.

BoFU content & forums

Last year, I interviewed the Queen of B2B SaaS content, Lashay Lewis.

She advocates for the nuanced, bottom of funnel content that might have a lower volume of search traffic, but likely a higher conversion rate.

Sure enough, around this time is when Google started to punish the usual affiliate sites and forums like Reddit started blowing up. 

Despite the fact that almost all forum channels I look at are constantly increasing in search traffic, I see many sites standing still not growing at all. Read this article on how much forums have grown in the past year.

What are these people waiting for? 

Forums are a great way to get BoFu content going and best of all, it is the type of traffic that encourages people to signup to your site. 

Who doesn’t want to own their audience?

Well, I could showcase a list of sites very easily but I’ll try not to piss too many people off today. 

Video is the new SEO

Video today is now a mix of SEO as content but also for social media.

If you don’t believe me yet, your next restaurant recommendation is likely coming from YouTube, Tiktok or Reddit. We probably all agree we don't trust AI recommendations yet and those recommendations if they become accurate ... will come from real users at YouTube, Tiktok or Reddit.

LOL

I keep reading that social signals are likely observed by search engines like Google and for me I think it would make sense. 

A single authority site would have all the social media channels setup whereas someone building 1000s of PBNs at scale can’t possibly commit to making all of these channels. 

YouTube is still your go to source for more traffic but if you’re got YouTube rockin’, you can always pivot and cover other social media channels. 

Don’t believe me that video is everywhere?

I just opened up LinkedIn on my phone and this is what I get.

• Post by Allan Stone, text only, no image

• Promoted post

• Post by Cristian Florin Ionescu with image

• Video by Rodion Gusarov 

• Then Videos for you

1 day ago, I uploaded a video onto LinkedIn of a snippet of an interview with Richard Dennys.

This video had 54 likes, 12 comments, 2 reposts and 3823 impressions. Remember, this video is just under 2 minutes in length.

Want to know how much airtime the video got?

• 1,612 Video Views 

• 9h 42m 10s Watch time

Almost 10 hours and by end of today, it should surpass that.

Affiliate stats

What’s an affiliate marketing newsletter without a little bit of affiliate marketing?

Actually with StatsDrone, you can use a few different means for identifying the revenue on a single page. You can certainly ask Joe Hatch and Lynda Salem for help.

You can achieve this revenue data either by creating a unique campaign which you can use the Campaign Analysis in StatsDrone to find.

The other way is with a dynamic variable tracking link where you can see the click ID and follow all depositing players coming through that tracking link. 

Why should you track both affiliate revenue data and SEO data?

Simply put, you shouldn’t focus on the volume of traffic but the quality of traffic as well. 

A tool like StatsDrone as well as Google Analytics and Google Search Console should be the things you check daily to know if anything has decreased. 

It is possible to have increasing revenue but decreasing search traffic but the opposite is possible as well. Usually if search traffic drops, it will normally have a correlation with a drop in revenue as well. 

StatsDrone gives you daily stats to stay on top of all of this. 

SEO Conferences 2025

Last year, I finally went out of my way to do some SEO conferences outside of Affiliate Summit events and all the iGaming affiliate conferences.

The 2 events I attended this year were Brighton SEO and SEO IRL in Toronto, Canada.

I did meet some iGaming affiliates at both of these events and it makes me wonder how serious other iGaming affiliates are about SEO. That is the ones that are not attending.

That is, I would expect to see more of these affiliates attending but somehow I know they aren’t doing it. 

So here are a few SEO events on my radar for 2025:

• SEO Mastery Summit in Saigon

• Brighton SEO

• SEO IRL

• Chiang Mai SEO

• Ahrefs Evolve

There are more but I’m already looking at which events I will attend in 2025 and not just myself but some of my team members too. 

One more thing

So I hope that by sharing some of the insights of my SEO strategy for ranking for certain things like ‘iGaming SEO’ is giving you ideas.

If you want to help me rank this, just leave any good comment or question. I’ll reply back and this article might also rank very high.

Other strategies I would personally employ to push for ‘iGaming SEO’?

1. Build authority links pointing to this article and my Times of Malta article

2. Create at least one video on the topic of iGaming SEO

3. Create more of these pages on StatsDrone as well

4. Offer to publish these articles on other sites as well and ideally link to this LinkedIn Pulse article or the Times of Malta article

5. Forum content

Just a quick note that I'm building my Beehiiv newsletter if you want to join that here.

A quick shoutout to sponsors of this newsletter:

• StatsDrone.com you know to track your affiliate stats

• FTDx.io to earn revenue from non GEO optimized traffic

✌️