SEO: In-play betting search on the rise as Euros near
Adverts encouraging punters to bet in-play are now common place, particularly when there’s a football game on the TV. This week Blueclaw take a look at the searches around “in-play” and “live odds”.
In-play betting has evolved massively since its emergence 10-15 years ago, with many operators now offering myriad in-running markets to attract punters and increase volume.
Looking at the Google Trends data, we can see just how much interest has increased over the past few years.
Analysing several variations of “in-play” and “live” phrases, it’s easy to see that there has been a considerable rise in search interest, the most notable being around the “live bet” phrase, indicated by the red line.
The peaks in interest tend to come towards the end of the football season, and also during the summer months when a major football tournament is taking place, such as Euro 2016 kicking off next week.
As a result, in-play tips is an area which affiliates should be looking to break into with Euro 2016 just around the corner.
Of course, there are a couple of drawbacks to this, one of which being if you are working full-time alongside your affiliate work, you may not have the time to dedicate to watching every minute of every game.
However, if you put tips up for games you are watching, other people are likely to be watching them too – take the England matches for example.
The other issue to be aware of is that you are likely to need an already active audience who visit your site on a regular basis, as it will be hard to get your tips found in a competitive market.
You also need your audience to be sharing your content in order to attract new sign-ups. This could mean that ’in-play tips’ are more likely to be better suited to established affiliates with a solid social following.
With the trends peaking towards the end of the football season and during international tournaments, we would expect to see the top in-play keywords to be heavily influenced by “football”.
Indeed, there are a number of football terms included, as highlighted in blue. There are also instances where football is included with the name of an operator. These phrases, along with other ‘branded terms’ which specify a particular operator, are highlighted in yellow.
As expected, Sky Bet and Bet365 are the two which appear the most often, with William Hill, Ladbrokes, Paddy Power, Coral and Bwin also featuring in the top searched phrases.
These branded terms could indicate a brand preference, which may come as a result of the searcher being an existing customer, or they may have been influenced by other marketing channels.
Overall, in-play betting is now very popular and there’s no sign of it stopping anytime soon. With the popularity of mobile betting, where punters can access their accounts and place bets wherever and whenver they feel like it, and with the emergence of other verticals such as esports, which opens up a whole new opportunity for in-play betting, searches for ‘in-play’ and ‘live odds’ keywords will continue growing.