Casino SEO | How to Rank in The iGaming Industry (James Dooley Chats With Craig Campbell)

James Dooley: Casino SEO, how to rank in the iGaming industry.

It is one of the most competitive markets in the world. I'm joined with Craig Campbell, who is a huge iGaming consultant for some of the biggest casinos in the world. Craig Campbell, if someone owns an online casino and they are looking to improve rankings, take their business to another level, get more impressions, more clicks and, most importantly, more FTDs, how can an online casino improve rankings?

Craig Campbell: The ones I work with often have a lot of power. They have been casinos for a long time, so they might have DR75 or DR80 sites.

For me, with any of these, it comes down to where the shortfall is. Is it content? Is it virality? Is it something else? A lot of these sites have different pieces of the jigsaw missing. You need to establish whether you need to keep building links or PBNs. At that level, that is not always hugely important because they are already on page one. Virality has been a hot topic for years, but virality means different things depending on who is talking about it. We have all used tools like CTR Booster and other similar tools, but the technology they were built on is now detectable by Google. I know they have rebuilt it, but you still need proxies, logged-in accounts, Twitter accounts, fake personas and all that kind of stuff. It is hard to get scale. If virality is done properly, with all the other dots joined together, it works massively. No one can tell me it does not. A lot of these guys think they are doing virality, but they are not. Anyone can go out and use PropellerAds or something similar. That is not virality. That will kill you over a longer period. In a lot of cases, adding proper virality into the mix, on top of canonical abuse and everything else, is working really well. We see a lot of casinos, restaurant websites and other random sites ranking for casino terms. You also see the Trustpilot approach working for brandjacking certain people. All these things go into the mix. I think a lot of casinos are scared to take risks. I do not think Google really cares in that market because everyone is aggressive in that space.

James Dooley: If you are a casino operator, you need to be running multiple lanes.

If you do not want to do something on your branded site, then fine, do not do it. Even though you can get away with much more in the iGaming space than in most other markets, everyone else is aggressive. You have canonical abuse, 301s, subdomain tricks, mass link generation, blogroll links, restaurant expired domains and all sorts going on. I want to ask you some quick-fire questions. In certain markets, ranking is relatively easy and you do not need to do much. Parasite SEO. Is this a must alongside owning an online casino? Should operators be trying to get multiple parasite assets ranking for brand protection, such as casino name login or casino name reviews? Is parasite SEO a must in the casino market?

Craig Campbell: Absolutely.

Let's say I own Craig’s Casino and you think you can brandjack me using parasite SEO. You will do it and you will take some of my traffic. So why would I not do it? It is crazy not to. My job is to make sure you cannot quickly come in and steal some of my traffic. Trustpilot is working really well right now, and a lot of people are doing it and getting away with it. A bit of brand protection does not go amiss. If I can leverage parasites that are currently working, then why not? I would do the same to you if you were doing it to me.

James Dooley: My next question is about press releases, specifically for the casino market.

We have both done a lot of tests using press releases in different markets. They are brilliant for LLM seeding and influencing LLMs, especially Gemini overviews, Claude and Perplexity. As a casino consultant, do you recommend press releases for link volume, reputation and broader visibility?

Craig Campbell: Yes, absolutely.

Not even just for casino SEO. If you came to me tomorrow and said you had a new gardening business, I would recommend the same thing. It is an important part of getting brand mentions, trust signals and everything else out there. I am not saying press releases are massive needle movers or that you will fail at casino SEO without them, but they are an important part of the overall mix.

James Dooley: The next question is tier-two backlinks.

Let's say someone has a DR65 site and you say they do not need too many more links directly to the site. But they have 65 referring domains pointing to a page, with good dofollow links, and that page itself has no referring domains pointing to it. Would you recommend tier-two backlinks to power up that page?

Craig Campbell: Yes, and I would pump traffic at it as well.

I would pump traffic and tier that stuff up to give it fuel. Why would you not? It is like taking protein to help your body recover after training. You need fuel for the fire. If you are not doing it, the other guys definitely are.

James Dooley: I think that is huge, especially what you said about virality.

There are so many people pushing virality now. You mentioned PropellerAds before, like pop-under traffic. A lot of people are doing it through the Twitter redirect, the t.co redirect link. There are one or two other redirect links that work well too. But if you consistently do it directly to the money site, you can end up triggering Navboost negatively and hurting rankings long term. People see the instant boost within the Google leak. They might move from position seven to position one for 72 hours, then run it again and keep repeating it. After six or 12 weeks, they have sent so many under-two-second clicks to the website that the pop traffic creates a bad user experience and, long term, Navboost kills them. But you just said sending virality to guest posts or digital PR campaigns works like a treat because it acts like fuel on the fire.

Craig Campbell: You never want to put the casino at risk.

Just pumping and dumping traffic directly to their website does not make sense to me. People always ask what pages they should send CTR traffic to, the homepage or the landing page. Who says those are your only two options? I have my own way of doing things and you have your way of doing things. I feel that pumping traffic through those third-party assets helps massively. If links are getting traffic, ranking for terms and getting CTR themselves, then I assume Google is passing more value than it would through a guest post on a site that ranks for nothing. For me, it is about powering everything up. It is like taking protein after the gym. You are feeding the whole system, not just the person at the top.

James Dooley: I have a couple more.

Semantics and semantic SEO are big topics in the SEO community. Some online casinos ask whether they need to build topical authority or pay someone to create a semantic content network and map out every page. In casino, that could mean all the different slot games and game names, and there are thousands of them. Would you recommend building out every single one, or would you only select the ones with search volume? What are your thoughts on topical authority in the casino space?

Craig Campbell: It is always going to be debated.

You can see restaurant websites ranking easily in casino. But building out every single slot game that will not make money does not make sense. I would definitely implement it for the ones with search volume or the pages that create traffic. Even if Google does not care too much about topical authority in that niche right now, it probably will at some point. I would rather have it in place. It might only give you a 3% increase now, but when an update comes out in six months and more weight is placed on it, you could see a big jump. Google is always dialling things up and down. CTR or traffic signals might be weighted heavily now, then dialled down later while something else gets more weight. I am always thinking ahead. Some people argue that Google clearly does not care about topical authority when restaurant sites are ranking for casino terms, and I understand that argument. But at some point, they will have to care. I would rather have it ready.

James Dooley: I also like that topical authority gives you more places to build links directly to or send virality through.

Those pages can then internally link to your main money pages. The last one is technical SEO. Some people brand themselves as casino SEO experts, then run a Screaming Frog audit and talk about Core Web Vitals. I understand crawlability matters, removing 404s matters and Google needs to crawl the site efficiently. Starting with Core Web Vitals, how important is technical SEO for casino SEO? Is it the number one ranking factor?

Craig Campbell: I would not say it is the number one ranking factor.

When you are dealing with an operator, a lot of the speed, structure and setup is not something you can easily control. It is not a basic HTML or WordPress website. There is so much going on in the background that it is not always possible to implement everything you would want. The casino I am currently working with is getting a whole new system because the current platform is around 10 years old. We know it is slow and sluggish. We know it could be better. We know the bigger casinos have better platforms. We need to develop that side of it. Is it the be-all and end-all for rankings? No. We are still performing, but we know the user experience could be better. Some landing pages are probably at the lower end for conversion rate, which is likely true for a lot of casinos. A better platform gives us more ability to be creative and do things that work in our favour. But I do not think technical SEO is the biggest factor because everyone in the space is constrained by things they cannot control. I would not go out and pay £20,000 for an audit for a casino. There are certain things you can and cannot do, and that is just the nature of the game.

James Dooley: What about schema for online casinos?

Is that an important SEO strategy?

Craig Campbell: Again, it comes down to the cost of implementation and which pages you implement it on.

I have never been a huge fan of schema. You could argue that it helps, especially now in the AI era, because it helps LLMs and search engines understand your website. Previously, I felt it was a lot of work without much reward. But going forward with LLMs and AI search, we need to think ahead. I would definitely consider it more now than I would have over the past five years. I would implement it now.

James Dooley: What about internal links for online casinos?

Is that an important SEO strategy?

Craig Campbell: Yes.

James Dooley: Are you looking at click depth, how many clicks pages are from the homepage, server logs, crawlability or whether sections need more internal or external links?

Craig Campbell: The casino I work with does not want to focus too much on sportsbook anymore.

They know slots and casino products are where the big money is. Casino websites can have loads of game-specific pages, sports pages and slot pages. Internal linking is a great way to pass power to good quality relevant pages that are there permanently. But there are certain pages you simply do not focus on. Internal linking is important whether it is iGaming or not. It helps keep pages in the index and passes power around the site. But with casinos, there are hundreds of slots, hundreds of other games and sportsbook pages. You need to apply the 80/20 rule. Twenty percent of your pages bring in 80% of the traffic. Implement internal linking on the pages that make money and double down on those.

James Dooley: What I love about your casino SEO advice is that it comes back to doing all the things.

Get the 1% wins across the board because everything compounds. Do not just worry about what is working today. There could be an algorithm update next week that gives more weight to schema, internal links, click depth, CTR or something else. Some things matter more than others, but the casino advice is to do everything holistically and let it compound.

Craig Campbell: Every casino that comes to me is looking for those small things.

They want to know what competitors are doing that they are not. Is it canonical abuse? Is it schema? Is it virality? Sometimes that is the difference between success and failure. I want to make sure we are ticking every box. People hear everyone talking about virality and say they do not do it. But they are missing a trick. That might be the only piece of the jigsaw they are missing. They might already have schema, content, links and everything else. Adding virality could move them up another notch. Going up a couple of positions can be the difference between £10 million or £20 million in revenue per year. It is always the small things because most casinos have been around for years and already have a lot of things implemented. They are usually missing the canonical stuff, virality or another specific piece.

James Dooley: If you are an online casino operator and you liked this video about SEO advice, leave a comment in the comment section.

Ask any questions you have about DMCA takedowns, negative SEO attacks or anything else around casino SEO. Craig Campbell, it has been an absolute pleasure.

Craig Campbell: Cheers.