When it comes to ensuring that your platform is reaching the right audience, search engine optimisation is king. That’s according to Anna Loiko, SoftSwiss online casino platform product owner, who highlighted the ways in which SoftSwiss is supporting its clients in boosting their website ranking.
For those new to the concept of website ranking, SEO is the practice of writing and altering content to improve site ranking in search engines. To rank sites, search engines like Google and Bing crawl and index the web to deliver results to queries from users searching the internet.
But why is this so important? Well, data has shown that approximately 90 per cent of online experiences begin with a search engine, while the top three Google search results account for 75 per cent of all clicks. So of course, ranking high has its benefits.
At SoftSwiss, we deploy a mixture of tips and tricks to ensure that our online casino clients appear at the top of search engine results. Let’s start off with some of the basics, which are the minimal must-haves in terms of SEO optimisation, which should be used on every project.
Meta titles, meta descriptions and headers
A meta title, which can sometimes be referred to as the title tag, is the title of the page. This tag appears in a browser tab and is often displayed as the page title in search engine results.
A meta description is designed to create a short description of the page; In search results, it is often displayed in the page description (snippet). Meanwhile the headers – which are probably the most self explanatory – are an organisational tool that guides your website visitors through your web content. Headers tell both search engines and website visitors what the content of pages will be about.
What’s the purpose of these? One of the most difficult tasks for search engines is to understand your web page’s contents. So search engines use headers, description tags and meta titles to find out a little bit more about your website.
At SoftSwiss, our platform enables clients to use unique tags on all pages and configure tag templates for the ‘Games’ and ‘Game providers’ pages which we believe can help encourage players to visit their site, thus directly impacting their search engine rankings.
Internal linking, Hreflang and XML Sitemap
One key SEO tool to use is internal linking. Used as a way of directing traffic to other pages within the same site, internal links can help users navigate a platform with ease, as well as determine the hierarchy and structure of the site.
On our platform we can add internal links to text, site menus and within the end-to-end block in the footer of your page as well as links to other games.
When used correctly, internal links can help search engines to crawl your site while also helping to distribute the link weight to more important pages. As a result, this can also help drive traffic and improve overall page ranking.
Meanwhile Hreflang is an attribute interpreted by search engines used to clarify the lingual and geographical targeting of a website.
When might you use this? Hreflang can come in handy when you’re wanting to specify alternate language versions of your page. If you do not use Hreflang, then the pages can be considered duplicates and Google will index one thing – which is something you don’t want. As you can imagine, this tool is a must-have for those online casinos with more than one locale.
Looking at your XML Sitemap, we allow our clients to create individual sitemap.xml files for each separate region, provider pages and game pages.
This means that search engines can crawl each individual page quickly – even if their internal linking isn’t perfect. Through these roadmaps, we can enhance the ranking of our customers’ websites, help search engines to gain a better understanding of website structure while also making sure that content is discovered even faster.
GTM and PWA
Now onto the more advanced SEO tools. GTM is a system for managing JavaScript and HTML tags (code fragments) without the help of developers.
By using GTM, our online casino clients can add analytics services, tools for A/B testing, online chats and content substitution. By using the SoftSwiss platform, online casinos have an easy way to connect GTM – they can add GTM ID to a ‘special place’, meaning they can send GTM / GA events such as sign up / sign in, deposit / cashout, and so on.
Progressive Web App (PWA) is a technology in web development that visually and functionally transforms a website into an application. As you can imagine, this can provide a unique user experience which will help drive traffic to your site.
As it is able to be installed on both desktop and mobile, this is available for casinos with the SoftSwiss front-end only and can be used to increase player conversion and lifetime value indicators.
