The Founder of Semantist.ru Dmitriy Shevtsov in an Interview With RGW 2021: SEO Trends and the Peculiarities of Gambling Websites Semantics

11.03.2021

What are some of the top search engine marketing trends in 2021? How many queries can the semantic kernel of a gambling website contain? What mistakes should be avoided when creating the architecture of an online resource and what role does content play in promoting betting websites? Dmitriy Shevtsov, the founder of Semantist.ru told about this in an interview with Russian Gaming Week 2021.

Dmitriy is an online marketing and advertising specialist with many years of experience. Founder of the Semantist.ru company that provides complete website semantics assembling services. He is the author of a unique methodology for clustering semantics and specialized courses.

Read more about the important aspects of promoting resources in the segments of gambling and betting in the interview below.

The interviewer: Russian Gaming Week (RGW)

The respondent: Dmitriy Shevtsov (D.S.)

RGW: What are the current trends in search engine marketing?

D.S.: Trends in SEO are dictated by Google policy in the world and by Yandex in Russia. Let's highlight three main ones:

Transferring content to search engines to speed up its display to the end user and as a result – simplifying content formats (Google AMP and Yandex turbo pages).
Increasing the requirements for expertise, authority and the degree of trust to the content according to the E-A-T algorithm (expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness).
Control of legality. The improvement of the algorithms for removing links to websites that violate the law (by court decision) from the search results, as well as links to copies of such websites (the list of copies in Russia is provided by the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications). In Russia, these are laws No. 149 and No. 156.

RGW: How difficult is it to successfully promote online gambling resources in 2021?

D.S.: Someone says that gambling is dying: payouts are decreasing and restrictions are getting tougher. Promotion in gambling is becoming more difficult and technologically advanced every year, but I would not rush to bury the industry.

The situation with the gambling panic resembles the situation with websites SEO. Along with the appearance of Yandex and Google search engines in 1997-1998, the business had a need to be found in these search engines. As a result, smart guys appeared who promoted the website to top for the right queries – and everyone was happy. But every month, a new technological search algorithm appeared, which threw websites from the first to the 100th place.

The first optimization consisted in typing of the phrase "BUY A SOFA IN MOSCOW" 100 or more times. If the website lifted, then it was necessary to type "BUY A SOFA IN MOSCOW" 200 times. If this did not help, then the guys came up with a new way to get to top. Every year it seemed like there was nothing else – the search won, there were rumors that SEO was dead. More than 20 years have passed, but SEO services still exist: the business is ready to pay, and the specialists are ready to promote it to the top.

Looking ahead, SEO services have not disappeared in the Western market, they have become more transparent and understandable for the customer. In my opinion, as long as the players have a desire to gamble, the market will live and, possibly, even develop. It will change.

RGW: What nuances are key for assembling the semantic kernel of a highly specialized website that highlights the topic of gambling?

D.S.: Kernel assembling needs lack of mistakes and correct target audience for which the project is being created. In addition, it is important to separate all semantics into types to simplify further work on the website. Queries can be categorized into four types based on the user needs:

Type 1. A person wants to play immediately: play {name of the game}, {name of the game} play, online {game}, etc.
Type 2. A person wants to learn before playing: rules {game}, strategy {game}, secrets {game}, etc.
Type 3. A person wants to play for free: play {name of the game} for free, etc. This is a colder audience – before the game you need to them warm up, add special offers.
Type 4. Informational queries. Game-related needs of gamblers.

RGW: How many keywords on average should there be in the semantic kernel of a website in gambling or betting topics?

D.S.: Since each individual project has its own characteristics and priority segments for the business model, it will not work to name a universal figure for the number of queries. Details are needed. We can only name the orders of the four types that we identified above.

For example, in the first two (playing and educational types) semantics contains several thousand queries depending on the game range. In the third type (free queries), the amount of semantics is significantly greater. And when it comes to informational queries, similar to the media and aggregators, the semantics has a volume of more than 100,000 phrases. If we are talking about all the key phrases that can be downloaded from the statistics counters of the sports portal, then their number exceeds 50 million phrases.

The closer queries are to money and the shorter the customer journey to payment, the lower the number of queries and the higher the competition. The more mediated the queries, the greater their number. Informational queries do not mean bad. These are queries that you need to work with through the fence of contacts and multi-layer warm-up.

RGW: What criteria can be used to determine that website semantic kernel is built incorrectly?

D.S.: I will name five main signs that you have bad semantics:

Few queries. Semantics less than 1000 phrases or less than 10,000 phrases for an informational portal.
The following is not taken into account: can two queries be promoted on one page or two separate ones are needed?
Inappropriate queries for which there are no offers.
The semantics contains stop words.
The presence of a large number of phrases with zero popularity.

RGW: What mistakes should be avoided when designing a website architecture?

D.S.: When the architecture of the website is created irrelevant to SEO technology and semantics, but on the basis of three common erroneous judgments:

The coder sees it that way. If a coder is asked which structure is better, in his opinion, he will answer: the one that is already in the database, so as not to rewrite anything. In this case, search demand is not taken into account. As a result, we saw trillions of URLs for indexing, of which about 2000 are interesting for search. As a result, there will be no large traffic from search to the website.
The structure of the affiliate program. If we automatically generate filters and selection of offers from the affiliate network without controlling the frequency and popularity of these combinations of filters, we will again get arrays of pages that will not be taken into the index by the search engine and will drop out as a low-quality page or due to the absence of search queries.
Copied from a competitor. You can see good solutions from competitors, but it is not always possible to uncover the entire technology – the tip of the iceberg is visible, and the remaining 80% of the technology is hidden. It's a mistake to copy everything from a competitor without adapting to your business model and marginality.

The only correct solution for collecting maximum traffic will be to build an architecture from user search queries.

RGW: What is the role of content in promoting betting resources?

D.S.: Content plays a decisive role. I'm talking about the essence of the page, for which the user comes. Around this kernel there is a binding in the form of technical meta tags, headings, texts, pictures, videos. Without this beautiful frame, the content itself will not be loved by search engines and it will not collect the traffic that its creator is counting on. Perfect plan: content with competent technical binding.

RGW: How does the legislative regulation of gambling affect the promotion of online gambling portals?

D.S.: Legislation aims to restrict the development of the industry with the help of tools; one of them is taxes. Consider two situations: the tax tends to 0% and the tax tends to 100%.

If taxes are minimum, everyone pays and develops quickly, but there is little money in the budget. If the tax is maximum, companies will close operations or evade paying it, and in the end, this is also not the best situation.

Regulatory legislation should ideally provide high budget revenues while maintaining or even growing the industry itself. At the moment, growth is being actively restrained. I think this trend will continue until the regulator reaches critical indicators, which will serve as the basis for a revision of the regulatory policy.

RGW: What will you talk about at Russian Gaming Week 2021?

D.S.: I will focus on how to get a white audience for free – similar to the media. We’ll analyze the process of creating your own website step by step. I will share my experience in solving issues with large semantics and content arrays based on the experience of working with market leaders: Reebok, Forbes, Cosmopolitan. We’ll talk about organizing a content production department at a remote location.

See you at Russian Gaming Week. No doubt, that would be interesting.

On April 27, Dmitriy will speak at RGW 2021 conference with a meaningful presentation and answer questions from guests.

More about the event program >>>