How to get traffic for your gambling affiliate website

Once you’ve setup your affiliate website, the next step is to start attracting users who will convert into customers for your partner brands and earn you a commission. In this guide, we will go through a number of methods you can use to do this and show you some tools that will assist.

In this guide:

  1. SEO
  2. Paid advertising
  3. Offline advertising
  4. Social media

1. SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and is the process of optimising your website for search engines such as Google. By optimising your website, you’re able to attain rankings in the search results for keywords that are being searched by your target audience. The more optimised your website is, the higher it will rank in the search results.

There are 2 types of optimisations you can make for search engines, on-page and off-page. On-page relates to anything on the actual web page itself, such as content, metadata, and technical things within the code. Off-page is backlinks. Our website templates already have all of the technical aspects of SEO built-in and automated, so the main aspects for you to focus on are content, metadata and backlinks - which we will explain to you further down.

It’s important to know that SEO is not an overnight process, but it definitely pays off as you’ll eventually be getting targeted traffic to your website for free. It takes at least 3-6 months to start ranking for lucrative keywords, but once you’re there the return is remarkable and doesn’t require a lot of up-keep.

Firstly, let’s get some understanding of what you should be looking to achieve with SEO. With your affiliate site, the ultimate aim is to rank for keywords that are being searched for by people who are likely to join one of your partner bookmaker or casino brands and start placing bets. For example, if someone in the UK is intent on placing a bet but isn’t sure where, they might search for something like ‘best UK betting sites’. Or if someone is thinking to sign up to Betfred but wants to check a few things first, they might search things like ‘Betfred review’, ‘Is Betfred a good betting site?’, ‘What is the minimum deposit at Betfred?’, ‘Betfred welcome offer’, and so on. By optimising your website’s pages and providing the information being searched for by potential gamblers, you’re able to rank for these keywords, give the people what they’re searching for and earn yourself a commission while you’re at it.

You can also research what keywords to target by using this free keyword tool. Simply enter your website URL (or a popular competitor website) to retrieve keyword ideas and search volume data. Note that the highest searched keywords aren’t always the best option, as they often have high levels of competition which makes them more difficult to rank for.

  • The homepage is your website’s most powerful page. You should use it to rank for generic keywords that describe the content on your website e.g. ‘betting sites’, ‘betting offers’, ‘online casinos’, ‘best casinos’. You can rank for further keyword variations by creating custom pages that have more specific content e.g. ‘betting sites that accept PayPal’, ‘online casinos with live roulette’. On our website templates, each partner brand has its own dedicated page, which you can use to rank for any keywords relating to that brand e.g. ‘Betfred review’.

That’s your introduction to SEO. Now, what can you do to optimise your website for your desired keywords? All technical aspects such as internal linking, site architecture, page speed, Schema structured data markups, image alt and title text are automatically optimised for you on all of our templates. So, what matters to you is the content, metadata and backlinks.

Content

In order for a web page to rank in the search results for its target keywords, the target keywords must be some of the most occurring terms on the page. By writing descriptive content surrounding the topics of your target keywords, they naturally occur on your page, thus making it ‘keyword targeted’.

AnswerThePublic is a tool you can use to generate ideas for content. Enter your target keyword and it will provide you with a number of titles to write about. From here, you can incorporate AI such as ChatGPT to assist you in putting the content together. It’s important that you use AI as an assistant and not to write your content for you. Content written entirely by AI can be detected by search engines and may lead to your website being penalised. Use an AI detector and aim to stay below 50%.

Once your content is ready to go live, our admin system makes it easy for you to upload and properly structure it. You can easily insert headings, paragraphs, HTML, FAQs, and more, in several areas across your homepage, custom pages, brand review pages and articles.

  • Anywhere you write content on your site, always refer to your target keywords for the page the content is going on and keep the content relevant to them. You should ensure that the target keywords are some of the most occurring terms on the page. You can see what terms occur most on your pages by using this keyword density checker. Aim for a 10% density.

Metadata

Meta data (also known as meta tags) are coded tags which are placed on a web page to tell search engines and browsers what is on the page. There are 2 main meta tags that are important in SEO. These are the ‘page title’ and ‘meta description’. The page title is the text displayed when your website shows up in the search results, and also in the tab at the top of the browser. The meta description is the small text shown underneath the page title in the search results.

The page title should be around 50-60 characters stating what is on the page and should contain your target keywords. It’s also good practice to end it with your website’s name or domain e.g. If your target keywords are ‘best betting sites’, you might have a title like ‘Best UK betting sites | yourdomain.com’.

The meta description is a more descriptive version of the page title. It should be around 150 characters to summarise what the page contains and why people should visit it. It is visible to the people who see the page in the search results, so should be somewhat persuasive e.g. ‘Come and compare the best UK betting sites of at our comprehensive comparison site. We list and review all the best sites for UK gamblers.’

Backlinks

A backlink is when another website links to your website, and is one of the most important factors of SEO. When your website has backlinks from trustworthy websites, search engines begin to trust your website more and as a result it will become easier for you to rank for your target keywords. It’s near impossible to rank well in the search results without any backlinks.

The idea is that when you write useful, unique content on your website, other websites will then link to it. Just like how we’ve linked to lots of useful websites in this article. However, when your website is new this can be rather difficult as no one knows you or your content yet. This drives many people to pay for backlinks. While this is totally fine, there are still ways to build backlinks organically. You can submit your website to online directories. You can also write an article that provides some sort of insight into a topic relating to your website, embed a link to your website within the content, and then submit it to a news outlet for them to publish. This is known as a guest posting and can be done very easily via WhitePress.

  • Focus on building backlinks from trustworthy websites. To check if a website is trustworthy, we have a metric called Domain Authority (DA). You can check the score of any given website using this free website authority checker.
  • Optimise backlink anchor text for your target keywords. E.g. if your target keyword is ‘betting sites’, you’ll want to ensure the backlinks you acquire on other websites have the anchor text ‘betting sites’, like so: betting sites.

2. Paid advertising

If you have a budget to play with, paid advertising is without a doubt one of the quickest ways to generate traffic for your website. By paying for advertising, you’re instantly able to reach your target audience - no having to spend months creating content as with SEO. It’s also easier to measure the effectiveness of paid advertising campaigns, as platforms such as Google Ads provide you with more insight than you can get from SEO traffic. Here are some of the most effective methods of paid advertising:

Pay Per Click (PPC)

Pay Per Click is a form of search engine advertising, where your website shows up in the search results for keywords of your choice and you pay for each person who clicks on it. PPC is a highly targeted form of advertising, as you can choose to display your ad for the exact keywords people are likely to be searching for when they are intent on joining a betting site or online casino e.g. ‘best betting sites’ or ‘best online casinos’. You can set up a PPC ad via the Google Ads platform, which will walk you through everything you need to know about what keywords to bid on, how much traffic you can expect, and how much it will cost.

Sponsored content

Sponsored content is a form of advertising whereby you pay another website to post an article that will promote your website to their users. For example, if a sports or gaming related blog receives 100K monthly users and they post an article about your website, a number of their users are very likely to come and visit your site and then convert into customers for your partner brands. The website might also have a high Domain Authority (DA), meaning that the article will achieve high rankings on search engines and reach further audiences. Where possible, ask for a ‘dofollow’ backlink when paying for sponsored content, as this will also help with your site’s SEO.

Banner advertising

Banner advertising is one of the oldest and most effective forms of online advertising. Similarly to sponsored content, you find another website that is already popular and likely to have an audience consisting of gamblers, and pay them (usually a monthly fee) to display an ad for you. Banner ads are usually displayed across the top or in the sidebar of websites and are great for building brand awareness.

  • When purchasing sponsored content or banner advertising, you should first check how many users the website receives per month, and how many of those users are located in the country your affiliate site is targeted to. You can use Similarweb to do this.

3. Offline advertising

Offline advertising is where you advertise your website via channels outside of the internet. It can be extremely cost effective and pay off massively when done correctly. Ask yourself, who bets online? The conclusion you’ll likely draw is people who watch sport. And where do these people go to watch an event? Either to the event itself or down to the local pub. By targeting these locations you’ll be able to tap into massive audiences who are ready to place bets right there and then. It’s a great way to advertise your website and doesn’t have to be costly at all.

Freebies

Everyone loves a freebie, so why not go to a sporting event and hand out freebies that people are likely to want. Free water bottles, hats, foam fingers, banners, any type of merchandise that will come in handy to punters during an event. Or if it’s raining, how about some free umbrellas? If the event is broadcasted on live TV and there’s a huge portion of the crowd using umbrellas with your website logo on, you’re going to get some serious coverage for very little cost. This type of coverage is exactly what you want, as these are the very places where all the biggest betting companies pay millions to be advertised.

Beer mates

When punters are in the pub watching the sport, they’re surely open to placing a bet. Purchase a bunch of custom beer mats with your website information printed on and hand them out to local pubs for punters to find. The pubs are usually rather happy to receive some fresh new beer mates for their tables. Beer mats are also very cheap to buy, you can get around 10,000 for £300.

T-shirts

Get some t-shirts with your website logo printed on and wear them around. When you’re attending sporting events, at the pub, at the gym, out running or just wandering around town, your website is being advertised to everyone around you. We live in a world where people pay a lot of attention to what you’re wearing. Given that 1 in 10 people bet online in the UK, it’s extremely likely a gambler will see your t-shirt and visit your website.

Flyers

Handing out flyers is one of the best known ways to advertise any sort of business, and it works rather well for advertising websites too. Print flyers to advertise your affiliate site and leave them in places where people interested in sports betting or online casino are likely to be e.g. pub tables, bookmakers, gyms, gaming arcades. You can also hand them out at sporting events or gaming conferences, or even on the high street.

Event sponsorship

Horse racing is the biggest sport being bet on in the UK. For a fixed fee, you can pay racecourses to name a horse race after your website e.g. ‘The yourdomain.com race’. The race is then broadcasted over the radio, on TV, in the news, and even on other betting websites, giving your website a huge amount of targeted exposure. You can also purchase banners and boards which will be displayed at the events and possibly on live TV. Packages for this sort of thing start from as little as £250.

4. Social media

Last but not least. Social media sites work just like search engines, making them very easy for you to get discovered on. Here are some things you can do on social media sites to get users to your website:

  • Create social media pages for your website and start posting things that will get people engaged.
  • Tweet a running commentary of sporting events and interact with popular pages or celebrities.
  • Join sports betting and casino bonus groups on Facebook, and share your website with members asking for bonuses.
  • Anytime you see a gambling ad on a social media website, post a link to your website in the comments.

Blog

  1. How to get traffic for your gambling affiliate website
    Guide
Visit blog