In the past year, I’ve been talking to SEOs about the trends in SEOin relation to affiliate marketing. I’ve been talking with a lot of iGaming affiliates as well to get a pulse of the industry.

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I'll share a quick chart to share what I'm seeing using Ahrefs to look up some data.

These 9 forums had an increase in monthly visits from organic search by 367% from October 2023 to September 2024. The only one that appeared to drop was Casino Guru however I'd like to point out that they have multiple languages across their site and it is one of the largest sites in the industry.

Before I start to go a little bit deeper into the numbers and some further analysis, I'll share the idea behind this post.

Affiliate coaching

I used to do affiliate coaching and I had an affiliate reach out to me recently asking for how I'd help to recover one of their main sites.

I gave some of my suggestions below but I just felt that maybe I could get some actual data on the performance of forums in this single niche in affiliate marketing. It could be casino or the rest of the gambling verticals but we can put them into a single box to analyze.

One bit of advice that I’ve been sharing is that I think forums are given more weight in the past 1 year because of Google updates.

Before I talk about the popularity of communities, here’s my quick tips for affiliate sites trying to navigate all the ‘helpful’ Google updates we’ve seen over the past year.

  • Branding
  • Authentic content
  • Long form content
  • Higher quality links
  • Communities
  • Products

Each of these topics deserves their own posts but I’m going to zero in on just communities, aka forums.

I’m taking a little bit of a deeper dive into a few communities:

  • Mr. Gamble
  • Casino Guru
  • Bigwinboard®
  • CasinoGrounds.com
  • WizardOfVegas
  • LCB
  • AskGamblers
  • NoDepositForum
  • Casinomeister
  • BonusParadise

Most of these sites have had communities for a long time with maybe Mr. Gamble being the exception.

Let's get a little bit into the data.

Search traffic analysis using Ahrefs

I left out the analysis of BigWinBoard as the entire site itself has gained a lot in the past year and likely the forum too.

Wait, am I showing biased data of forums currently ranking high that possibly gained rankings? That is, I picked the main 1st page of results in Google.

I had a look at other forum sites that have lost some rankings for ‘casino forum’ related keywords just to make sure I’m not giving some misleading info.

Sure enough, these sites too are all growing in keywords and search traffic.

I looked at the winners and losers in 1 year time to see which site ranked for 'casino forum' in the United States and there were quite a few changes.

Even when I pick a site that has lost a ranking here, their entire forum seems to have received an uplift in the past year.

What I'm saying is I don't think users are doing more searches than before for say 'casino forum' but I do think that Google has kicked out some blogs and affiliate sites and traded them for something else.

When you look at rank 50 and below, you start noticing drastic changes. Lots of sites lost their rankings and were traded for sites that are new in the top 100.

To me it makes sense. Like would I, as a user, want to blackhatworld, beermoneyforum, mariopartylegacy, mynewsdesk and roblox for results when looking for a casino forum?

No thanks.

The results on the right of the SERP comparison isn't perfect but I would say it is better for matching search intent.

I'm starting to notice more Reddit threads showing up in many results.

Reddit Gambling forums

Reddit of course has now appeared in the top 100 for 'casino forum' featuring at #9, r/gambling with 130,000+ members and at #50, r/Bovada with 16,000+ members.

Even just looking at some newer subreddits like r/NZOnlineCasinos it has over 1100 members and first registered on July 17th in Ahrefs going from 0 to 216 monthly organic visitors.

  • Quora has #15 and #28 positions taken
  • LinkedIn Pulse has #66 taken

In some cases this is almost like what I would call the white-hat parasite SEO.

Operators with their own forum

If you look at the top 100 sites ranking for ‘casino forum’, there are a few operators in the rankings.

stakecommunity.com and forum.ignitioncasino.euare ranked 16th and 19th in the United States respectively.

The Stake community has over 86,000 members and over 2 million posts. Well done Product and SEO team!

Quality improvements in SERPs in 1 year

Looking at the lost positions for the keyword ‘casino forum’ and a lot of others that gained, it seems the quality of the SERPs has in this specific example looking at forums. The ones that gained are either new casino forums or established ones that deserve to be ranking better.

I still see bad examples of sites that have lost traffic when I don't think they deserved it and replaced by some sites that I don't think belong either. There are still some non iGaming sites that seem to find a way into rankings.

Why are communities important for affiliates?

A community is essentially a product. It doesn’t matter if it is a Reddit community, Slack group, Facebook group, or a regular forum that we are all used to.

Communities are important for affiliates because that product attracts and retains players. Simple as that. More users leads to more content, leads to more pages ranking in Google and that eventually leads to more affiliate revenue.

Social media is a mix of search, branding, sales and marketing. People are using social channels as part of their extension of search, or in some cases, it is their search. Just think about Tiktok being a social search engine.

Forums and topics can be discovered in search engines but their own search engines are being used a lot. Social media has just become even more important in the past 5 years. It seems that Google is finally understanding the content in social networks as being important for signals of authority.

Forums, more than just SEO

Many affiliates might think about forums as another SEO channel. That is possibly true but I think forums are far more valuable.

With a forum, you are capturing user data which I think is important for affiliate marketers today. This is like getting a newsletter but with more value implied.

Forums and communities are pure BOFU content

I know you know that BOFU stands for bottom-of-funnel.

All the detailed content you see in threads and the replies to threads is really what bottom-of-funnel content is all about.

We’ve seen sites like Quora, Reddit and Stack Exchange all expand ever since Google’s Helpful Content Update (HCU) got started.

BOFU content is where you get conversions and this content is engaging. TOFU content isn’t dead but if ChatGPT and Google can give you AI answers to your basic questions, you shouldn’t focus on it as much.

Sure, we all want to be #1 for keywords like ‘online casinos’ and ‘betting forum’ but there is riches in the nicheswhen it comes to constantly being suggested when it comes to BOFU content.

So who should care about player forums?

I think almost anybody in the industry should. That is, other affiliates, operators and the game providers too.

Why should affiliates care about other player forums

Even if you don’t have a forum, this is pure market research. Find out the sentiment amongst players related to product, brands and even the software providers.

Why should operators care about player forums

See if your brand has a positive or negative sentiment amongst players. Also look for the same in your competition.

Why should software and service providers care about player forums

Let’s say you’re a game provider or a product in say sports betting. You’ll want to stay on top of any complaints or praise your product or service will receive.

If players are unhappy with it, social media is where the complaints will manifest.

If I was a game provider, I’d be involved in every single player forum possible. You should be helping your company’s visibility and remember personal branding can be an extension of company branding.

Forums as digital assets

A forum is a digital asset, you might be able to easily add more search traffic to your forum. For every subscriber you get, you are building a database that makes the value of your site worth more.

Subdomain, folder or custom domain for forums

I’m not sure I can give any advice that one setup is better than another. I would say that if you have an established website already that a subdomain would be easy to setup.

I personally like Discourse.orgas a setup for forums but you can use anything you want.

Will a forum help your site recover from Google updates?

I don’t know the answer to that question either. Without doing an entire comprehensive study of the affiliate forum space in iGaming, it appears that forums are gaining in value.

I mean Reddit has been on a tear for a year straight and is seemingly getting bigger. Reddit has gone from 65 million organic monthly visitors to 650 million in 2 years. Most of this growth happened in the past year.

I think sites with forums have been the beneficiaries of all of these Google updates.

I rarely see a site that has tanked that had a half decent forum. Likewise for all the ones that have done well, they've seemingly had a forum and some of them have had other products and value props for players.

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