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Alex Windsor is an experienced iGaming affiliate working in the licensed US market on Gamble USA. He also runs the iGaming SEO agency Level88 Media which provides link building and content creation services to other affiliates and operators.

You’ve got an extensive working background in mobile apps and in mobile marketing. Do you think that many iGaming affiliates are still not focusing on mobile first when it comes to user experience and design? 

I've worked in the affiliate space for over 10 years now and a lot more focus has moved to mobile. When I first started out, there weren’t many affiliates (or operators) paying attention to mobile at all. Most thought it was a fad and that desktop would remain the main platform for sports bettors and casino players. 

We only have to look at the figures now and see that mobile has taken over desktop for the majority of customers, with only a hardocre few still preferring to play on desktop.

How important is mobile UX and design for ranking websites?

Very much like mobile, UX and site design has played a far bigger role than probably any of us imagined. Website design and functionality has changed so much over the last few years. Sites have a lot more features now with comparisons, tailored content, videos and they are a lot more interactive.

As competition among operators and affiliates has increased, so has been the need for companies to push boundaries to stand out from the crowd. Customers are also a lot more aware of what they want now and know there is a lot of competition for casinos and sports betting operators.

Now that most traffic comes from mobile, it's important to have a well designed and fast site that lets players get the information that they want and do so in a timely manner.

You run Level88 Media which is an SEO agency doing link building and content creation. What do you see working well for affiliates given that you get to work with a lot of successful affiliate companies?

At Level88 Media, we work with some of the biggest affiliates and operators from around the globe and the one thing that always stands out is quality links. Google has gotten far smarter and better at understanding links. Getting high quality, relevant links on sites that havent been spammed to death is becoming increasingly harder. We have great relationships with a lot of quality websites and webmasters which puts us in a good position to offer quality links to customers.

Google has tried to play down the value of links over the past few years but we haven't seen this. If you look at any successful sites, be it an affiliate site or an operator, they all have quality links and lots of them.

Gone are the days where you can rank sites without any link for any sort of meaningful keywords. Content is king is still a philosophy that's true, but you also need quality links to your site as well if you want to make any money.

Competition has grown exponentially over the last 10 years. You only have to look at the number of conferences and the attendance figures to see how much the industry has grown and continues to do so.

What are affiliates doing wrong that they should stop doing immediately?

The biggest mistake we see is new sites trying to rank for super competitive keywords right from the off. Trying to rank for terms like “online casino” or “online casino bonuses” is an impossible task for a new site.

Start on low competition keywords, get some traffic, get quality links and then start to go after the more competitive keywords.

AI tools and Chat GPT are going to put content writers out of business. Prove me wrong

The last few months as an affiliate have been quite scary. The rise of Chat GPT and other content tools has been phenomenal and they can do some crazy stuff.

We have used probably every AI writing tool and Chat GPT to write content and it is very good. But it still lacks that personal touch. AI can only be as accurate as the sources it gets the info from so it may never be 100% accurate. No tool has been able to recreate what our native writers can, so all of our content is manually researched and written.

AI models are pretty much incapable of adding new value (currently, who knows what they will be like in the future). They're great at re-telling what human creators have already said, they can even rephrase and restructure it well, but they're just not adding anything new to the conversation

While this can be useful when providing some encyclopedic/basic explanatory content, it falls short in other areas, especially reviews, where they're pretty much unusable

Do you think any of these AI tools will make people smarter, lazier or both?

Definitely both. Some people will use it to their advantage and help grow their knowledge and infinitely increase what they can do. Others will get lazy and complacent and rely too much on AI doing everything.

What are you optimistic about for affiliate marketing, tech and SEO for 2023 and beyond?

For the last few years we have heard SEO is dead. When Google introduced featured snippets, people also ask, knowledge graphs and other SERP features designed to keep you on Google and not click through to sites, yet here we are still plugging away.

Affiliate marketing and tech will do what it has always done and evolve. Yes I think we will all use some form of AI to help us more, but we as affiliates will continue to try out new methods and tools to try and stay one step ahead.

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