How to navigate link building strategies in different languages for the iGaming industry

Added: January 4, 2021

2021 is finally here after one of the most bizarre years ever. Brands and consumers are trying to figure out this ever-changing digital ecosystem in an attempt to connect with each other in more meaningful ways.

In the world of SEO, an overlooked side is usually a strong link-building strategy. More specifically, we’ll be taking a look at the importance of Multilingual links and how to successfully build them.

Quite a few studies from backlinko and ahrefs have revealed that one of the top factors that correspond with ranking positions are backlinks to the page. Google’s algorithm can also easily sort out which language backlinks come from, hence why it is absolutely necessary that most backlinks are in the same language as the page it is being linked to.

Let’s check out how you can achieve them for your website. There are two main methods that you are able to adopt:

Paying for publications – (known as Guest posting). This process involves finding approved websites with good authority which would publish your content for a certain fee.
Creating added value – usually, this involves creating a linkable asset and later making contact with journalists to get it published. Some of examples of linkable assets that work really well are the following:
- in-depth industry research backed with accurate data and
- data visualization – finding data that’s already available and creating great visuals around it. (A great source of data visualisation inspiration is visualcapitalist)

It is important to remember that “old school” spamming techniques actually do still work in a few languages – but google is bound to notice, therefore it is always recommended to publish to functioning websites with good authority and good volumes of traffic.

Once you have chosen which languages you would like to target, you need to settle on whether or not you have enough assigned budget to make inroads into each of those languages. If not, you may risk not seeing the right ROI within your set time frame.

Before beginning outreach, you have to be certain that your own website is populated with some in-depth articles in your target language, and this is because many websites will not link to commercially intent landing pages. It is also a smart move to identify a list of pages that you’ll be linking to, just so you are intentional about your backlinks.

Here are some very useful link inspecting methods:

Reverse Engineer your competitors – utilizing tools such as semrush and ahrefs you can filter out the good referring domains that your competitors have to create an outreach campaign with that list.
Find the top websites by country – this can be done by using sites including com or similarweb.com.
Find related websites of both lists above – as a potential backlink opportunity – you can use ahrefs competitors tool or sitelike.org for this.
Contact a few journalists to cover your story – If you possess the ability to provide industry data and extensive and helpful guides, then contacting journalists should bring you some needed media coverage. Knowing the right journalists to contact is key in this case. Always be credible by providing sources and methodology.
Quality over quantity, always.

Digital marketers are always at the mercy of algorithms and policies that are constantly changing. It’s easy to try to take short cuts on an exercise that appears so regular but that could potentially have quite a large impact in the long run.

Here are some of the best practice standards that will help you out during the journey:

Link internally whenever it is possible – always ask the editor to add at least one internal link to your publication. This will divert some link equity to your publication and might even save your article from being an orphan page.
Relevance matters but authority wins – Google is paying more attention to links that come from higher authority websites, specifically since the May 2020 Core Update.
Language Cross-Linking as a last resort – suppose you are targeting the Brazilian market which utilizes the Portuguese language, but you exhausted all link opportunities from websites in Portuguese, you can still link from English or Spanish websites to your Portuguese pages. Just make sure you are not overdoing it, as it can look unnatural and cause further damage to your rankings.
Using the right tools – Tools will cost money. But time costs more money than tools. Buzzstream is an excellent tool to find contact information and for outreach.

Here are some more tips to help you:

Always make sure your outreach is 100% manual, natural and organic. Journalists are quite busy people, seeing as they write an average of 6 publications daily and receive hundreds of pitches on a daily basis.
Be culturally sensitive with the content you are putting out. This applies for all of your marketing efforts – always be respectful to your target audience and make sure you are not being offensive in any way.
Sticking to the native language helps.
Personalize your pitch – If you are sending guest post outreach in bulk, at the very least attempt to include the person’s name and mention their website URL in the email. With buzzstream you can use dynamic fields such as [first name] [website domain] to automate personalisation.

AffPapa, iGaming