Measures to prevent the spread of coronavirus have resulted in major shutdowns across the globe and massive restrictions on international travel, meaning many sporting events have been cancelled or postponed.
With the Premier League agreeing the season will not resume "until it is safe and appropriate to do so", the European Championships and the Tokyo Olympics postponed until 2021 and British jump racing suspended until the beginning of July; sportsbook blogs that typically cover previews of events, sporting predictions and roundups have found their content calendars empty overnight.
Even though there is limited sport to cover internationally and no sporting events in the UK, this is not the time to abandon your sportsbook blog. Over the last month, we have been helping our clients pivot their sportsbook blogs to focus on evergreen content to keep readers interested and boost their SEO long term.
Have you let your sportsbook blog slip down the priority list whilst you focus on other channels? Or perhaps you and your team had lots of sporting event cancellation blog post ideas to begin with, but have now run out of steam?
Let us inspire you to take another look at your sportsbook blog. Below, we share our tips on how to pivot your sportsbook content strategy during these times to create evergreen content for long term gains.
5 ways to create engaging evergreen content for your sportsbook blog
1. Enjoy the flexibility to write in a more passive tone, and revisit past sporting events.
Whilst you and your team might be more used to composing opinionated responses to the weekend's sporting action, you now have the opportunity to employ a more objective tone to simply run through events of the past to create informative evergreen content.
Take this time to learn from historical precedent where it exists, by way of giving context to current or future events. A great piece of content for your blog could consider a previous time when major sports leagues were interrupted and how it was resolved. Whilst this major shut down is the first in many of our lifetimes, it is not unprecedented. Major sporting events were affected during both World War Two and the Spanish flu pandemic. This is also a good opportunity to revisit notable sporting events of the past on your blog, ensuring you link to relevant markets in your sports book for when events begin again.
2. Experiment with informative guides and How Tos.
What can you explain that you've never previously had a chance to go into detail about before? Think betting guides and explainers on more complex theories and specialist bets, answering questions such as; what is an accumulator, what is a yankee, or what is a reverse forecast.
These guides can be particularly useful if you have a casino and you want to draw people there. Don't underestimate the barrier to entry for customers who have never played Blackjack or roulette before. It’s okay to go back to basics and spell things out in layman's terms, in fact it can create really valuable content. We were all beginners once. Even seasoned Blackjack players might not actually know the origins of some of the terminology used, so going into detail can create content that is interesting as well as informative.
3. Use this opportunity to get creative and go off piste
Some of the most engaging content that gets shared online is written with a touch of humour and wackiness. Whilst you can't preview Manchester United v Liverpool this weekend, you could look back at which players have had the worst haircuts from Manchester United v Liverpool ties of the past.
We have found that humorous hypotheticals tend to capture the imagination of readers. With the seriousness of our everyday situation, right now is a great time to add some light relief with your content. Blog posts based around what if a team, player or event was a mundane everyday item (like biscuits or takeaways), prompt your audience to get involved and consider whether they agree or disagree with your hypotheticals. This can create viral, shareable content. If in doubt think about those pub conversations with your friends that turn into big debates like the age old classic argument over which Premier League manager is the toughest.
4. Find content gaps on your site and fill them.
It's a great time to go looking at competitors in your space and determine what type of content they are doing well from. You can use online tools to get estimates on which posts get the most traffic or rank for the most keywords. Building and developing on concepts you can see doing well for other people is a great way to improve your blog’s own traffic.
It’s important not to lift their content and repackage it, the key is to produce a better version of it. This is particularly easy when someone is ranking well with a post that's a few years out of date. If you can write a more topical version, using examples from more recent history, you will have gained an advantage because search engines, particularly Google, prioritise the freshest content.
5. Do some more keyword research.
With no sport to cover, now is the time to research keywords you can target with future content. Does your sportsbook blog ever get traffic to a certain page that has a very high bounce rate? Take the time to find out what that page is ranking for and then try to determine why people aren't sticking around. As an example, perhaps a blog post about Cheltenham Festival 2016 ranks well for Cheltenham Gold Cup Winners but the content is only covering the 2016 festival. Most search users aren't getting the answers they're seeking when they land on the page so you could try writing up a post specifically discussing Gold Cup winners from the past 20/40/60 years and see if the blog can start capturing the traffic to stay on the site with this new post.
Here to Help
Millions and millions of people are online at home, now is the time to invest in your sportsbook content. We believe that work put in now will not only engage your existing readers, but pay dividends in organic acquisition when the sporting calendar resumes.
The team at Digital Fuel Marketing are on hand to support businesses with their content requirements. If you have any questions based on the tips above, please get in touch and we’ll explain our reasoning. Likewise, if you think our advice sounds great but have no time to action please reach out to us and we’ll see how we can help you to transform your content and improve your SEO during this sporting downtime.