Head of SEO at Ladbrokes from February 2009 - December 2010
I am happy to have been part of Ladbrokes online success between February 2009 and December 2010. The company during this period of time performed with a higher 20% profit compared to a year earlier ( Date of writing Feb. 2011 ). I am bit shocked with the results for 2011 actually and I would love to find out the real reason for the financial depletion. Perhaps there has been a change of strategy after I left ? I will never find out since I work for PokerStars now.
When I first started at Ladbrokes, I quickly realised it was more than just doing simple SEO. I actually had to utilise all my SEO, PPC , Affiliate and Analytical skills to change the business to think Online. I had to convince my Directors that SEO and PPC data had to be viewed separately and that new ways of tracking conversions had to be implemented. The role was also a whole new education process which I thoroughly enjoyed. My personal goals for Ladbrokes was to reduce Spend and yet achieve higher profits for 2010. I managed to optimise the Affiliate commission window as well as increase customer acquisition via optimised PPC and SEO campaigns.
Part of my strategy was to fully automate sports.ladbrokes.com , which by the way performs very well in terms of driving SEO traffic and keyword rankings. I am proud to say that I pioneered the SEO project until its completion in early 2010. All Titles and Meta Data were automated for international languages. The URL structure is clean and has the capability of being Geo-Targeted. Server load time had been minimised to ensure that robots do not have to wait for a page to be crawled. Automated XML Sitemaps have also been incorporated to ensure maximum crawlerbility.
A second project which was then completely outlined by myself was news.ladbrokes.com, which serves the purpose of complementing sport.ladbrokes.com with content. Both domains serve a clear purpose, which I am unable to mention here at this point but will surely do so by early next year.
The success of both domains can be seen with keyword rankings as follows :
Keyword Position ( Mid 2010 - Check date Feb 2011 )
Football betting 1
Tennis betting 1
Cricket betting 1
Gold betting 1
Darts Betting 3
Actually any main keyword on news.ladbrokes.com in association with betting will rank to 90%. Another important fact to note is that there have been no active Link Building for the site and keywords purely rank due to Content ( Content is King again ).
Please note that I am now working for another great company Poker at PokerStars, and I am sure my online marketing techniques will greatly contribute here too.
Summary of Activities at Ladbrokes
SEO & Product Development
- Review the current effectiveness of SEO on the product sites and put an action plan in place with the product marketing teams.
- Review the international versions of the site and work a country related SEO solution in conjunction with the product marketing teams
- Work with the web development team to ensure all SEO aspects are covered including site redesigns, new product releases, product enhancements, and new site features
- Managing the SEO communications programme to the product teams and international teams.
- Relationship Management
- Liase effectively with the product teams to maximise SEO opportunities.
- Develop good working relationship with the web implementation individuals in each team.
SEO Strategies
- Ongoing keyword research, analysis, recommendations and execution
- Developing and executing on inbound linking strategies (link building and link baiting)
- Staying on top of current search engine news, trends, SEO practices, and emerging items of interest and sharing these with the rest of the team, product managers, developers, etc.
- Work with paid for search team to gain and assist in any learning’s that benefit search both paid for and organic
SEO Copywriting
- Ensure team is writing keyword rich, on-site copy
- Working with editorial and marketing teams to drive SEO in content creation and content programming
SEO Reporting
- Generation of SEO reports
- Ensuring regular and systematic analysis of data to ensure trends and issues are identified and acted upon (web analytics and rankings reports)
- Benchmark SEO progress against the relevant competition
See my profile for SEO easyjet.
A small article on Poker SEO
For further information please contact me under: ray.mendis@gmail.com
