No igaming platform is perfect when it comes to SEO – and those who have worked with legacy white labels, bespoke sportsbooks and even recent ‘disruptive’ startups know that compromise, workarounds and a focus on the possible is key to making progress.
Unlike transactional sites in other industries outside online gambling – or information-rich affiliate sites – operators’ platforms have to contend with regulatory, security and integration considerations that mean SEO professionals often have little ability to make hands-on changes.
Even so, concentrating on direct player acquisition and first-time depositors (FTDs) is vitally important in mature and maturing markets where profitability and value is coming into greater focus. It’s just not sustainable to be constantly sacrificing revenue to advertising and affiliation when investor money is at stake.
As such, it is of little surprise that so many igaming SEO professionals focus on things they can leverage more easily than onsite or tech SEO. For example, link building and digital PR. This is a manifestly important part of the SEO mix – and one that the ICS-digital team has seen grow across a surprising variety of markets – but there are still some aspects of tech SEO that are able to be tackled and that can present a competitive edge due to being overlooked so frequently.
Being indexed, being found, being used
With so much dynamic JavaScript content, operator sites often struggle to be crawled, indexed and sensibly ranked by search engines. More than this, from a player acquisition perspective, technical limitations and slowness can impact the sign-up process. Particularly when we think about regulating markets where mobile connectivity has room to improve, operators should do all they can to improve usability and load times to spark initial sign-ups – but also support retention and referrals.
JavaScript content is everywhere on operator sites, from dynamically loaded odds and offers to embedded games. Making the right call about using server-side (SSR) or client-side rendering (CSR) for this content can make a difference for SEO performance and visibility, and the wider customer experience.
This topic does veer into some technicalities, but for marketers – and igaming professionals more generally – it can help to understand the options available. It also demonstrates quite how significant technical decisions can be when they underpin SEO, UX, conversion optimisation and potentially the ROI from media spend where traffic is being directed to suboptimal sites.
In short, CSR and SSR represent two distinct approaches to how web content is delivered to potential bettors, and the choice between them has direct implications for performance, discoverability and, ultimately, player acquisition. With CSR, the server provides a minimal HTML page and a JavaScript bundle, leaving the browser to load up and assemble the content on the user’s screen. We’ve all experienced this as we wait for games and odds to populate.
The positive side of CSR for operators is the flexibility to update fast-moving content and highly dynamic functionality: live odds feeds, real-time leaderboards, demos and streaming casino lobbies all lend themselves to this model. This avoids the need for hard coding, as key elements are swapped in and out and then loaded on the customer’s side.
Once everything has loaded, navigation can feel more seamless, with fewer full page reloads. It’s an experience familiar to users of other apps that bring everything into view on loading. SSR, by contrast, delivers a fully rendered HTML page directly from the server. The advantage here is immediacy. Search engines and users see content straight away, improving both load times and indexability. With CSR, there’s a risk content is not seen, crawled, understood or ranked.
For gambling platforms with thousands of URLs (slot games, bonus pages, match previews, live streams, odds and sports markets), SSR can also communicate the hierarchy of content more effectively, with implications for the impact of link building and link earning. By that, we mean the relationship between pages and content types is easier for search engines to map and follow. This aids discovery and indexation, yet it also more effectively distributes what we might loosely call ‘link equity’ more effectively across site architecture.
The trade-offs are clear: CSR is highly flexible but risks search engines not fully crawling/indexing/ranking commercially significant content, while SSR addresses crawlability and speed by loading everything upfront for bettors and crawlers alike, though this increases server demand. It means that during peak times, stress is being placed on the operator’s server to get all the content ‘ready’ before sending in complete form to the user.
With the rise of prop betting and in-play betting more generally, embedded sports commentary and other innovations that spike user traffic and activity during sporting events in particular, can cause big technical headaches if not built into the operator’s plan.
Hybrid approaches, trade-offs and compromise
In practice, many operators adopt a hybrid approach. Initial rendering is handled server-side to secure fast page delivery and search visibility, with JavaScript then enriching the interface for interactivity. An element of compromise is always needed. Frameworks such as Next.js make hybrid approaches more technically straightforward, while services like prerender.io generate static HTML snapshots specifically for search engines, allowing a CSR-heavy sportsbook or casino to maintain dynamic features without compromising discoverability.
For some brands, this technical – and not especially interesting – approach can make a huge difference in SEO potential. That isn’t to say that rankings and traffic will flow just because operators find an elegant way to show page snapshots to search engines; you still need the quality of content, topicality/strength of links and rigour across other areas of SEO, but it at least puts you into the game.
Once again, it is worth stating that some operator brands aren’t even in the race to rank – their content is not being crawled, indexed, ranked or clicked in organic search, no matter how good it is. As competition intensifies, the rendering strategy is no longer a purely technical decision. For igaming operators, it forms part of a broader commercial strategy where search visibility, site speed and user experience directly affect retention and revenue.
Regulations, audiences and the SERP landscape
While brands in other sectors defined by ‘heavy’ sites with lots of JavaScript also get to grips with SSR versus CSR, the specifics of igaming mean there is more to consider. Where fines and regulator action are a risk, operators should be careful to geo-target content to the right audiences. SSR gives an element of greater control by loading up everything the user is intended to see prior to them seeing it.
Similarly, from a user perspective, it makes sense not to inadvertently show any content that is irrelevant or relates to offers or incentives intended for another country. That’s a sure-fire way to introduce friction into the user journey and lose trust. On the flip side, where speed is paramount, CSR has advantages with individual elements of the page updating in line with developments, such as dynamic odds, prop bets and live betting. Customers who are engaged with a game may favour the immediacy of CSR.
With all this in mind, it is worth considering where your brand fits within the wider competitive landscape, the traits of your customers and the competition you’re up against in the search engine results pages. For example, if you feel you’re currently paying out too much to affiliates who are outperforming you in search due to your lack of rankings/limited success at being indexed for key content with the potential to rank for key terms, it could be worth prioritising SSR to maximise chances of SEO success.
On the flip side, if rankings are already doing well, the site already has a propensity to rank for key terms and your goal is getting greater value of an engaged cohort of bettors who stay on site and take advantage of multiple betting opportunities, CSR could be the more profitable play.
At every step, we must be mindful of compromises and ways to maximise opportunity while minimising risk. Every brand ultimately runs their own race based on their own strengths and weaknesses. If these debates aren’t happening at all though, there’s almost certainly room to improve. In a market where every click counts, ensuring your site renders for both Google and gamblers is the safest bet.
The post When every click counts: Server-side versus client-side rendering first appeared on EGR Intel.
ICS-digital’s Patrick Crier and Martin Calvert outline the pros and cons of both options and the importance of ensuring your website renders for both Google and gamblers
The post When every click counts: Server-side versus client-side rendering first appeared on EGR Intel.