Earlier this month I attended both days of Brighton SEO. The talks gave me much food for thought and I also attended a couple of social events (the official party plus meetups sponsored by OtterlyAI and by Women in Tech SEO). I met interesting people of all ages from all over the world. A long way from a room above a pub indeed!
Every time I visit this conference I’m struck by the major differences between mainstream SEO and iGaming SEO. This time I got chatting to someone who does digital PR for other “vice” industries including the vapes industry and apparently it’s the same there.
We experience huge negative SEO attacks including
- thousands of spammy backlinks
- fake DMCA takedowns
- brute force hack attempts
- cloning of entire sites
This happens because vendors and promoters of black market products (unregulated offshore casinos, vapes that don’t comply with safety legislation or advertising rules) want to push legitimate businesses off the front page.
It’s also extremely difficult to get organic backlinks due to prejudice against vice industry sites. And zero click searches are particularly damaging to us becuase we live on clicks.
Nevertheless there’s always lots to be learned and adapted to our industry.
Biggest key takeaway; the AI agenda everywhere has moved on. The question now is not whether to use AI, but how to use it effectively. And how to use it effectively has moved on massively from the discussions of 3-4 years ago when a few people were taking about using Chat GPT to create content at scale. Everyone’s now talking about AI automations and AI as an assistant.
Do I use AI when creating content? I do…and I don’t.
Don’t, because the finished piece of content is all my own writing using my own expertise and experience, and checks as 100% human according to Originality (the gold standard for AI detection).
Do, because I make extensive use of AI for
- Keyword, topic and intent research and analysis
- Competitor research and analysis
- Heading hierarchy and structure
- Proofreading
- Suggesting things that I have left out
- Checking that AI agents can read and make sense of what I’ve written
I even use it for fact checking, but only of things that are neither new nor contentious.
Like it or not, AI – and AI search – is here to stay. Interesting times!
