Analyze New GEO Before the Launch

3 November 2022
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Hi! We are the team of the Playfina Partners affiliate program!

We work in the iGaming niche with Gambling and Betting offers. Our projects have already been launched in more than 25 GEOs, primarily Tier 1-2 markets. We date back to 2019, we have more than 100 people in our team.

In this article, we will describe the main steps you need to take to enter a new GEO successfully. The information will be most useful to those who work with SEO, but it is still relevant for media buying as well.

Monetization

Monetization opportunities are the first thing to think about before launching a project. It is unwise to launch a project without preparation, otherwise you will have no luck driving traffic later.

Here’s what you can do to evaluate the market:

  1. Research the main available affiliate programs (study the conditions, communicate with the support).
  2. Reach out to direct advertisers (talk to affiliate managers).
  3. Take a paid counseling (with teams that already work in this niche).
  4. Attend 1-2 top affiliate conferences (chat, get to know the community and understand what works).

After completing these steps, you will gain an understanding of monetization models and conditions.

Important! When you talk to colleagues and managers, research possible restrictions for affiliates in a particular GEO. There are many nuances, for example, there is a high chance that affiliate gambling sites will be blocked in Poland and Australia, and in some GEO affiliates need to obtain a license (for example, in Romania or the USA).

Niche Analysis

When you have more or less figured out how to drive traffic and where from, you need to run a detailed analysis of the region in terms of site parameters.

  • Structure. This includes the size of the sites, their features (whether there are personal accounts, filters, etc.). For example, for the main Tier-1 GEOs, most large betting projects have a Predictions section: this means that such projects have a lot of content and many authors.
  • Content. The amount of content, the languages, the frequency of updating or creating new pages, whether there are tables, animation, comparisons, etc. This shows how professionally they optimize the content and how much they invest in it.
  • Links. Nothing new here: the number of links and the dynamics of their placement. We also recommend paying attention to the 301 redirects, and if there are very few links, see if there are any back linking and PBN for Tier 2-3 sites. Thus, you will be able to assess the competition in a particular region more precisely.

These 3 parameters will help you estimate the budget you will need to reach the TOP.

Traffic assessment

To understand how much traffic you can eventually get from a niche, you need to:

  1. Check the traffic of TOP 10 competitors. To do this, you can use a combination of different tools: SimilarWeb, Semrush, and Ahrefs. The parameters will be different everywhere, but the picture as a whole will be clear.
  2. Build a semantic core. This will allow you to assess your potential traffic more correctly. At the initial stage, it makes sense to collect keys only by main groups, this can be done using Ahrefs.

After that, we compare the numbers from all the instruments and get the average.

Preliminary decision-making

And only after all the steps are done, you can make an assessment and decide whether the niche is worth it or not. You will have information on the market volume, budget for promotion, creation and development of the site. At this stage, you can also make final revenue predictions: how much you can really earn.

Professional approach

We have a few more actions left to do that will create a “clearer picture”.

  1. Networks. Pay attention to the presence of “networks” in the chosen niche, not PBN networks, but large white-hat projects that cover many countries, for example casinos.org, casino.guru, kazinokanada.com, etc. If you see them, this means that the competition is very high and there are large teams working in this market (with dozens and hundreds of employees). To create and promote such projects, you need a big team and a large budget. Will you be able to manage?
  2. Team. We estimate the required number of people / departments that are needed for the job. These can be: developers, designers, marketers, SEO specialists, link builders, content creators, etc.
  3. Budget. You always need to allocate a bigger budget than the estimate, because you never know how the site will behave and how long it will take to get good traffic in a particular country.

And at this stage you can decide whether to launch or not.

Example of GEO analysis

Let’s look at Spain as a potential market. We use one of the high-frequency betting search queries “casas de apuestas” in the “Keywords Explorer” section on the Ahrefs website. We are looking at two TOP-1 and TOP-2 sites:

The first site:

Analyze New GEO Before the Launch

The second:

Analyze New GEO Before the Launch

  1. First of all, we see the number of Referring Domains: 854 and 437, which is not much compared to other markets. For example: in the UK, you can see up to several thousand referring domains. Conclusion: links will not cost you a fortune.
  2. And the second important point worth looking at is the structure of the sites. More than 500 million people speak Spanish, and this is a very large audience. The population of Spain is only about 50 million, the rest of the people live in Latin American countries: Peru, Colombia, Chile, etc. The sites above happen to have traffic from these countries as well:

    Analyze New GEO Before the Launch

  3. And the last important point is the cost of content, ordering texts in Spanish is relatively inexpensive. You will pay a little more than for an English text.
  4. Besides, these GEOs have relaxed regulations when it comes to affiliate sites.

As a result: the query in Spanish shows us that there is a lot of traffic, many countries, affordable content, and a relatively adequate budget estimate. Next you will need to study the structure of sites and clarify the conditions for monetization of sites (what models are used in this niche).

And to find out more about the advantages of Playfina Partners, read the review on ZorbasMedia! In the review, you will also find an exclusive bonus for our readers that will bring you a 50% RevShare rate until the end of 2022.

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