How to maximise content SEO around Bundesliga

I think it’s safe to say that we’ve never cared about German football before, atleast not until we were playing the national team in a tournament. However, this past week saw millions of us scrambling around for a BT Sport subscription to watch the return of European football. With the 3pm rule disbanded, as a result of no matches to attend, BT was able to stream five matches simultaneously on a Saturday afternoon for the first time since the 1960s.

I won’t use the “U” word, but it has never been done before and is certainly unknown…

How to take advantage of the Bundesliga and align your search strategy to take advantage of sport restarts.

With the return of sport to our TVs comes the inevitable desire to make a game we never really cared about seem more exciting… and with that lies the point of this post – how to set your site up for the return of sport and take advantage of a flood of positive, buyer-driven searches.

What are the top phrases being searched right now?

There are four different points to capture search traffic in the “Bundesliga Bets” sales funnel

1. Generic and Familiar “Football Tips” & “Football Predictions”
2. League Specific “Bundesliga Tips” & “Bundesliga Predictions”
3. Match Specific “Borussia Dortmund vs Schalke Tips” etc.
4. Team Specific “Borussia Dortmund”

The google trends charts below will track the interest of the top terms, so you can bookmark this page and check back to see their 30-day progression.

Generic and Familiar

League Specific

Team Specific

This is no different to how we would approach the Premier League, but the Bundesliga presents a number of opportunities further up the sales pipeline. These are the terms that allow you to take advantage of and capture traffic away from the dominating forces. Also, these five teams are the only ones really spending any time on in the UK markets. We don’t really know German football, so our searches are revolving around the top five teams in the league. It also means that these will be the matches where the most bets are placed, despite probably having the worst odds.

What phrases should I include to optimise for Bundesliga in the UK?

This is a list of the breakaway terms, that you should consider when planning content and trying to capture as much traffic as possible.

You will notice the large groups of research-based terms. The intent here is further up the sales funnel, but when new markets are researched, individuals look to find consistent sources of expertise on a new topic. These sites become part of the research before a bet is placed and during this time, customers of rival affiliates and betting sites will be more flexible to discovering their “reliable source of information”.

Within this group is a wide variation of SERP features used within Bundesliga SEO. Those snippets include:

• Featured Snippet
• Image Pack
• Instant Answer
• Knowledge Panel
• People Also Ask
• Reviews
• Site Links
• Top Stories
• Twitter
• Video Carousel

So, with the right content and the right page set-up, you can optimise your chances to appear within the normal organic search results too. I’ve helped a number of companies get the right page set-up recently, working with designers and developers, alongside content writers to ensure that we are making the most of every opportunity to gain organic exposure.

A mixture of Schema, page layout and keyword targeting can make all the difference during a transitional phase such as what’s happening in the sportsbook industry at the moment.

Watch, BT, Live Stream or Stream and the importance of passing traffic.

At the moment, a list of where to watch any mainstream sport is a strong way to earn relevance and provide credibility around specific topics. If you can stretch this to individual matches and include variations of “Watch” then you could also capitalize on passing traffic.

This traffic is low converting but it quite often returns, for the next match. This, and only this, is one of the few times I feel pop-up deals can help to assist in conversions, but this should only happen on a link click and shouldn’t be used as an aggressive sales technique. Use it as a reminder that you offer other services and have the insight into the two teams and the match.

The build-up to these terms starts on the morning of the match. On the 16th May, searches for “Watch Bundesliga” started in building from 5am.

Breakaway terms from watch Bundesliga include:

These terms were heavily searched prior to the matches, and including these and similar terms across other sports will help to capitalise on short-term search spikes.

How can I use this to my advantage and what can we learn from other sports?

In 2017, Channel 4 racing changed hands to ITV Racing. This change in channel presented an opportunity and we managed to capitalise on it for our client at the time, MyRacing.com.

With a very simple tactic, we quickly got a page up called ITV Racing Tips and pointed a few internal links to the page. The original page included things like a timeline and answers to semantic questions, which allowed us to rank, quickly, for terms and questions relating to ITV.

The result was an extra 40,000 visits to the site in six months and a 10% increase in conversions.

To conclude

As sports come back and make a return, don’t rely on your existing content pages to make the same level of impact. Customer queries are changing, the information they are searching for is changing so the content and expertise within the content on your site should be changed to reflect this.

It might only be a temporary inclusion, but by increasing the helpfulness and authority of your content in the short-term, will result in more traffic to your website in repeat custom in the longer term.

As sports return, there will be similar search patterns to the Bundesliga, especially if the first sport back is in a foreign league.

If you would like to discuss your restart strategy with me, then feel free to contact me on [email protected].