Every affiliate in the iGaming industry strives for their website to rank at the top of the SERP’s for ‘that keyword’.

Whatever keyword you’re targeting, whether it’s ‘poker’, ‘roulette’, or ‘slots’, your site won’t rank if it’s not performing.

But what tools are available to help you assess the performance of your site?

The 15 tools listed below will help you monitor your sites (and your competitors) performance, but also give you an insight into the market, that will help you improve your online presence.

Google Search Console

Search Console is the new name that Google has recently given to Webmaster Tools. The aim of the name-change is to encourage more users, not just webmasters but hobbyists, small business owners, SEO experts, marketers, programmers, designers, and app developers. From the PageSpeed Insights tool and the Mobile-Friendly test, to the Structured Data Testing tool and Search Analytics; there are a number of useful SEO tools and resources here affiliates should be using.

Google Analytics

Like Search Console, Google Analytics has many useful features to help webmasters gain extremely valuable insights into their website’s traffic. The tool allows you to identify and monitor the source of your traffic, and get detailed insight into the behaviour of your traffic. A useful feature for affiliates is event tracking where you can see what banners are performing best, and who’s clicking on them. Set these events as goals which will help you to analyse performance based on different metrics.

Keyword Planner

This should be your first port of call when deciding on what keywords you are going to target. You can find various keywords related to a product (sportsbook, casino, poker), brand (Bet365, Coral, William Hill) or any other term you can think of. Export the data and look for those ‘easy wins’ (keywords that have good search volume but little competition). Manually check what sites are ranking well for your targeted keywords and look into what is contributing to them ranking.

Broken Link Checker

It’s not unusual for an affiliate to have different content writers publishing content daily but sometimes mistakes are made in the URL structure - it’s normal. However, broken links may frustrate users, and also affect a search engines ability to crawl a site. Checking your site manually for broken links can take a while, even more so as your site grows. Overcome this with Broken Link Checker, a web-based tool where you can get an easy-to-read web based report that displays any broken hyperlinks and where on/off your site these links are located.

Yoast SEO Plugin

Yoast is an important tool for any website, available as a WordPress plugin - it helps you optimise your page content, image title, and meta descriptions. It will also automatically create and update your sites XML sitemap which is useful.

SEMrush

SEMrush offers a variety of metrics to help you understand your website, competition, general market, and industry. You can get an idea of a sites overall organic traffic, identify competitors, and analyze their performance. If a site’s performing well, have a look at what keywords are driving traffic; this can help you to identify keyword opportunities for your own campaigns.

Followerwonk

Followerwonk is an extremely useful tool that allows you to discover great insights into your Twitter followers and their behaviour. Delve into the data and see when your Twitter followers are most active, or where in the world they are located; use it to implement a social strategy and capitalise on the information you have. If you’re Twitter following is most active at 7pm – make sure your Twitter account is active at that time.

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo allows users to find content that has acquired the most shares in the last 24 hours, three months, six months, or even a year. This is an extremely useful tool if you want to capitalise on trending topics. It’s also a great tool for researching trending topics, for blog posts and creative content assets.

Majestic

Majestic is one of the best link intelligence tools available online. There’s a free version available where you can find a variety of different data, such as referring domains, backlinks, link history and anchor texts. Links play an important part in most SEO campaigns, so if you want to analyse your own sites backlinks, as well as your competitors, this should be a tool in your arsenal.

Bit.ly

What a brilliant performance from Jules ODwyer and Matisse, can they be this years winners? #BGTfinal. http://t.co/pSr9FBEqY3

— William Hill Betting (@WillHillBet) May 31, 2015

Bit.ly is an extremely popular tool and is very easy to use. As a link shortener it’s extremely useful when you want to post an affiliate link. Users are able to track which links get clicked, whether it be on social media or on-site. Bit.ly also offers basic analytics so you can delve into the data and monitor the performance of each link closely.

Hootesuite

It can be difficult to keep your social campaigns organised having so much content to post through your social channels. Hootesuite is a web-based social media management tool which offers a number of benefits, including the ability to monitor multiple accounts across different social networks. This is an extremely convenient tool for any affiliate that finds themselves juggling multiple accounts across a variety of social networks.

Link Sleuth

Link Sleuth is primarily used for identifying broken links, however it can be used to gather some really valuable information about your site. Using this tool you are able to export the crawl into Microsoft Excel, where you’re able to assess the length of your title tags across the whole site, identify any 302 redirects, generate an XML sitemap and so much more.

Copyscape

Copyscape is an online plagiarism checker that crawls the web to find similar content elsewhere. Given the URL or text of the original content, Copyscape returns a list of web pages that contain similar text to all or parts of this content. Copyscape is a very useful tool, especially if you are regularly producing quality content and want to ensure you’re you are meeting Google’s content quality guidelines.

Piktochart

Piktochart is a fantastic tool for anyone with little design experience who wants to create a data driven piece of content. You can choose from over 400 fully customisable templates, icons and graphics, and create striking content for you to share on your site and through your social channels.

Running a multichannel iGaming strategy can take time and effort but these tools can definitely help to ease the burden. If you use any tools that we’ve missed, why not let us know in the comments?