Major sporting events feature athletes and teams battling for supremacy, but often they won’t be the only people competing for top billing. An entirely different game takes place on the web, an online competition that intensifies during these spectacles.

Sports SEO How-To’s

SEO can come in various forms and can be very costly. But it doesn’t have to be. Running an organic SEO campaign can earn and secure high-quality links or initiate conversations with industry-relevant stakeholders. Read on to learn how you can build your organic SEO strategy and reach your goals during major sporting events.

Linking:

• Aim for mentions with diverse anchor text within the main body of the content.
• If others reach out to you with link placement requests, investigate the site very carefully. Reputation, relevancy and geographic appropriateness should be the main criteria to review.
• Suggest and encourage linking to your blog, pressroom or main site, by referring to high-quality and relevant content.
• When it comes to placing links in your text, work with a 100/1 ratio. Make it a rule that for every 100 words you are only permitted to add one link, otherwise it’s spammy.

 Keywords:

• Focus on keywords, but not at the expense of high-quality content. High trending keywords and topics are a good starting point – check google.com/trends for daily searches.
• Incorporate long tail keywords, the semantically relevant cousins of keywords. For example the keyword “World Cup” may have a long tail version along the lines of “best site to keep track of World Cup scores.”

Outreach:

• Strike up a conversation with relevant thought leaders within your industry.
• Find blogs and platforms that are popular and initiate a conversation in the comments. Most authors keep an eye on comments and are pretty prompt about getting back to you.
• Don’t just comment in a praising manner. Leave thoughtful comments and people will be more inclined to visit your site.
• Be original. Nothing kills a good conversation more than being too obvious and repetitive.

Content:

• Keep your content relevant to the topic at hand.
• Quality always overrides quantity.
• Every time you put up fresh content on your site, it should be indexed by Google. Post it on G+, resubmit a sitemap to Google or fetch the URL of your domain in Google Webmaster’s Tools.

Creating an SEO strategy for major sporting events is essential for taking advantage of the immense business potential that these events offer. Prioritise creating keyword-friendly content and supplementing that with rich, appropriate links, and insightful outreach.