The Art of War (iGaming SEO edition)

This article contains excerpts from the forthcoming book: The Art of War (iGaming SEO Edition) which is currently being co-authoring by myself and some of the finest practitioners of SEO in the iGaming space. This interpretation is based closely on the original texts written in the 6th Century BC by Chinese military commander, Sun Tzu.

These ancient military teachings not only form the basis of all modern warfare but Sun Tzu’s principals are often applied in business and marketing and have led to this ancient book becoming a global bestseller and compulsory reading for many Japanese corporate executives.

For almost all online businesses, victory or defeat often rests on the success or failure of SEO. I can think of no business where these principals apply more closely than in a space where battles are fought more fiercely than in any other field of business. A single position short of your target may cost tens of thousands and may, ultimately, cost you not only your job, but also the jobs of your entire team.

This article contains excerpts from the forthcoming book: The Art of War (iGaming SEO Edition) which is currently being co-authoring by myself and some of the finest practitioners of SEO in the iGaming space. This interpretation is based closely on the original texts written in the 6th Century BC by Chinese military commander, Sun Tzu.

These ancient military teachings not only form the basis of all modern warfare but Sun Tzu’s principals are often applied in business and marketing and have led to this ancient book becoming a global bestseller and compulsory reading for many Japanese corporate executives.

For almost all online businesses, victory or defeat often rests on the success or failure of SEO. I can think of no business where these principals apply more closely than in a space where battles are fought more fiercely than in any other field of business. A single position short of your target may cost tens of thousands and may, ultimately, cost you not only your job, but also the jobs of your entire team.

This article explores the fundamental principles laid out in the first three chapters of the Art of War, these are: Laying Plans, Waging War and Attack by Stratagem. (A free downloadable version of all 13 chapters of the Art of War (iGaming SEO editions) will be made available at: http://artofwar.biz.)

These ancient military methods make up the basis of my own personal approach to SEO and I advise taking time to understand and apply Sun Tzu’s principals in the context of your business. I have purposefully remained as close to the original text as possible; in many instances, the original translation required no alteration as the principals conveyed are universal.
 

Chapter 1: Laying Plans

Sun Tzu said: “The Art of War is of vital importance to the state. It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin.
Hence, it is a subject of inquiry which can on no account be neglected.” The art of war, then, is governed by five constant factors, to be applied to one’s deliberations, when seeking to determine the conditions in the field. These are:

●●The Moral Law
●●Heaven
●●Earth
●●The Commander
●●Method and Discipline

The Moral Law or business culture driven from the top down is a state of mind and appears intangible, but this drives the rest of the business to be in complete alignment with the CEO and his vision, so that they will follow him without question.

Heaven signifies the changing environmental conditions, originally referring to weather and seasons, day and night. In the context of doing battle in SEO, they refer to quality signals, ranking factors, filters, algorithms, infrastructure updates such as ‘caffeine’ and, for instance, how this will impact the size of the search engine’s index or average crawl rates. While at any single point in time any one of these factors remains constant and inescapable, they are also subject to change without notice or prior warning.

Earth originally referred to distances, great and small; danger and security; open ground and narrow passes; the chances of life and death. However, in the context of ‘Laying SEO Plans’ they may be considered as follows: your current rankings (in SERPs) in relation to your objectives, the norms and tolerances within your target query and SERP, even the quality of the traffic driven by your chosen keyword. Since this impacts the battlefield, lucrative keywords often cause the ground to become heavy and difficult to either cross or fight upon without depleting budget or resource.

The Commander: your Head of SEO/SEO Manager, whether in-house or external, their skill, experience, courage and strictness.
Methods of Discipline originally referenced the marshalling of the army in its proper divisions. This refers to your business processes, budgetary control, team structure and potential for internal career progression as well as external relationships with link brokers and webmasters or, indeed, anyone who assists in the supply of battle ordinance in whatever form that may be.

These five factors should be familiar to every SEO: if you know them, you’ll win; if you don’t, then you’ll lose. Therefore, when you are deliberating the competitive landscape, use these questions as the basis of comparison:

●●Which of the competing CEOs would have their entire team follow fearlessly, if only just to experience the outcome?
●●Between two competing businesses, which of the SEO Heads has the most ability?
●●With whom lie the advantages derived from Heaven and Earth?
●●On which side is discipline most rigorously enforced?
●●Which team is stronger?
●●On which side are managers and executives more highly trained?
●●In which team is there greater constancy both in reward and punishment?

It is from these seven considerations that you will be able to accurately forecast victory or defeat in your SEO efforts. The SEO who takes this on-board and acts on it will win; you should hire such an SEO. The SEO who does not act upon it will be defeated; you should fire such an SEO.

Additionally, you should be mindful and take advantage of any helpful circumstances which present themselves and modify your plans where appropriate. These include the renegotiation of commercial deals where changes in circumstances occur.

All SEO is based on deception. Hence, when you practice black hat, let it be known you are a practitioner of the purest white hat; when you are buying sponsored posts, make it appear that you are guest blogging; when you buy premium placed links, make it appear that you earned the links; when you have a big budget, make it appear that your budget is small; if you are a fat old guy approaching webmasters for links via email or chat, make them believe you are a hot young blonde.

De-optimise your on-page SEO and create the illusion that you are no longer a threat; once the link agreement with the competitor is formalised, re-optimise and crush him. If your competitor’s link equity, budget or domain network is superior to yours, don’t compete directly.

●● If your opponent is easy irritated, wind him right up!
●●Pretend to be weak, so that he grows arrogant and prone to mistakes. Mistakes lead to penalties.
●●If your opponent is resting, don’t let him. Instead, invite him out for tequila shots.
●●If his team is united, separate it.
●●Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected.

If you are going to win using these methods, ensure that all your plans are held in the strictest confidence, starting with yourself and your team and finishing with all your suppliers and associates. Non-disclosure agreements (where possible) are crucial. Now, the SEO who wins the battle makes many calculations before the battle is fought; competitor intelligence, required link volumes, cost per link, cost of deploying a link, margin of error, estimated traffic, average lifetime value, estimated payback period of a player, annual link cost, inflation of link costs, cumulative cost of renewals, team salaries and annual pay review expectations and anticipated performance bonus pay outs.

The SEO who loses a battle doesn’t do their calculations beforehand. Doing your calculations leads to victory and not doing them leads to defeat. Attention to detail at these planning stages gives the best indication of whether or not you will succeed.

Chapter 2: Waging War

Sun Tzu said: “In the operations of war, there are in the field a thousand swift chariots, as many heavy chariots and a hundred thousand mail-clad soldiers.”
The business expenditure including staff salaries, agency fees, office space, computers, content, tracking software, accounting and payroll, competitor intelligence as well as link budgets, placement and administrative costs will reach as much as tens of thousands of pounds per month. Such is the cost of delivering above-the-fold rankings for a sought after primary iGaming keyword.

When you engage in actual link building, if page one rankings are long in coming, then your budgets will be depleted and your team’s enthusiasm will be dampened. Whether you are laying siege to page one or position one, you will exhaust your strength. Again, if the campaign is protracted, your budget will not be sufficient to equal the strain.

Now, when your link tenancies require renewal, your passion and enthusiasm dampened and your link budget depleted, other affiliates and operators will spring up to take advantage of your extremity. No SEO, however skilled, will be able to avoid the disaster which must ensue.
Thus, though we have heard of stupid haste in SEO, cleverness has never been associated with long delays. There is no instance of a business having benefited from an overly prolonged campaign. It is only one who is thoroughly acquainted with the evils of SEO that can thoroughly understand the profitable way to conduct it.

The skilful SEO does not request more budget from the CFO, neither is the frequency of his sponsored posts increased more than twice.

Find your own links and identify the powerful ones which make up the link profile of your competitors to ensure your team has enough link equity for its needs. If your marketing budget is stretched, leverage the existing relationships of an experienced link builder with abundant contacts in your market and territory.

Poverty in your accounts causes your campaign to be maintained by contributions from a distance. Contributing to the maintenance of your campaign at a distance causes the team to be exhausted and dismayed. You have two choices when running an international campaign: you either invest in local natives with existing webmaster and link broker relationships, or you do it the hard way i.e. you assign the work to your existing team, who will struggle and make no progress to the cost of your budget and their enthusiasm.

Note: I’ve heard it said that SEO isn’t a job; it’s a well-paid competitive sport, and this is so true. For this reason, state of mind is crucial. One enthusiastic team member is worth ten emotionally broken team members.

The local presence of major brands competing in a developing market causes link prices to escalate; and high prices cause your budget to be depleted. This will generally impact the affiliates before it impacts the operators – relationships, negotiation skills and buying power will offset this inflation, offering an advantage to those who hire SEO heads who are well connected, skilled negotiators with large databases of link sellers and international local resource. A wise SEO makes a point of foraging the competitor’s links, resource and suppliers; just one of your competitors’ link brokers could be worth a thousand links.

Now, in order to destroy the competitor, your team must be roused with anger, however, in order to make his defeat compelling to your team, they must be rewarded. Therefore, when targets are met in SEO, those who hit them should be rewarded. Our own positions in the SERPs should displace those of the competition and the competing site’s link profile should be mingled with ours. Poached suppliers and staff should be looked after and well treated.
This is called “using the conquered foe to augment one’s own strength”. In SEO, let your objective be victory, not lengthy campaigns. Thus, it may be known that the leader of an SEO team is the arbiter of the people’s fate, the man on whom it depends whether the business shall be in peace or in peril.
 

Chapter 3: Attack by Stratagem

Sun Tzu said: “In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy is not so good.”
So too, is it better to acquire a domain or brand than displace it; to poach your opposition’s key staff, than to allow them to drift off into another industry or company. To some degree (where possible), this also applies to the acquisition of any asset, including Twitter accounts, fan pages, etc. Too often are company assets such as these technically the property of individual staff members rather than the company, since they emerged at a time when no-one really understood the importance of these platforms.

Hence, to fight and conquer in all your SEO battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists of breaking the competitor’s resistance without placing a single link, potentially through acquisition of intact real estate or through acquisition and link equity purely for redirection.

As such, the highest form of SEO strategy is to repeatedly counter-attack based on the moves and stratagem of the competitor. The next is to isolate your competitor from his allies; the next is to attack when your competitor is at full strength. In particular, if you are trying to overcome a publicly traded company at the beginning of their financial year for a major casino term; this is likely to lead to a Pyrrhic victory. When taking position number one from your competitor, the commercial impact to your competitor is greatest; you should be prepared for retaliation proportional to their loss in revenue.

The worst policy of all is to besiege a heavily fortified number one position. The rule is to not besiege these ‘walled cities’ if it can possibly be avoided. The preparation of links can take up to three months to prepare and the acquisition of sites for link equity redirection may take three months more.

The SEO unable to control his irritation will deploy his links and/or redirects before sufficient link equity has been accrued. Many of them will have no impact and the position remains untaken, such is the disastrous effect of such a siege.

Therefore, the most skilful SEO subdues his opponent without buying links; he carefully displaces his competitor’s rankings, without laying siege to his prized and heavily defended number one ranking – he overthrows their market dominance without a lengthy campaign.

With his team and suppliers enthused and intact, without losing a single site to a penalty, he will dominate the market, covering a wealth of page one positions for a multitude of short-tail prized keywords. This is the method of attacking by stratagem.

It is the rule of SEO war that if your budget is ten times that of the competitor, surround him. Acquire the key web properties from which he derives most domain authority. Approach his link suppliers and assign head hunters to his staff (be sure to recruit the right people when acquiring personnel). Identify their link suppliers and brokers and commercially lock your competitor out of their own supply chain.

“If five to one, attack him”. Pull together all your resources and deploy a timed campaign to generate the maximum possible link velocity. Spend one or even two months preparing links, redirects, PR (where applicable), all your legacy link bait and deploy it all using sufficient anchor text and target URL diversity in a condensed period of time.

If you are twice as well resourced as your competitor, divide the resource into two. Use one half working towards positively impacting your position, and the other team to focus on negatively impacting your competitor’s position. This approach aims to double your relative velocity, bringing  victory in half the time.

“If equally matched, we can offer battle”, but only the most experienced SEO should consider this. He will have to use the sum total of his experience, skill and cunning if he is to win under these conditions. “If slightly inferior in numbers, we can avoid the enemy”. In the original text, the translation of this statement is ambiguous. Asian military scholars have suggested that it is better translated as ‘watch the enemy’ since guerrilla tactics would be the natural course of action.

“If quite unequal in every way, we can flee from him”. I often say, ‘picking a keyword is picking a fight; don’t pick a fight unless you know you can win’. In this instance, you should never attempt to engage in optimising for a keyword for which you are in no position to seriously compete. You would be better investing in other marketing activities, which would yield some return, however small.

To reiterate...
Always seek professional advice before hiring an SEO agency or hiring an in-house practitioner.

●●Picking a keyword is picking a fight.
●●Don’t pick a fight unless you’re sure you can win.