The world of horse racing is changing, and it is a good thing. In order for the sport to adapt to modern times it needs to evolve, even when we are talking about a sport closely tied to tradition like horse racing.
After all, for a sport to stay relevant it needs the support and passion from fans. It is like an equal exchange. Fans get excitement, adrenaline rush, entertainment, and a way to make money from horse racing as a sport, and horse racing is more popular meaning that it can make more money through organizing races and paid partnerships.
However, the old marketing ways where horse racing events were published in the newspaper are long gone. Nowadays, organizers are leveraging SEO techniques in order to boost their online presence and attract organic traffic to their website where they can convert visitors into fans or customers.
So, how can you use SEO to boost the visibility of horse racing events? Let’s find out.
Understand SEO Basics
In order to use SEO effectively, you first need to understand what it is and how it works. In reality, it is quite simple to understand. Each article that is published online is crawled by search engines like Google and Bing.
These crawlers analyze your content and place it in front of the viewer who searches for your content.
So, what is SEO? SEO or search engine optimization is an array of strategies that you can use to make sure Google, Bing, or other search engines understand your content and present it in front of the best audience.
In other words, SEO helps showcase your content to the right viewers through organic search.
But what are the main pillars of SEO strategy in 2024? Well, the SEO process can be constructed by focusing on a few important things, but that doesn’t mean that the strategy will remain the same at all times.
After all, search algorithms are changing, and so must your SEO strategy.
Here are some SEO techniques that are proven to work and can be used in the horse racing industry.
Helpful Content (Quality)
Google, which is the leader in the search engine world has been focusing on helpful content for a long time. In other words, Google will value websites that produce high-quality and well-researched content that will actually help viewers.
We live in an era where AI dominates the world, and generating articles through ChatGPT won’t cut the cheese anymore. We need something more direct, more personal, and more helpful. This March Google introduced their Core and Helpful content update, where a lot of the websites experienced massive fluctuation in the SERPs.
That’s all because Google sees the content as spam or something that doesn’t provide additional value over the competitors.
So, in the horse racing industry, brands should focus on providing helpful content to all fans of the sport, and not trying to manipulate the search engine algorithm by adding a bunch of keywords.
Social Media
Over the last couple of years, social media has become an integral part of SEO. Why? Well, search engines also see the number of people that interact with your brand on social media websites like Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok.
It helps you boost authority. That’s why we see brands like the Kentucky Derby being heavily advertised on social media. It seems like at Churchill Downs, they really know what they are doing.
Regular updates, horse racing betting offers, interactive posts, and engagement with your audience can lead to natural backlinking and improved SEO performance. Remember, SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. A consistent posting schedule and a steady stream of quality content will keep your audience engaged and help maintain your search engine rankings over time.
Link Building
Search engines have always used an age-old metric to measure the domain authority of a website. How? Well, if you have many high-authority websites that link to your domain, Google and other search engines will view your site as a reliable source of information, which makes sense.
Therefore, every horse racing brand online must invest time and money into building links. However, this doesn’t mean that you should head over and buy thousands of low-authority links on spammy websites.
You should find a way to place a link on high-authority websites that are somehow connected to your horse racing topic. This is a bit harder to achieve and takes a lot of time, but it is definitely doable.
After all, providing high-quality and helpful content will get you links eventually without you even lifting a finger.
Entertainment First
Horse racing brands should also focus on entertainment and user experience first. If you are trying to build a brand and you are mostly focused on selling your products or promoting your brand, you won’t succeed.
Take a look at Red Bull or Coca-Cola. They don’t share their products on social media. Instead, they showcase adrenaline jumps, funny or informative videos etc. That way, a horse racing brand will increase its reach since fans can get something in return for interacting with your content.
