On the latest episode of iGaming Daily, the show’s resident SEO expert, Ivana Flynn, was joined by Rhino Entertainment’s Director of SEO, Marta Szmidt, to discuss why brand protection is a “crucial” aspect of effective SEO.

“Brand protection is essential for any business,” began Szmidt. “Brand protection monitors and controls the usage of your brand name across search results. It can be Google or any other search engine.

“Brand protection combines all the actions, not only from an SEO point of view but also from marketing, PR and a legal point of view, to ensure that your brand is correctly represented online. 

“Brand protection helps you to protect your branded traffic and visibility and integrity of your brand on the internet. The bigger your brand, the more you should invest in your brand protection as well. It is important because it also helps you to protect the misuse of your brand identity.”

Szmidt also explained that brand protection should begin even before a new brand is launched. This involves securing the brand’s keywords through the use of trademarks and copyrights.

She added: “Another good idea would be to create a Wikipedia page. It’s free and you can control the narrative about your brand.

“And you can insert important information [such as] links to pages or websites that you want to protect. I know it’s not easy to get, but [a Wikipedia page] runs excellently in Google search results.”

Brand protection is also key due to the fear of “brand jacking”, which is where third-party sites steal your brand identity.  According to Szmidt, this is especially important given the inability of search engines to deal with this threat.

She said: “I have noticed that Google can not react to these attacks. I even see government websites being hacked and there’s absolutely nothing that Google wants to do about it.

“I think there are, in India, at least 20 to 25 websites that they run for big casino names and they’re up for months and nothing is done from Google sites, they are just there. You cannot contact the government websites, especially in India because you don’t want to be very visible to the government.

“So it’s a big issue and I have the feeling that Google has been very spammy with the search results. Not only brand jacking but also parasite SEO can be used for it and it creates a mess.”