News.ladbrokes.com
News.ladbrokes is a sports betting news site designed to deliver organic traffic via search engines and increase conversion of new customers. The site was launched for the 2010 World Cup and has met objectives of instantly-indexed pages, high search ranking for key words and conversion.
Ladbrokes wanted to improve the performance of its SEO site betting.ladbrokes and at the same time create a high quality sports news content site with integrated betting opportunities direct from content.
GP developed the project from inception to delivery, and continues to host, support, manage and create all content daily for the site. Highlights include:
- Delivered the site from greenlight to live launch in 9 weeks.
- Built site to integrate seamlessly with Ladbrokes.com sportsbook; created single login from sports.ladbrokes to news.ladbrokes and ability to bet from the new site.
- Designed and built architecture based on innovative customisation of open source software, WordPress, making the solution inexpensive, universal and easily scalable.
- Customised WordPress CMC to enable editors to control betting opportunities using Ladbrokes XML feeds.
- Created intelligent ‘widgets’ to display relevant betting markets at all times — even when pages were old and original markets displayed were closed.
- Created live in-play scoreboard mixing Ladbrokes live odds feeds, live score data from Ladbrokes 3rd party stats suppliers and graphics created by GP. Scoreboard can display any match content from scores, goalscorers + minutes, cards, subs, teams etc.
- GP SEO team worked collaboratively with Ladbrokes SEO team to develop the site on best practice SEO to index pages quickly, raise ranking while not competing with main Sportsbook, and decrease bounce to reduce PPC costs.
- Developed all elements of the site in HTML and JavaScript (including live scoreboard) with no reliance on flash.
The site has been a success, and in November 2010, GP launched a Spanish version, followed by an Irish version in May 2011.