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Last Thursday, I joined the usual weekly SEO meetup in Chiang Mai.

We dove into some interesting topics, like recovering from Helpful Content Updates, ranking in the casino industry, and exploring parasite SEO strategies.

While researching the casino niche, Xavier Fichelle, Daniel Braga, and I stumbled upon a fascinating tactic involving YouTube channels. It's all about using them to rank for “Best casino” keywords and driving traffic to casinos through affiliate links.

I haven’t seen people talking about it, so I assume it’s a new one.

Let’s call it “Parasite Video SEO” for simplicity purposes.

In today’s article, I’ll break it down and show you how I think companies are using this strategy.

Parasite Video SEO - Casino niche analysis

As you might already know, Google is all about diversity in search results these days. That means YouTube videos, Chrome extensions, apps, social media posts, Reddit subreddits, and more can rank and get traffic directly from search—not just within their platforms. If this is news to you, check out my article on the topic: Mostly overlooked point from the latest Google event.

While chatting about the casino industry, Xavier Fichelle, Daniel Braga, and I decided to take a closer look at what ranks for the keyword “Best casino online.” What we found was pretty interesting.

In the SERP video section, we came across videos about the best online casinos—but they were posted on channels that had nothing to do with gambling.

Here’s what it looked like:

Both channels recently started posting a ton of video content about casinos, even though their main focus had always been music.

Here’s a look at how much traffic just one of these pages gets from Google and the keywords it ranks for, according to Ahrefs:

How does it actually work? Is it as simple as “post a video and watch the $$$ roll in”?

I dug deeper, and here’s what I think the process looks like: