Maros Gasparik: "The content we present to our visitors is the most important aspect of our website"

Meet Maros Gasparik, the Head of Content at Casino Guru. Maros holds a crucial role in crafting cornerstone content, while also leading a team of expert writers and content specialists. His keen eye ensures that everything presented on Casino Guru is well-written, factual, and accurate.

In this interview, Maros delves into his beginnings and collaboration with Casino Guru, shedding light on the importance of a data-based approach within content creation, which sets Casino Guru apart in the industry. He emphasizes Casino Guru's goal to help people understand complex gambling principles and make smart decisions when it comes to gambling.

What drives Maros and his team? What are they currently working on, and what future projects have they lined up? Is "content is king" truly the mantra of Casino Guru, and what does that phrase really signify? Let's find out!

Q: How did you get into content creation, both in general and more specifically within the gambling industry?

Actually, the two are the same. I was pretty active online since a young age, creating websites for fun, translating subtitles for a TV show, and so on, but my first "proper" writing job was for a website about poker, which made sense as I had a genuine interest in the subject. However, I don’t remember how specifically I found myself writing about it. Perhaps I just saw an ad online and responded to it, who knows?

This was all while I was still at school. Over the following years, I used content writing to earn some money while studying at the university. By the time I finished my studies, I realized that it was something I could be pretty good at, so I decided to pursue a career as a freelance writer.

The next few years were filled with countless writing and content jobs related to a huge range of subjects, but I found my way back to the gambling industry and started specializing in it.

Q: When did you start working for Casino Guru? What brought you to this job?

It started pretty randomly – with a post I saw in a Facebook group back in 2017. One of the founders of the project asked for help. Back then, it was a relatively small project, and our director was writing some of the content himself. He was happy with the information contained in one of the articles, but he was looking for ways to improve the presentation and make the article more "readable".

I responded to him, saying I was happy to take a look at it and see if I can be of any help. We exchanged many, many messages about the article and the entire Casino Guru project. Then, we set up a meeting to discuss the article and some other content issues in person and decided to work together on a long-term basis. Back then, I still had many other clients, but my involvement with Casino Guru has grown over the years, eventually becoming the project’s Head of Content.

The funny thing is that when I was responding to Jan back in 2017, I did not do it with a vision of making money or finding a new job. I just wanted to offer quick help for the sake of helping someone who needed it, and that was it. Funny how things play out sometimes.

Q: What does content creation for Casino Guru include, and which types of content do you primarily focus on?

Casino Guru is a very data-oriented project. The most important content we have and utilize is all the information we have about online casinos, casino games, casino bonuses, and everything else. There are separate teams that focus on the data. The Content Team then works – together with developers, designers, and other teams – on presenting the information to our visitors correctly and clearly. In this aspect of our work, we cooperate closely with other departments to make sure our content is as good as it can be.

Then, with a team of internal and external writers and content specialists, we write content for various pages. The most common are pages that list casinos, bonuses, or games that meet certain requirements and satisfy a user looking for something. The content we write usually appears under the listed items and provides additional information to users who want to learn more about the subject.

We also write educational content explaining the basics of online gambling, how casino bonuses work, how to play various games, how to gamble safely, and so on. Of course, there are other things we do, like our educational YouTube videos, ZOOMin articles, and many others.

Q: What priorities do Casino Guru's writers have in mind when creating content? What values do they emphasize and what kind of information do they typically provide to users?

Over the years, we’ve worked with many writers, and it’s difficult to generalize what’s important to them without our intervention. There are some things I deeply care about, and which are part of Casino Guru’s values, such as emphasis on factual correctness and not trying to persuade people to gamble. Sadly, these are not very common values in the gambling industry, judging by many of the writers we encounter.

Many writers, who have previously written content about online casinos and gambling, are used to writing something closer to a sales copy. Something that gets people to start playing. Something that presents a casino or anything else the content is about in the best way possible. It makes sense from the business perspective, but it goes against our value of informing instead of promoting, so we need to start our cooperation with other writers by explaining these values to them and making sure they are followed.

Our goal is to provide the users – who usually come to us because they are searching for something – with the best possible content that gives them all the information they need to make an informed decision. Once a writer understands that they are probably a good fit for the team, as long as they can also write well and know their way around the gambling industry.

Q: What essential qualities, skills, and experience should every competent content creator have?

In short, writing skills and experience, knowledge of the gambling industry, SEO basics, and the ability to learn and adapt.

Of course, as we collaborate with writers, they must be good at writing. They must be able to create content that is interesting, as well as easy to read and understand. They also need to understand how online casinos work and how things are connected in the industry, so that they can write articles that contain the right, truthful information. Also, as the majority of users come to Casino Guru from search engines, they should also be aware of at least basic SEO principles.

Now, regarding the ability to learn and adapt – of course, not all writers meet the requirements I just mentioned. But there are things we can teach them by providing feedback not only to fix the current mistakes, but also as a learning mechanism that improves our content and processes over time and enables us to continually create and fine-tune content that meets our requirements and is in line with our values.

Q: Who is a part of the Content Team and what are they participating in?

The internal Content team currently consists of 6 people – Mirka, Denis, Nikolaj, Denisa, Rasta, and me. Together, we take care of Casino Guru’s content, make sure it’s up-to-date and factually correct, handle issues and new projects with development and design, and write the most important pieces of content.

However, we do not write all the content ourselves. We work with great external writers and experts in their fields we’ve managed to find over the years. They are not part of the internal group which regularly meets in person, but they are definitely part of the team.

And I can’t forget our translators. Casino Guru is available in 17 languages, so we need to make sure the content gets translated from English to the other 16 languages, too. Not all content gets translated, but much of it does, so we work with 1 to 4 translators for each language, depending on the workload.

We are quite an international and location-independent team. Some of the other internal team members work remotely, and the writers and translators are from all around the world. International team for an international website, right?

Q: During your work, what tools and resources do you use to streamline the content creation process and manage the substantial volume of content handled by Casino Guru?

Where to begin. [laughter] Of course, as we mostly create written content, we work with text editors such as Microsoft Word and Google Docs to write, review, proofread, and finalize the content that then gets published. Of course, we also work with other usual "office"software like Excel for various purposes.

To publish any content that appears on Casino Guru, we use our internal CMS which has been custom-built to manage a website as complex as Casino Guru, with a vast database of content related to casinos, bonuses, games, and many other areas.

To communicate with writers and manage their assignments, we use applications like Teams, Skype, and Trello. On top of that, we use a CAT tool Phrase (previously known as Memsource) to assign work to translators who help us localize our content into other 16 languages in which Casino Guru is available.

Last but not least, to monitor traffic, and our positions in search engines, and do SEO research, we use tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Ahrefs, or SERanking. I am probably forgetting plenty of things, but I would say these are the most important ones.

Q: What are you and your team currently working on?

Many things, as always. But I would say the most important one has to do with improving our internal processes and implementing new features to our CMS that will help us automate certain processes, make them more efficient, and help us better track the content we are working on through all parts of the workflow.

We are always working on many pieces of content with several writers, so it can be a challenge to keep track of everything and stay organized. The new features we are implementing together with our development team will make our lives much easier going forwards.

Also, we are working on redesigning certain parts of the Casino Guru website, and I am quite heavily involved in that.

Q: What innovations will you focus on in the future, and how will they impact your team's growth and scope of work?

We are almost always looking for improvements and new members for the Content Team. Because of our requirements and approach to presenting information about online gambling in a certain way, it can be quite a challenge to find suitable writers and translators. Because of that, the hiring process is pretty much ongoing.

That said, I plan to focus on improving our reviews of online casinos, so that we can provide even more value to our visitors who come to us when looking for an online casino or a review of a specific site they are considering.

Our casino review team collects a huge amount of information during the review process, but, at the moment, not all of this information is presented to our visitors in our casino reviews. The aim is to improve this over the next months, but it will be quite a difficult and time-consuming process to make it all a reality.

I will be working on the concept myself, but its implementation will involve other members of the Content Team, as well as colleagues from other teams.

Q: I'd love to hear your thoughts on something that came up in a previous interview – the saying "content is king." Do you share that viewpoint as well?

Well, it would be strange if I wouldn’t agree with that, wouldn’t it? [laughter] I definitely believe that content is king. Our visitors come to Casino Guru looking for information or entertainment, and most of that has to do with the content we offer to them. The better the content, the more value we can offer to them. And satisfying our visitors is not only good for them, but also for our business.

A satisfied visitor will happily return to Casino Guru the next time they are looking for something related to online casinos, etc. The benefits are endless.

However, I don’t want to make it seem that I believe our Content Team is more important than other parts of the Casino Guru team. We create some helpful content on our own, but most visitors don’t come to Casino Guru to read educational articles, no matter how good they are.

They come to browse casinos, find bonus offers or play free games and so on. We are involved in presenting these things to our visitors, but all of this content is enabled by the work done by teams that add casinos to our database and collect information about them, maintain and grow our catalog of free-to-play casino games, discover new bonus offers to add to our database, and so on. This data, and many other things, is what Casino Guru is built on.

With that being said, regardless of who creates it, I am positive that the content we present to our visitors is the most important aspect of our website, or virtually any website for that matter.

This interview is part of Casino Guru Insiders, a series of interviews during which experts from Casino Guru share their unique workflow, reveal insider information, and offer an exclusive overview of experience-packed know-how.

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