Written by Chris Mawson, Head of SEO at ICS-digital & MD of Power Up Gaming
While there are practical tips you can put to use when marketing your indie game, taking efforts to the next level can feel daunting.
It’s easy to sink money into paid ads, influencer partnerships or PR launch campaigns. When these land, the buzz they generate can be a godsend, but when they don’t, having such a financial outlay can create serious budgetary challenges – often before you’ve even got off the ground.
Affordable video game marketing services do exist, but it’d also be worth considering how organic channels, which you can set up yourself, can also play an important role in your overall strategy.
Today, we’ll be looking specifically at SEO (search engine optimisation): the art of improving your visibility in online search – predominantly Google – to drive traffic, i.e. eyeballs, to your website.
Having your game’s landing or store page stand out is vital in today’s burgeoning – but also incredibly crowded – indie game landscape. How do you achieve this in a cost-efficient way?
First, a little about the author. My career spans two major disciplines: that of being the Head of SEO for an international digital marketing agency, but also being a video game news website owner, the latter of which relies almost exclusively on acquiring users through organic search.
It’s for this reason I feel I’m uniquely placed to advocate for the importance of SEO in your indie game marketing plan – and hope to be able to share some top tips (and a fair share of mistakes!) from the experience I’ve had in the industry over the past decade.
In this first entry, I’ll touch on the broad benefits of maintaining a coherent organic search strategy. As we get into future months, I’ll get into some practical tips you can take away for your own campaigns and game launches.
How SEO Can Help Your Indie Game Stand Out
1. Increase Visibility without Continuous Spending
When talking to clients, I often compare paid media channels such as Google and Meta to a faucet. You turn the tap (i.e. top up your account with money), and the water (i.e. traffic) keeps flowing. But as soon as you withdraw your investment, the water doesn’t just trickle. It – and your potential customers – are completely shut off at the source.
That’s not the case with SEO. While you may invest conservatively in various aspects of devising and executing an organic strategy, you don’t necessarily have to spend continuously to maintain your traffic.
I’ll take a step back to explain. Search engines use a complex ranking algorithm to decide where your web page should rank for a particular topic or query (commonly referred to as ‘keywords’).
Within these systems, the perceived authority of your site and the quality of your content are probably the most important factors to take into account. In very simple terms: the more your content delights and engages your users, the higher you’ll rank in organic search, and the more traffic you’ll drive to your site.
While the likes of Google constantly evolve and update their algorithms, the uplift you’ll see from ranking on page 1 may well last months (or even years) past the publication date of your content. You may periodically invest in refreshing content and driving more overall authority for your site, but you don’t have to keep topping up your account balance – nor do you pay when a user clicks on your result.
2. Target Your Desired Audience
SEO allows you to reach players who are actively seeking out specific games to play. Whether they are already looking for your game by title, or want some advice on the best games to experience in a certain genre, a strong organic presence allows you to capture potential customers very close to the point of conversion (i.e. making a purchase).
By targeting keywords that are relevant to your game’s niche, you can get your indie title in front of those who are likely to be interested in actually buying it at that moment.
But what about players who are a little more undecided? A common challenge with other marketing channels is knowing exactly which stage in the purchase funnel a user is at; with SEO, you can create content that caters to all different intentions, ensuring people land on the page most relevant to their search query.
3. Build Authority & Trust
Come on, you have to admit it: we’re all a little bit sceptical about clicking on ads, whether they’re on social media or directly in our search engine result pages.
With that in mind, potential players are more likely to trust – and therefore engage with – indie games that appear high in organic results, rather than sponsored listings.
Not only that, but as more users spend more time on your site checking out your game, the whole process becomes a positive feedback loop, or virtuous cycle. Search engine algorithms make use of user engagement metrics as part of their ranking decisions, so the higher the number of players you’re able to drive and keep on your site, the more other pages will benefit, in a very symbiotic manner.
4. Provide Global Reach
While different geolocations and languages have many individual nuances, the same principles to achieving organic success through SEO apply regardless. By optimising your game-related content for keywords in multiple languages, you can exponentially increase your site or store page’s international traffic, attracting customers beyond your ‘home’ market.
Of course, in these cases you’ll need to make sure your game is actually suitable for those players, through an effective translation and localisation strategy. Otherwise you’ll risk upsetting users and damaging the credibility you’ve worked so hard to achieve.
So, How Can I Use SEO to Make My Game Rank Better?
I’d suggest the following resources on getting started with some fundamental principles of the discipline, including keyword analysis, SEO content creation, and more:
Join me next time as we’ll start to look at how you can put some of these skills into practice, and actually start to take advantage of the benefits SEO can bring to your indie game.
What are your thoughts?