While large budgets are allocated for marketing and advertising, small investments in SEO can bring games to a much wider audience. Considering that Google plays a large role in the gaming field, using SEO strategies for gaming sites is one of the most effective ways to increase SEO visibility and authority.
Steam Page Optimization
With this process, which we can call Steam SEO, you can optimize many areas, including the subcategories of your game store on Steam. By creating highly readable game descriptions about your game, you can ensure that your page ranks higher in both Steam searches and search engine results. Since this area is very valuable, it will be useful to do professional keyword research :
Make sure to customize the meta description of your game. Even plan A/B tests if necessary:
In-game achievements will also create a search volume overseas chinese in uk data on their own. These volumes may seem very low; however, when you think that your users will stay in the game much longer to achieve this achievement, you can create pages on your site that include information and even guiding tips about these achievements:
If your budget allows, definitely translate your game into different languages. This way, your Steam store will be at the top of the search results in the local language since you are offering a localized experience in the relevant country. You can prioritize and plan this according to Conversion or the population/game play statistics of the country where that language is spoken:
You may consider similar suggestions if you publish your games on sites like the Epic Store.
Creating Wiki Pages
You can create a knowledge base by predicting what your target audience might search for regarding your game. The scenario regarding the knowledge base is wide, especially historical games are more likely to get much more visibility in SEO when we consider their volumes.
For example, someone playing Empire Total War can learn how to switch from Republic to Constitutional Monarchy from a guide on the game's main site. In this way, you will keep your users on your site. In fact, if you have different DLCs for the game, you can earn money from these packages by promoting them on the site.
Additionally, in games that are close to real life or have a historical background, you can get much more visibility with some words, as real search terms and in-game search terms may overlap. Like “Ottoman Empire”:
For games where characters are at the forefront, I definitely recommend creating pages specific to different characters. You can attract the attention of users by producing game-related content such as game reviews, guides, tips, and tactics.
Monitoring Communities, Reddit and Forums
What are people playing your game talking about? Maybe your users are discussing a bug that your testing team passed but no one else thought of. You can follow what your users want with these bugs on Reddit or related game forums. If you have the solution to the problems on your own site, you can create teams that answer these questions using relevant URLs and get backlinks naturally.
You can organize Game quizzes to increase interaction with your community. For example, users can test their game knowledge with tests such as how well you know CS:GO. Since users will search to find the results of these tests, volume will again be used to our advantage.
Competition Analysis
Of course, there may not be as many specific competitors in the gaming industry as an e-commerce site; however, this is enough to evaluate the available data. Games that could be competitors such as CS:GO and Valorant can analyze their web pages at regular intervals. For example, if you have a simulation game, you can constantly analyze the game sites that are close to you with tools such as Ahrefs or Semrush. In this way, you can find content gaps and produce content related to these gaps.
Hreflang and Technical SEO
Since technical SEO is a huge topic, I won’t go into detail; however, make sure your sites are technically ready for Googlebot and other search engine bots. In the example below, we can see that although the site has Turkish language support, there is a lack of hreflang :
In fact, if your robots.txt file contains commands that prevent search engines such as Yandex or Bing from crawling your site and you provide services in that language, be sure to change these commands. If you do not have a robots.txt file, I recommend you create one immediately:
What Do Users Ask?
You can answer these questions by analyzing what users are asking about your game on Google. In this way, you can always be at the top of the list for brand-related queries and gain full traffic to your site by keeping your target audience on your site:
