8 Reasons Why Your Entertainment or Game Company’s Site Needs SEO

Let's face it: marketing is hard. In fact, if you're a game designer, it might be the hardest part of the game selling process; and a family entertainment center like a bowling alley or laser tag arena lives or dies on how aware potential customers are of your existence. The days of just selling your game to Hasbro or putting an ad for your escape room in the local paper are gone; the market is glutted with indie game designers and independent FECs, and the first place everyone is looking for anything is the internet.

So how do you compete with market saturation? Sure, you can buy ads on a website or on Facebook, but everyone hates those. You could buy sponsored results on Google, but those are expensive, and very few people trust them. And the thing is, those are all expensive and none of them last very long once the money runs out.

What you want is for people to find you naturally while searching Google or Yahoo (or, for board and video game developers, Kickstarter, Amazon, and Steam). A truly optimized website or Steam page will cost much less than an ad campaign, while paying off in dividends for far, far longer.

So let's take a look at why you want SEO for your site.

Building Your Brand

SEO works hand-in-hand with traditional brand-building techniques to get people talking about your venue or your game.

For your website itself, if you continually create content that's in line with what your target audience is looking for, they'll be more likely to see it. And the more of it you make, the more they'll see, the more likely they'll be to remember you, and the more likely they'll be to talk about you to their friends, or post about you on their blogs.

Other people's blogs or reviews are its own form of SEO as well. The right strategy can help you reach out to people who can link back to your website, meaning that their audience becomes your audience.

Earn More Traffic

An optimized website shows up higher on Google, meaning more people see the site, meaning more people have a chance to visit your venue or buy your product. The effect even snowballs: the more people who come to your site, the higher Google ranks you.

The results on this are even proven. Siege Media did a case study where they created a new website and took it 100,000 visitors in 12 months, solely using SEO tactics.

See that 88.37% organic on the chart above? That means that nearly 90% of the people who were coming to the website by the end of the experiment were finding them through Google search.

Less Expensive Than Ad Space

It's fairly easy to buy ad space on Google. We call this "Pay-Per-Click" advertising, or PPC, because you pay every time someone clicks on the ad. It works fast—if you start a PPC campaign, you'll see the results right away.

The problem? It's also expensive. If you're lucky enough not to get into a bidding war with Hasbro or Main Event that will quickly drive the price out of your budget, you'll still need to keep paying, and paying, and paying. And the minute you stop paying, all of that traction the ad gives you disappears.

SEO is a slower solution, but it's also significantly cheaper—and it lasts much, much longer. Over the course of a year, proper SEO maintenance of your website will cost you far less than a PPC campaign run for the same amount of time. And if you stop paying for SEO services, you'll still have all that traffic incoming for months to years afterward.

Helps Your Target Audience Find Your Site

62% of consumers turn to search engines first when they're researching their purchases. That means that, if you want to reach the majority of your target audience, you need to be on a search engine for them to find.

A good website, ranking highly on Google, will do more to help you sell your product or venue than a hundred newspaper or bus stop ads.

Boosts Credibility and Authority

Marketing doesn't go in a straight line from "heard about it" to "buying or reserving it." The truth is, it can take months of a prospect hearing about your venue or product before they're ready to make a move.

While this can be frustrating, it's also an opportunity. Your prospects will be looking at tens of similar family entertainment venues or hundreds of similar games, and the right SEO strategy can build up trust in their minds, so that when they are ready to make a decision, you are the one they decide to turn to.

Helps You Stay Ahead of Competitors

Speaking of competitors, SEO is a fairly straightforward way to stay ahead of the competition. Why? Simple: the Google results page is literally a quality ranking page. Every step you move up the Google rankings gets you a higher percentage of prospects clicking and entering your site, and a lower percentage for whichever competitor you just displaced.

Improves User Experience

Many people think that SEO is about trying to "game" or "trick" the Google algorithm, but that hasn't been the case for more than a decade. The Google algorithm favors websites that give a better user experience, according to a complicated set of metrics that Game Brands keeps track of for you. If you want more traffic, improving your SEO can help you make your website the best it can be.

This has a number of positive side-effects, but the most relevant one is that it won't just mean more people come to your site: it will mean that the people who come to your site are more likely to buy. They'll stay on the site for longer, they'll read more about your venue or your game, they'll have an easier time getting to the "make a reservation" or "checkout" page.

Easy to Measure the Impact

If you buy an ad in the newspaper, you can't tell how many people are calling in because of the ad; you have to guess. With SEO, you can immediately see why people are coming to your site, what sources are leading to better results, and adjust your strategy on the fly.

Why Hire Game Brands?

The major problem with SEO is that it's complicated. Each search engine has a different algorithm, and the algorithm is constantly changing. Websites require constant maintenance to stay on top of the rankings, and it's time—and expertise—that you don't need to be spending when you've got us.

Game Brands isn't just any SEO agency. We're the only US-based agency exclusively serving the family entertainment, board game, and video game industries. That means we have established relationships with the reviewers who can make your game or venue go viral, and we understand the unique needs entertainment ventures have. More than that, we have the exact expertise in SEO techniques that you need to help your website rank higher.

So let us take it off your plate. You'll see long-term results that will improve your traffic, your conversion rate, and your revenue for years to come.