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SEO for Gaming Portals: 10 Helpful Tips (2024)

Apr 29 2024

What are the best practices for gaming portal SEO? Is this different from other types of websites’ SEO? How can you leverage the power of your game library to strengthen your portal SEO?

We always hear the principle of SEO is content. But how is it interpreted for gaming portals with different games in their collection? Since the introduction of web games (HTML5 games), we have witnessed their increasing use on websites with different objectives, even top websites like Facebook, Google, and YouTube. Therefore, we can consider games as another type of content that needs to be optimized for search engines. So, how can we do it? What practices should we consider when optimizing a gaming portal?

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Below, I listed the 10 most valuable tips about gaming portal SEO that will help you make a more dependable and productive SEO strategy and use that to increase your user base. Bear with me with the following.

#1: Before Any SEO Actions: Know Your Audience And Their Favorite Games

Stop all your SEO efforts if you don’t know your ideal audience. Attracting a not-well-recognized user through SEO is like proposing to an unknown girl behind the wall. You should have at least the following information for the first step:

1. What are their demographics (age, gender, location)?
2. Which category of games do they play (hardcore, mid-core, casual, hyper-casual)?
3. What are their favorite games?
4. How much do they play games daily?
5. How do they play games (console, PC, mobile)?
6. How do they usually get familiar with their favorite games (internet, family, friends)?

Armed with this information, you can craft a more precise and cost-effective SEO strategy. This strategy, in turn, can significantly increase your chances of converting visitors into players at a reasonable conversion rate.

Remember, the answers to these questions provide only the basic insights about your audience, but they are a crucial starting point.

During the time needed to achieve the highest performance in your SEO strategy, you should obtain much more detailed, helpful information about their gaming habits, favorite games, reasons why they play games, etc.

 

#2: Analyze Your Competitors Thoroughly

There is no need to reinvent the cycle. Many similar gaming portals exist that you can learn from and even imitate.

You must scrutinize your competitors’ websites, portals, social media accounts, marketing campaigns, advertisements, etc, to find out what makes them successful and know their strengths and weaknesses.

After completing your investigation, you should have enough knowledge to define your SEO strategy.

In the first step, you can focus on your competitors’ lacks and weaknesses and make them your strengths.

 

#3: Prepare Games That Your Audiences Search for And Like to Play

Choosing appropriate games for your audience is a primary action because your game collection highly affects your SEO decisions. Making the right decisions when preparing the portal’s games will simplify your SEO.

When you have a substantial game collection, including the most trending and desired games among your audience, they search for such games with similar keywords.

This will increase your SEO strategy’s chances of success because you have games that your ideal customer searches for.

If you do other things right, they will see your website on Google results and choose it to play their favorite games.

Fortunately, there are reliable HTML5 game license providers that you can use to prepare the games you need in the shortest time.

You can handpick games from their substantial game collection. Also, they all provide handy additional services (like white-label games, reskin, localization, etc.) that let you customize and adapt games based on your target and needs.

#4: Care About Your Portal Responsiveness And Mobile-friendliness

Search engines don’t like navigating their dear users to a website they won’t like. Hence, search engines constantly analyze destination websites’ performance to meet their standards.

One essential prerequisite of any search engine like Google is website responsiveness so that all devices can run it properly.

Therefore, search engines consider a particular score for responsive, mobile-friendly websites, which affects their SEO rank.

Making your website responsive and mobile-friendly is also critical and beneficial for you! Besides improving your SEO rank, using it will ensure that your new users won’t get confused and won’t leave your portal at first glance.

They will spend more time on your portal, and if you do other things right, they will play more games and watch more ads!

 

#5: Write Helpful, Expressive, SEO-friendly Descriptions for Your Games

I know gamers and 99.9% of people prefer playing the game itself to experience the gameplay instead of reading boring texts. But you don’t write content on your game pages for humans; instead, you put it there to be read by bots!

Since machines find understanding game concepts challenging, thoughtful related texts on your portal’s game pages, let search engines know about the content you provide to users.

Writing SEO-friendly texts that bring good users for you is an expertise that needs enough knowledge about the industry, products that should be showcased, and copywriting.

 

#6: Create Exciting Video Content of Your Games

Nothing can motivate a player to play your game like an exciting video.

I don’t discuss expensive, glorious, shining videos that empty your budget. I mean, you can make good videos by just recording your walkthrough. There are a lot of ideas that can help you create quality videos that encourage your users to play a game.

As a suggestion, besides recording a walkthrough, putting your face at the corner of the video and talking about your feelings about the game can make it engaging fantastically.

Don’t forget to use call-to-actions (CTAs) in your videos to encourage users to play the game. Without a CTA, your efforts are wasted!

Get the Help of Influencers and Streamers

Social media influencers and YouTube streamers are excellent options for making high-quality walkthrough videos of your games if you work with appropriate persons with identical user bases to your gaming portal.

Regardless of the higher cost, influencers and streamers generally make much better videos to attract more users.

#7: Be Active on Your Audiences’ Most Popular Social Media Platforms

Being active on social media is one of the most influential and cost-effective ways to attract new users to your gaming portal. You need to know that any platform has its rules, tips, and tricks for growing your brand.

For example, Instagram users tend to watch short, fast-paced, exciting visual content that is usually disposable, while YouTube users seek quality, longer videos they may watch multiple times.

 

If you know your audience perfectly, you can guess which social media platforms they are active on. After that, you can begin your activity on that platform by publishing quality content, attracting followers, running ads, or commenting on related posts.

Social media activity may seem disappointing initially because nobody knows you, and you can’t get only one comment or like. But by staying committed to your target, consistently making quality content, and communicating with others, you can grow and attract good users for your portal.

 

#8: Be Active on Gaming Forums That Your Audience Are in There

Millions of professional gamers and even non-gamers visit gaming forums for various reasons (news, releases, guidance, sharing their scores, etc.).

Any gaming forum website has dedicated forums to discuss different topics and games. Therefore, your mission is to find forums where most of your audiences are active.

For example, if your portal is about puzzle games, you can go to the forums about solving different levels or tricks in popular puzzle games, talk with people and solve their problems.

Meanwhile, you should wait for an opportunity to insert your portal link so that no one will feel spam or annoying content. The best way to do that is to insert your link whenever you need to mention it.

Besides, your posts in gaming forums are a good opportunity for creating external links to your website, which improves your Domain Authority (DA).

 

#9: Encourage Your Users to Create User-Generated Content (UGC)

The best marketing happens when your users talk about your product instead of you. Generally, people trust customers’ words about a product more quickly than a business’s commercials. Aren’t you the same?

User-generated content (UGC) is the new generation of mouth-to-mouth marketing, and many companies have started leveraging it. You may think by the name of this method that the users create UGC content by themselves, but it’s not true. Many companies (like UGC Ninja) make UGC content for other businesses, as it seems the users created it.

If I want to take an example of using UGC for your gaming portal, imagine an amateur video (amateur filming is one principle of UGC content because people feel it’s a natural video by the customer) that a girl is playing one of your games eagerly. At the same time, she talks about that game and how she is excited to find your portal.

 

#10: Get the Help of Ads to Aware Your Audiences About Your Brand

While it may seem counterintuitive, running ads can actually enhance your SEO efficiency. Consistently planning and executing targeted ads on Google can ensure that your website link appears whenever your audience searches for relevant keywords.

This strategic use of ads increases your brand’s visibility and helps establish a strong presence in your audience’s mind. The more frequently they encounter your ads, the more likely they are to remember and engage with your brand.

On the other hand, running ads attracts new users who become familiar with your brand. This awareness can increase searches for your brand’s name on Google and lead to better SEO.

 

Conclusion

Nowadays, web games are one of the most exciting types of content, leading users to more engagement on websites. However, like other types of content like text, video, and podcasts, they need to be optimized for search engines to be accessible by users.

This article reviews ten helpful notes about optimizing game content on your gaming portal. These notes help you attract appropriate users who will make you money!

Knowing the ideal customer is the cornerstone of any website SEO effort. So, the article starts by discussing the importance of knowing your perfect user and listing the principal data you need to establish your SEO strategy.

After that, I described the importance of analyzing website competitors and how to monitor their efforts, preparing appropriate games for your users that help your SEO, responsiveness, and mobile-friendliness of your portal, writing game descriptions, recording quality walkthrough videos to attract more users, being active on social media and gaming forums, creating user-generated content (UGC), and running ads to improve SEO.

Remember that SEO is just one essential approach to game portal marketing. Making your game portal an excellent website for players to spend their time on requires many other efforts.