Boost Your Game Website's Success with Expert SEO Tips!

Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. Today I'm answering a question, it's one of my Fiverr gigs on a website called Online Games Area, and as you can see I'm a little bit late in delivering this, so apologies to Chris, who's the website owner, and hopefully you get some good information from this video. So the point of this gig is to review different websites for entrepreneurs, give some feedback, and hopefully they can use the information to help grow their business and also get some free free promotion on my YouTube channel. So the website is Online Games Area, so we're going to check it out here. So this is the website, and basically it lists a whole bunch of cool games you can play, and advertising is likely the business model here, and it's actually not bad. A lot of times these sites are filled with advertisements which make it not fun to play the games, but this one is tastefully done so you can clearly see the games, but there are still ad-supported here on the side, and I think it was a little bit below. Maybe those are just on the inside pages. From an SEO perspective, it's pretty good. You can tell from their content. So the first thing you see here is just the games. You don't see much content at all, but Chris has done a good job in actually having content on every page. The content reads okay. You know, it's designed more for the search engines than for readers. You can see, you know, "cool games" and "new games" and "best games" are highlighted and bolded. But I think for most people coming to see these websites, they're not looking to read, they're looking to play. And so the content is below the actual games. I think most people who will visit this page will just go up here, start playing the games, and not actually read the content. But it's a great idea to actually have content on each page to get them ranked. And if you do a search for "cool games," which is what he's trying to rank for, you can see that he's number 3, which is awesome. The ones that are ahead are coolgames.com and coolmathgames. And so as It's gonna be hard to outrank those guys considering that they have cool in their domain name. So good job on the SEO side so far. So if I were to come to this site, I'd probably go and click on strategy first since I like the strategy games. So if I click on that one, ideally you can rank for every page on the site and not just the homepage as well. So this one, the title tag here, we're looking at strategy games, play strategy games online. And let's see what the keywords are here. He's bolded strategy games online, strategy games. This one might be a little harder to rank for. Let's see strategy games online, how he's doing. And it's not on the first page. So if strategy games online is the important keyword, then we would probably want to make sure We've got it here. Hopefully this is an H1 tag. You've highlighted better in your title tag. Move it closer to the left than just having strategy games up there. Looks like there's enough content on this page to be able to rank for it. And you might want to think about having better keyword research. You know, maybe strategy games online is very competitive and it's going to be hard to rank for this page, which is only a PageRank 2 on the inside. So you might get more traffic by changing around the keyword or by changing around your content and your linking strategies. Same thing would happen on each game. So let's click on this one, first game here on the strategy, Ultimate Tank War. So this one is trying to rank for free tank games or tank games. Do a quick search of free tank games and see what happens. Free tank games. And is not showing up on the first page. So again, here we want to have free tank games up in here. He has put it up in here right at the left, so that's, that's great. And still, this is good that he has content on this page. A lot of these guys— and it's common for game sites or e-commerce stores— you have a big product, uh, of inventory, and you don't have enough content on each page to get them ranked. So kudos to Chris so far for at least creating content on each page. It might be better targeted towards keywords that will help him rank and drive traffic, or could also do some better SEO in terms of link building to get better links to the site. Now one thing I did find, I was quickly looking at the Twitter profile here, and so this is his Twitter profile, and he's got some tweets. Looks like he was pretty active in late March, but nothing recently. So this is the last tweet of March 21st. Right now we're looking at April 10th, so it's been a while since he's been active on Twitter. But one thing I found interesting was doing a quick link profile search in Google, the number one link that came back was actually from a tweet. And so there's this guy named Justin who linked to the site, said, "Check this one out that my friend made, want some cool new games online?" And so it's interesting that that's coming up as the first result in Google for a link search to the website. And I'm wondering if you might be able to get a better— improve your SEO by trying to get each of those individual pages tweeted out from your own account and then also hopefully by other people who would find those games interesting. So something to think about when you're planning out your SEO. You either have to target lower quality keywords that won't have as much traffic but you have a good chance of ranking for. Or improve your SEO both on-site and off-site through link building so that you do have a chance of ranking for these little keywords, these better keywords. So you've done a good job on the homepage. You're ranking for your number one keyword, which is great, but the inside pages don't seem to be ranking as well, and there's a big opportunity, I think, to be able to make more money and drive more traffic from ranking better for those keywords. The next thing I want to look at quickly is your user experience. The Tank War was the number one strategy game, at least it was the first listed. So if I came to the homepage and click strategy, I come here, I'm going to click on this one typically. If I don't know any of these, I'll just click on the first one. And what surprised me a little bit was it only had 2 stars, and so that seems a little bit low to me, especially for the first game. And so I would think about switching around the order of the games on this page here so that you have the, the best ones. Like, I see an option here, top rated, most played, but I would automatically sort this by the either top rated or most played, some kind of combination, so that you have people have a good user experience. If I come to this Tank game and I play it and I don't enjoy it, I'm probably not going to come back to your website again. Where if I come and I have a good time and I really like the game, then I'm more likely to want to click through on more of the games and see how good they are. So I'd recommend switching the order, the default order here around, and maybe even showing what the stars are underneath and how many times they've been played, just so I have a way to separate them beyond just their name and the picture. And then the last thought I had for this site is getting people to come back somehow. So it's great that somebody lands on this website, they may be bored, looking for a quick game to play online, and they land on one of your pages and, you know, hopefully have a good time. But they may not ever come back. And so as much as possible with the website, you want to try to collect people's information and give them a reason to come back to the page. And so if you had some kind of newsletter here or an incentive to sign up or some kind of membership, then people would hopefully leave their, their name and email address and hopefully give them a reason to want to do that. And then you have an excuse to be able to contact them on an ongoing basis. And when you launch new games then there's a reason for them to come back. So for example, if I really like strategy games and, you know, I've played some of these, there's a good number here, but it's not overwhelming. It's not like I'm bombarded with strategy games from here. I might run through these. I may not come back ever again, or I may really like, you know, tank games, and that's the only one you have, and I may not ever come back. But if I left my name and email because you promised me some bonus or membership or some free download or free access to special games, you know, give me some reason to sign up, then whenever you launch a new strategy game you could tell me, and then I would probably come and check it out at least to see if I like it or not. And, you know, it's up to you to deliver good quality in those emails. If you send me one or two that are not good, I'm probably going to unsubscribe from your list. But it's a quick way to be able to capture information for people who are coming to the site and get them coming back on an ongoing basis. Which will help boost your numbers, boost your ad revenue, boost your link profile, boost your SEO. And so as much as possible, you want to try to build that relationship with people and not just have it as a one-time visit when they come and hopefully they don't forget to come back. So those are my initial thoughts. Chris, good job on the site so far. I might hang around for a few minutes later and play one of these games and see how good it is. For those of you watching, if you like the video, please give it a thumbs up below. It makes me want to do more for you. And if you have a thought about this website or thought about your own business, feel free to leave in the comment section below. I always read those. I always check it out. I love seeing them come in. So thank you, and I'll see you on the next episode.