

SEO Strategy that Works - rgrieselhuber
http://ginzametrics.com/seo-strategy-that-works.html

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patio11
SEO for games, social or otherwise, is almost always going to be challenging.
Any idiot could rank the official Zynga site for Farmville or practically any
query with "Farmville" in it. That doesn't really help, though.

1) To the extent that someone is actually searching for Farmville, it is
because their business/media juggernaut already has succeeded in reaching that
person. Everything after that is about filling transactional intent, which is
much less complicated since Zynga has and always will have a total lock on
transactions with their brand.

2) Game companies have a lot of difficulty getting non-branded queries to work
as a distribution channel. Really, what would you type in to find Farmville
prior to finding Farmville. "online farming game"? That's probably near the
head of the distribution, and if you rank #1 for it that will get you a few
dozen signups a month. That won't move the needle for Zynga. You also probably
couldn't scale your way to meaningful numbers through X,000 pieces of content
with each one converting a handful of people. So you either go with industrial
scale generation and become Demand Media, or you go with the much surer
viral/paid ad channels.

SEO is really, really good at answering specific needs your prospective
customers know they have (Demand Media really, really gets this at a
fundamental level). Games typically don't work like that,
transactional/navigational queries aside.

Of possible note: there are quite a few publishers cashing in on Zynga's
lackluster SEO efforts by creating pages responsive to queries like [farmville
strategies], [farmville crops], and the like. Those get decent volume but
wouldn't result in new account creation. Monetization seems to be a mix of
affiliate products and generic backfill AdSense like, e.g., Evony.

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rgrieselhuber
Definitely. I agree that the SEO for games themselves is much harder, although
I do know some companies doing quite well at it.

As you mention, there is opportunity for 3rd parties and this will increase as
brands get further involved. I think it's all still new enough that the needs
for (insert search term here) in the context of gaming have not yet been
created, but I believe this will change over the next few years.

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terra_t
A hint I'll drop is that the "monetizability" of a niche for advertising isn't
what you'd think.

For one thing, areas that everybody thinks are "monetizable" often have huge
amounts of content chasing a small advertising spend, resulting in very low
eCPM.

Then there are capricious factors that are very specific to the niche. You do
better with a Chevy forum than a Cadillac forum because the real money is in
ads for aftermarket parts -- Caddy enthusiasts like OEM parts, so nobody wants
to advertise to them. (GM doesn't, since people on Caddy forums are already
sold on the brand and know more about the next crop of Caddies coming out than
the dealers do.)

Overall, web publishers cheat themselves out of ad revenue by choosing topics
the way they do. If you threw a dart at the "encyclopedia of the situation"
and picked a random topic you'd get better than average results!

Personally I'm delighted by the increasing use of behavioral targeting
technology: I'm finding that behavioral targeting is greatly raising the
revenue I get from my worst performing sites.

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chopsueyar
"Personally I'm delighted by the increasing use of behavioral targeting
technology: I'm finding that behavioral targeting is greatly raising the
revenue I get from my worst performing sites."

Can you please elaborate on that?

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terra_t
For a long time, Google ads were entirely contextual: they served up ads based
on the content of your page.

Contextual ads work well on a site for which the text is predictive of what
ads will make money; for instance, in the case of a car forum, you can figure
out what kind of cars are being talked about, if they are fixing up drivers,
if they are racing, whatever.

Contextual ads work poorly on sites (like Facebook) that aren't really about
any topic in particular -- because the text isn't predictive of anything.
Also, in some cases, you can predict accurately what ads are likely to make a
profit, but the profit isn't much.

Behavioral ads to the rescue -- the ad network sticks a cookie on your and
tracks your interests over the long term. Although contextual ads are
(overall) better targeted, a network like Adsense that does both can guess
which will perform best for a particular impression, raising earnings for
publishers and the networks.

Behavioral ads take many forms, but my favorite form right now are ones that
are integrated with the shopping process. For instance, if you spend some time
on Zappos, you might find ads for Zappos on other sites that feature the sort
of products you were looking at. (Right now I'm thinking about what the next
Gamecube RPG I'm going to buy next, so it would be logical for AMZN to try to
tempt me to close the deal)

Anyway, Google added behavioral targeting and third party ad networks a few
months ago -- publishers don't need to do anything special to benefit... we
just get bigger checks!

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carbocation
I like this both as a publisher and a consumer. (Privacy issues are real, of
course, but I can browse in ptivate mode, via proxy, etc if I choose.)

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rmc
A web proxy might hide your IP address from the original website, however I
guess that Google uses cookies to keep track of you. This means a web proxy
won't help your privacy, since Google would still have a big record of you,
what you buy, what you browse, who you are.

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lkozma
SEO seems to be an example of a zero-sum game. If everyone adopts the same
strategy that "works", wouldn't it stop working?

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powrtoch
It sort of depends how you look at it. From Google's point of view, good
(white hat) SEO is more of an "everyone wins" game, because the more sites
that do it, the better the search results get. Your site is returned only when
it is relevant, and sites get the attention (ranking) that they actually
deserve.

Of course, a lot of SEO is more focused on "get my ranking up, no matter
what". In a world where everyone uses black hat techniques, it's AT BEST a
zero sum game (more realistically, everyone loses, because search engines
become useless and then everyone stops using them).

