Ever since we launched Games2win.com we began to grow thanks to:
a) Distribution deals with partners like addictinggames.com and yahoo.com
b) more importantly – the STEALING and PIRACY of our games
How did this work?
The pre loaders, the logo tags on all the games that spread across all over the planet all had live links to games2win.com and slowly and steadily, we built a very nice 5 million monthly visitors business to the site. On comScore, the uniques that view our pirated games are 12-15 mn per month (see comScore extended media metrics). So just content allows us to address 17-20 mn uu’s a month.
Now review the Google Analytics of Games2win captured a few minutes ago – (click to expand)
Here is the interesting part:
FLASH by itself is not SEO friendly!! Google cannot read between Flash and hence Games2win.com itself IS NOT A SEO friendly site!
See the analytics:
Only 19% of our traffic comes from Search. Also, ‘Search’ for games2win are tweens and teens TYPING games2win to go the site (lots of kids dont know how to use the browser address bar – they just type the site address on google and then click on the first link).
Hence, I would believe that our REAL SEO traffic is less than 5%!
Over 32% is DIRECT (yup – thats the power of having a good brand)
Over 32 % is OTHER ( this is nothing but the pirated site that are sending traffic back – Google cant recognize them either)
Over 17% is referring sites (the direct licensing relationships we have had)
Note that the 5 million come from 220 countries monthly!
Sure, we did our own SILLY SEO experiments of adding all kinds of stupid words on the site ( boys games, girls games etc etc), but I think its all cow dung.
All you need is great content and the rest follows.
What convince me further to post this article was an article I read on GigaOm today which describes how leading investors conclude the SEO and VIRAL marketing for building cheap and large audiences is now PAST TENSE.
Check the article here – https://bit.ly/seo-is-bunk
I did some more digging around the authors and concurred with what was now an open secret:
– SEO was for an era whose time has past ( i would say pre FB era)
– Facebook delivers massive visibility and audience – directly via likes and posts and MORE IMPORTANTLY via ads. A case there is an Interview with the GROUPON CEO who says that he did VERY LITTLE SEO and instead bought listings and Facebook ads to start up momentum.
For example – the site you are on – therodinhoods.wpengine.com records 50% direct traffic and 40% Social traffic (FB and Twitter). Just about 10% is via Search.
– Content syndication (like we did) in my view works very well. So what is zynga but a massive content syndication business? I mean they have housed their content (all their games) on Facebook and are reaping from the traffic of FB?
The interesting mention that again I agree with is that even if SEO delivers some results – its EXPENSIVE!! It takes people, tweaking your website and then always chasing that ‘CEO Magician’ for the next trick – that honestly I have NEVER been able to accurately measure.
On a final note, ‘accidental’ SEO traffic is meaningless. It shows higher visits but zero page views and zero loyalty ( happens on SEO that is generated via Google News stories).
Long story Short:
– Forget relying on SEO as the mantra for traffic. Think beyond this.
– Syndicate heavily – let the content be loaned, borrowed, stolen – in the end it always comes back to you
– Heavily Socialize – Tweet, FB, linkedin etc
– Latch on – If you latch on to media companies or celebrities or just very popular people who control massive fan pages on FB ( I spoke to a UK media company yesterday who has 10 MILLION facebook fans) then one wall post on that fan community page is the equivalent of many many slow slogging months of SEO
– House yourself in TRAFFIC Zones rather than trying to build content simultaneously (the Zynga in Facebook example). Its tough to climb 2 mount Everest in one attempt!
Like there was never a free lunch – there is NEVER free traffic. And specially from SEO.