SEO for Tabletop Games: A Primer

SEO – that’s Search Engine Optimization – is the process of creating, editing, and altering the content and structure of your digital footprint to maximize the frequency with which your site appears to the right audience when they use a search engine. 

The Problem

Look - I love innovative and unique mechanics. The creativity of this industry, in RPGs or board games, puzzles, etc. is literally awe-inspiring, to me. Those innovative mechanics and style start to become the problem for business like yours when they become the only thing you talk about.

By this point, I'm sure that someone has told you, you have read, or watched a video about defining your Unique Selling Proposition (USP). Having a USP is so important; if you don't have one, you should just stop reading this right now and go figure yours out. That said, you need to translate your USP into discoverable terms.

I've seen so many incredible games fail to reach their full potential because they aren't speaking to the world in a language the world understands, because they haven't been taught that language – those mechanics, the world, etc – yet. It's your job to educate them, yes, but first you have to start talking to them.

That's where game companies get caught up and it's the major benefit of SEO; it will bring you organic traffic so that you can educate the masses and see your game get into more hands.

Why should I prioritize SEO?

It’s got multiple very tangible benefits for your business, especially in the tabletop space. Having a well-considered SEO and content strategy will: 

• Increase visibility: Proper SEO ensures that when someone searches for a term like “Sci-fi battlemaps” or “D&D one-shot adventures,” it’s your products that appear near the top of search engine results. 
• Attract the right audience: By targeting keywords the “perfect customer” is searching for, you connect with people who are looking for exactly what you’re providing (we’ll get to how to find your target audience in a moment).
• Boost Credibility: if your website is showing up at the top of Google, you’re going to be seen as more trustworthy, which will, in the long run, increase your revenue. 
• Drive Organic Traffic: Instead of relying solely on paid ads or social media, SEO attracts ongoing, free traffic. A paid ad only lasts as long as the money is flowing - a well-tuned article or website will provide organic traffic for years. 

Main Types of SEO

SEO is a bit of a concert - a few different techniques need to be implemented simultaneously for maximum results. Realistically, doing anything will be better than nothing, but managing them all effectively will produce long-lasting results. There are three primary pillars of SEO: 

Technical SEO.

This is the stage-setting; like a Game Master learning the rules and building a world that makes sense, technical SEO is part of the work that can’t be seen on the site but is essential for ranking in search engines. Here's why Technical SEO matters:

• Site Speed. If your site is slow, no one wants to use it and search engines know that. 
• Mobile-friendliness. Half of the internet’s traffic is via mobile devices. If your mobile site sucks, Google just won’t rank you. You also won't get any hits that convert.
• Crawlability. Your site can only show up on Google if you’ve set it up to be crawled. 
• Internal Linking. If you link some of your content to some of your other content, it means that you’re writing content that is highly related. The more you link to other articles in your site, the more authority you’ll have.  

There’s a fair bit more, but we’ll cover that in a little more detail, later. 

On-Page SEO.

This is the storytelling – the part that you were likely thinking about when you started reading this article. On-Page SEO is the content that people read, see, and interact with on your site, for the most part. It includes: 

• Keywords. Writing content that has meaningful keywords is really important. If you’re selling a 5e adventure and not including “dnd campaign book,” you’re missing out on a lot of opportunity.  
• Headers and Structure. Google gets to know the contents of a page by the header tags (<h1>, <h2>) in your html. If you’re not using them – in order – on your page, or you aren’t using plain-language headers that google can effectively parse, you’ll have a much harder time ranking. 
• Images and their metadata. You need to have descriptive file names and alt text for every single image and they can’t be marketing jargon. Fancy Cathedral Battlemap is a much more understandable map name to search engines than, say, Church of the Whispering Tombs Gridless.

Again, there’s more to it, but these are probably the most important things you need to keep in mind. More details and a checklist is down below. 

Off-Page SEO.

This is all about relevance. When you write/release something, does anyone link to it? Are people writing about the work you’re outputting? Is it getting talked about and linked to on social media? Here’s the things you need to consider: 

• Backlinks. Backlinks are people who have linked to your website from theirs. When that happens, search engines see you as being authoritative and valuable to others. We want as many of these as we can get. 
• Social Media. Share all of your content on social media. Does it generate buzz? What works? What doesn’t?
• Partnerships. If ever you work with another creator, you should both be promoting one another with links and tracking whether or not those are clicked through - that way, you can tell what, exactly, is a ‘successful’ collaboration.

So, what now?

Well, now you go forth and check out our other articles. We've got guides on each part of SEO, and a smattering of other content here or on the way. We're also releasing articles like this one every single week (or more) to help you get out of the publish or perish cycle of Kickstarter > Fulfillment > Kickstarter and instead use crowdfunding as a marketing tool.