MVP101: Is SEO Worth It For Your Game Store?

The Manaverse Podcast: Magic: the Gathering Business / Game Store Entrepreneurship / LGS Professionals

Does Your Game Store Need an SEO Specialist?

If you've been in business for any length of time you've probably been pitched SEO services at least a few times by people promising to get you on page 1 of Google.

That sounds pretty good right? The trouble is hiring someone for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can be very hit or miss.

Some people are great and others will try to rip you off completely, and it can be challenging to know who's who.

SEO is technical and somewhat abstract so it can be hard to tell if someone you hire is doing a good job or nothing at all, and it generally takes a few months to see any real benefits from the effort.

Something to keep in mind for someone who is planning on opening a new store in the near future, SEO is a long term strategy and if you're opening up shop in month or two, SEO isn't going to do all that much since you only have a short amount of time to get things rolling.

You should definitely get the basics started so you have an online presence that people can find to learn more and that you can grow over time, but if you want to prime the pump on your opening week, you should be spending time on promoting your store on the local Facebook groups in your area and trying to get the word out with some paid ads.

That would be money better spent than hiring an SEO specialist.

But all that said, it's still worth your time to get some SEO basics in place for your game store business.

The good news is 80% of what you want to achieve with SEO (namely better rankings for keyword searches that matter for your business) can be done yourself in the course of an afternoon assuming you already have a website created.

Here's a quick rundown on what you need to know to get your SEO going this weekend.

The Set Up

Start with getting the basics in place.

Open up Google and search for Google My Business and go through the set up process. It’s pretty straightforward and the app will walk you through what you need to do to get everything online. You will have to verify your address with a code they’ll send you in the mail so it might take a couple weeks to completely finalize GMB.

Make sure your graphics and logo assets match your website and branding, same with the copy.

Grab your Yelp listing and be prepared for a Yelp rep to call you and essentially hold your page hostage unless you pay them. Don’t worry about that too much though, the direct impact of Yelp itself on your business is minimal, but it does help rank what you actually care about, which is your website.

Don’t worry too much about Yelp reviews, direct people to your GMB or Facebook page to leave reviews there. They rank higher than Yelp and most people default to these first since they use them everyday already.

Set up your Facebook page and other social media accounts. Make sure the graphics and information match your website and branding. Also make sure the social media accounts that you plan on using are linked up on your website. Most website platforms make that pretty easy.

Create a listing on Yellow Pages. Not much to this one. The vast majority of people searching will find your website or Facebook page first and use that to contact you, or get your info from the GMB info box.

That's the foundation and will get you most of the way there. You should also try to register your website with other relevant directories like the Chamber of Commerce for your local area, or Industry Store Locator directories and GAMA, and any others that make sense.

None of these extra directories will drive any significant traffic to your site, but they will help build up your backlink profile, which I'll explain down below.

The Goal

SEO has three end goals. You want people searching for keywords relevant to your business like “game store near me” and “magic cards/board games/dnd (your city)” to either: call your store, get the info they need to visit your store in person, or go to your website.

You get those clicks by ranking highly on those search results. To get those rankings, you need to align with what Google is trying to accomplish.

Google is in the business of delivering the information that people are searching for, and that means giving them search results that solve their problem or answer their question.

At this point, the algorithm is pretty smart. You used to be able to get some top rankings by jamming a bunch of keywords into your page, but that doesn't fly now.

If you want to rank on the first page of the search results, you need to play Google's game. Think about it from the searcher's point of view when you look at your page. Are they going to find what they are looking for?

The vast majority of traffic goes to the first three results in Google (75.1%). Less than 1% click results on the second page, so if you're not on the first page for a keyword you might as well not exist.

If you want to get organic traffic you need to understand the basics of SEO and have a simple strategy to make it work for you.

Real quick though, one common misconception that most people have about SEO is that you rank your website, but that's not the case. Pages rank, not websites.

Your website has a Domain Authority score which affects the ranking of individual pages on your site, but we can ignore that for the most part right now.

All you need to know is that you want to rank individual pages, and there are two main ways that you can do that. On-page SEO and backlinks.

We'll break those down in a sec. The first thing you need to do, now that you've set up all your accounts, is do some keyword research and figure out what search terms you want to rank for.

Keyword Research

Take 30 minutes and do some research on what people in your area are searching for.

Open up Excel or Google Sheets and create a spreadsheet to keep track of what you find. You're going to want two columns, one for the keyword and one for the number of monthly searches that keyword gets.

One of the easiest ways to get started is to go right into Google and search “game store near me” and see what comes up. Take a look at the top results and see where those keywords appear. Chances are you'll see some of the big name players near the top like Gamestop or BestBuy.

These are the businesses that you are going to be competing with, but don't get discouraged. Just because a keyword has a lot of traffic, that doesn't mean it's the keyword that's right for you to target.

You have to think about intent. The “game store near me” search query is a good start, but it might be too broad. It's better to rank for more specific keywords that align with what you are offering.

So, scroll to the bottom of the search results and you'll see a Related Searches section.

You'll see a number of similar searches that people are putting into Google and chances are those are the ones you want to focus on.

Copy and paste those results into your spreadsheet, then click on each one and repeat the process.

See what pages rank near the top and then scroll down and grab some new Related Searches.

Rinse and repeat.

You might also see a People Also Ask section in the middle of the results page. Those are great ones to add to your list and keep in mind when writing copy for your website.

You can also go from the angle of whatever products you sell. If you specialize in TCG's start searching for "magic cards near me" or "best magic card store" and that sort of thing and add those to your list. Keep up the process until you've got around 100 keywords on your spreadsheet.

Next up, use a tool like Google's Keyword Research Tool, SEMRush, or MOZ to get some traffic stats for those keywords.

Many of those tools will also give you additional keyword suggestions that you can add as well. Once you've got the traffic filled out, you should sort the sheet by volume and take a look at which keywords are going to give you the most bang for your buck in terms of effort.

Ideally, you're looking for a handful of keywords that make sense for your business (ie. you sell those things and want to sell more of them), have a fair bit of traffic (100-1000 per month, 10-100 isn’t bad either ), and not too much competition.

You'll probably find that the best ones for your game store are four to five words long.

"Board games" gets 246,000 searches per month, but it's going to be almost impossible for the average game store to rank on the first page for that term.

The average web page that ranks in the top 10 has 51,609 backlinks. That's over 51,000 other websites that link to those pages!

Places like Wikipedia and BoardGameGeek are going to take those top spots and there isn't too much you can do about it, but that's okay.

Longer search times like "tabletop game store near me" are going to drive better results for your business, since people searching that are showing more purchase intent and are more likely to be local to your store and therefore turn into actual paying customers, which is the whole point of this exercise.

So now that you've got some keywords you want to rank for, you can start doing the actual SEO work.

On-Page SEO

This is the side of the SEO coin that you directly control. For something like your homepage, you should try to rank for the broadest and highest traffic keyword you have on your list that's still relevant.

Side note here: this is where having an obvious and direct business name helps.

Google looks at factors like your domain name, title tag, meta description, and body copy for keywords, so having a business name like "Tom's Board Game Store", while boring and uninspired, is a huge asset for SEO.

Tomsboardgamestore.com is going to have a natural advantage ranking for the term "board game store" because it's going to be right there in the domain name, as well as the title and several other places on the website.

It helps to think about each top level page of your website individually, and pick a keyword that you want that page to rank for. For your homepage, maybe that's "table top games", or "wargaming", or "magic the gathering cards".

For your Events page, that could be "magic tournaments" or "dungeons and dragons league". Try to focus on just one keyword at a time when writing copy for your page and then make sure you use those keywords and similar variations in the title (

) of the page, as well as sub headlines and body copy.

Put the keyword in the URL too (ie. tomsboardgamestore.com/magictournaments) as well as the meta description.

Most website platforms make this fairly easy. If you're using WordPress, install a plugin called Yoast SEO and if you're using something like Shopify you can edit those no problem.

Don't ignore the meta description! It's one of the lowest hanging fruits for ranking signals since most websites don't bother to create one.

Other good On-Page SEO practices include using graphics whenever possible, and adding the keyword plus variations to the alt-text for each graphic, and to include links within the body of the page to other pages in your website, not just in the menu.

Making sure your page is optimized in the URL, title, meta description, sub headlines (

), body text, graphics, and has a few internal links will get you 80% of the way there for on-page SEO.

One thing to note is that I mentioned keyword stuffing near the top. Don't put the same keyword on the page too many times or where it doesn't make sense from the reader's perspective.

If it looks weird or spammy, Google is going to pick up on that and demote the page in the search results.

Try to use natural language as much as you can, which is where variations of the keyword come into play.

Google is pretty good at picking up on context now, so terms like "family board games" and "Euro style board games" can work well together without making it feel like you're just jamming in search terms in hopes of ranking the page.

Backlinks

This part of SEO is less under your control, and why it's important to set up your GMB and other listings at the beginning.

Google considers other web pages linking to yours as a good sign that your page is authoritative and high quality, which means that they are more likely to show your page higher in the search results.

Backlinks are vital to ranking highly for all but the lowest volume search terms, and more broadly, the more backlinks your website has in total the higher it's Domain Authority.

So backlinks are a good thing to have, but there isn't really a direct way to build your backlink profile.

You can't force people to link to your web pages, and no, Facebook doesn't really count here.

Throwing out links to your website from your Facebook page does help a little bit, but they're counted separately from a direct link from another website and don't affect your organic rankings all that much.

There are two main ways to gain backlinks for your website. Either create content that people want to link to ie. content marketing, or exchange links with other website owners.

Creating content takes time but it's definitely something I recommend.

Writing posts or recording videos is a good way to rank for new keywords and it keeps your site interesting and "fresh".

Google likes seeing a website that is recently updated and demotes websites that haven't been updated in a while (the info might be out of date after all). If you create something that people want to share, you get that great word of mouth advertising for free, and you can get a bunch of links pointing back to your site.

Creating content is like planting seeds. Each piece of content you create can be tailored to a specific keyword and can drive organic traffic indefinitely when ranked over time.

If you created 100 pieces of content that were optimized well for different product keywords and gave the person the opportunity to purchase on the page over the course of the next year, and each piece netted you an average of 10 visits per month to your product pages, you would end up with 1000 free visitors every month.

If your average conversion rate was 2% on those product pages, that would be 20 additional gravy purchases each month, which could represent hundreds to thousands of dollars in "free" sales.

Rinse and repeat.

There is a reason that Star City Games pays writers to create thousands of articles per year. Each article drives traffic to the site, and a certain percentage of that traffic will convert to a sale.

Like SEO, creating content is a momentum strategy. It takes some time and effort before you see results, but once you plant those seeds they keep sending you traffic and sales indefinitely.

Exchanging links also takes time and effort, but it's a good way to build up your link profile. In a way, this is what you're doing when you create a listing in a directory.

You're creating content on their website and they give you a direct backlink in exchange.

If you do any work with your local school or community center, you should reach out to them and ask them to put a link to your "After School Adventurer's Program" page on their website.

You could also reach out to other businesses in the area that you're friendly with and do a link exchange, where you put a link to their website on yours and vice-versa.

Every back link counts, and the more your website has the more authority it's seen to have in the eyes of Google, which gives all your webpages a little more weight in the algorithm.

Summary

So to pull everything together, you can certainly do most of the SEO work yourself with a few basic strategies:

1. Create your GMB account, create your social profiles, add your website to whatever relevant directories you can find including store locators.
2. Do some basic keyword research and create a list of keywords that you want to target that are relevant to what you sell and/or convey purchase intent.
3. Pick one keyword to focus on for each page on your website and make sure it's in the URL, title tag, sub headlines, body copy, alt text of any graphics, and meta description.
4. Create content around specific keywords each week to constantly expand the number of keywords your pages rank for.
5. Spend a little time each week emailing other businesses or organizations you are connected with and see if they would be interested in exchanging links.