—–July 2018 Update—-King’s website has reclimbed the ranks to the first page for the term games—–
—-April 2018 Update— King’s ranking for the term “Games” plummeted since Google’s Algorithm update in March 2018——-
A historical analysis of the changes King made to their website to rank for games:
This analysis was completed with the use of a variety of tools: Ahrefs, SimilarWeb, SEMRush and the Wayback Machine. I stumbled upon this story while digging into SimilarWeb data.
Within SimilarWeb – the web version of the tool – I isolated non-branded keyword traffic to King’s website and discovered they were bringing in a small percentage of “Games” traffic of the total worldwide monthly search average of 34,933,330 (Similar Web’s monthly estimate). At the time of my discovery, their site was bringing in about 1.5 percent of 34,933,330, which means they were bringing in about 523,999 monthly visits from that one keyword -provided they maintained their average ranking of 4 in Google.
The highly competitive nature of such a broad keyword term like “games” means King does not always rank 4 – so their monthly traffic from the keyword “games” is most likely not always 500,000 a month.
In fact, SimilarWeb data shows me King is bringing in the ninth most traffic among the traffic share for the “games” keyword, accounting for 2.63 percent of the worldwide total over a period of time.
This view shows how much their rankings fluctuate and means they probably bring in closer to 908,266 unique visitors a month from that one keyword term.
If you work in SEO or Digital Marketing, you have probably seen the below chart – studies by other companies that have already proven the correlation between first page rankings in the SERPS to CTR and traffic share. Anyway, whether it’s 500,000 or 900,000 non-branded visits, both are large numbers, so I wanted to do some more digging and see if I could figure out how they were ranking for such a broad and competitive keyword term. So next, I compared the SimilarWeb data to Ahrefs and SEMRush.
SEMRush revealed King received a spike in new organic traffic after January 2016 and had significantly climbed throughout the next year and a half or so.
AHREFs revealed their “games” landing page – the one ranking for the term “games” – didn’t get indexed on their platform until some time around September 2016. These two pieces led me to turn to the WayBack Machine to get a bigger picture of the changes they made.
King kept their old URL to leverage the strong domain authority (previously gained through domain referrals and links), and they built a new clean framework on the old domain rather than buy a new domain and start from scratch. With that said, I feel like King also didn’t really have a choice in changing their domain, considering their URL is their brand name.
They migrated their old website to a new URL and linked between the two to keep their previous user base happy.
Games page
- They use “games” keywords in text on page and in meta title/description.
- They have clean, keyword rich urls with “games”.
- They use proper headings structure.
- They have supporting text about each game.
- The game page acts as a hierarchal parent to each game title page.
- They have 18 well-known game titles on the landing page that gain a massive backlink profile.
Game title pages
- They use “play” keywords in url strings.
- They have playable flash game versions of major game titles. All top results in SERPs for “games” have playable games.
- You can play the games without logging in.
- You can save your games if you login.
The takeaway: If you want to rank for the term “games”, structure your website like King did and offer fully playable game builds.
In addition, King’s ranking for “game” in desktop is matched in mobile search, but they give two different experiences. Using device detection, if a user clicks on a games landing page on Desktop, they can play the game online, but if they are on a mobile device, they are sent to the equivalent App store page, which means they are sending “game” search traffic directly to the app stores for downloads.
Lastly, after playing King’s online version, it became evident they have true cross platform play. They offer save functionality and in-game boost purchases, which I would bet can be transferred to their mobile game equivalent, and this means if players are buying “in-app” purchases through the online playable version, King is removing Apple and Google Play from taking a monetary cut. Now, I don’t know this for sure, it only appears to be the case.
Note: Changing your website alone won’t put you on the first page. Without offering fully playable games, you won’t compete. Ranking in the top tier of results involves doing multiple things right. Google knows people searching for games expect to be able to play a game. The competitors ranking for the term prove that. A last note – properly migrating a website is a big undertaking involving multiple steps – i.e. redirects, coding, content writing and so on. Make sure it’s worth the undertaking.