eSports has exploded in recent years. Affordable gaming platforms (mainly in the form of mobile phones) have opened the accessibility of gaming to the masses. There are obvious pros and cons. There are more users for eSports brands to engage with. According to Insider Intelligence, there will be 29.6 million monthly esports viewers this year in the US alone. But the boom has also led to a number of new companies built around gaming – meaning more competition.
For eSports brands to perform well, they need to earn revenue or grow their business. Generating website traffic is often a key goal within business growth strategies. When it comes to generating traffic, link building is an essential part.
In this post, we are going to talk about how backlinks work and the best strategies to perform link building for gaming websites.
Before we jump into how to build backlinks for an eSports brand, let's first talk about why you would want to in the first place. The benefit of having more backlinks to your site is that you will start to generate more relevant traffic. But how do backlinks generate traffic? There are two key ways:
Backlinks help your SEO. This essentially means that when an effective backlinks strategy is implemented you will start to see your Google search rankings improve for keywords related to your eSports brand.
Google considers backlinks a signal that other resources and websites across the internet find your content valuable. And valuable enough to link to it within their own content.
The obvious benefit of being higher up on the search engine results pages (SERPs) is that more users will see, and click on your site link – thus generating more traffic to your site.
The next, and less obvious way, that backlinks generate traffic is through referrals. This means that users will click on the backlink from the webpage that is backlinking to your site, and land on your website.
When backlinks come from highly relevant sites, that also have large readerships (ie. Dot eSports), then the referral traffic is highly valuable. This is because it is your target audience who have an interest in eSports.
Now, you know why backlinks are an essential strategy for eSports brands, let's take a look at how you can start earning them.
Guest Posting on eSports Blogs and Publications
Guest posting is a simple but highly effective backlink strategy.
Guest posting essentially means that you submit a blog, article, or other pieces of content to another website that you don't own. Within this content, you add one (often there will be a limit) backlink to your own website within this piece of content.
The best guest posting strategies look for websites in your niche. You don't want to pick websites that are too general or completely out of your niche as these offer less value in terms of SEO, but also in brand awareness, referral traffic and building your audience.
How do you find sites to guest post on? Google has many search modifiers that are helpful and you will want to take note of. Let's say your eSports brand focuses on real-time strategy games. Your keyword therefore might be ‘real-time strategy’.
Therefore you could search:
For all of these search modifiers, you can simply replace ‘real-time strategy’ with your own keyword.
“Link Bait” – it sounds like a sketchy tactic (I know you just thought ‘click-bait’) but it's not. In fact, it is one of the most popular online eSports backlink tactics. With this strategy, you have to get really creative with your content and make content so funny/interesting/valuable that people naturally link to it without you having to ask them to.
Backlinks are an essential strategy for eSports brands looking to generate more traffic to their site. The SEO and referral traffic benefits make them well worth the time and effort. The key thing to remember with backlinks strategies is that you have to create valuable content. No one is going to give you a guest post or naturally link back to your content if it isn't worth viewing or reading.
See inspirations here:
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