Using a viral game for your online marketing can help with SEO
This post was written by Gtaylor
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The concept of a viral game or any viral marketing for that matter is to create a huge buzz about you, your product or service and drive a huge volume of traffic to your website. The great thing about viral games though is the additional benefit they can have to the search engine rankings of your website.
To make a viral game “go viral,” developers will have a team of seeders who submit the game to hundreds, if not thousands of gaming portals, social networks, and directories. They often encourage the company commissioning the game to offer an incentive to people to play the game, for example a prize draw to win something like an iPhone or Nintendo Wii.
In seeding the game the developers are creating hundreds of inbound links to your website, which are often of a high page rank too. This is where thinking about your search engine optimisation strategy first, before launching a game can really make a huge difference.
Our game for www.searchandapply.co.uk was called Wild West Coin Fest (www.wildwestcoinfest.co.uk) this was 301 redirected to www.searchandapply.co.uk/game, where that particular page had no real loan related content apart from links to the rest of the website, which was one of our errors.
What we should really have done was to have called the game something like “Cheap Loan Ranger”…nice play on words…(hosted on www.cheaploanranger.co.uk) so the links we accummulated carried within the anchor text cheap loan a term that we were trying to target . The page could then have been optimised for the keyword “cheap loan.”
Overall the Wild West Coin Fest Game created 500+ quality inbound links and carries a PR3, not too mention being played over 1.5m times it the last 12 months. For the same budget of £22k over a 12 month period, pay-per-click advertising would not have given half the return or the exposure in a market as competitive as secured loans, also giving us the opportunity to be featured in several industry magazines such as Mortgage Strategy Magazine (http://www.mortgagestrategy.co.uk/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=159329&d=403&h=401&f=402) thus lifting our PR and market penetration.
Looking back on the viral game now, and seeing exactly how it works from development all the way through to final product, launch and integration in the market , there are industries which would benefit extremely well from viral marketing, in particular, retail; gadgets, toys, and fashion and the mobile download industries of ringtones, wallpapers and games.
A viral game would also work well for the lead up into a seasonal period such as Christmas or Valentines Day; where you could launch viral game two/three months before the seasonal event, offering your products or services. What we found with the loans industry was that although the game generated a huge amount of enquiries and applications, because of the declining loans market and global credit crunch actually getting the loans approved was very difficult. Focusing a viral game on an industry which is does not particularly get affected by external markets would work wonders.
This post was written by Gary Taylor of 3ac and was a case study of a viral game that he had developed whilst running Search and Apply.
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May 20th, 2009 at 11:33 am
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