The global eSports market, valued at $4.3 billion, offers lucrative opportunities, but competition is high, and companies are subject to strict compliance measures.
Gaming and sports are lifetime interests for most people, so customers can have high lifetime values. The gaming industry and Esports community actively participate in international and local tournaments with big money prizes.
But this opportunity also attracts major players with large budgets.
Since some aspects of esports are restricted from online advertising, ranking in organic search results becomes even more important to drive sales from the gaming community.
Unlike SEO in traditional industries, eSports requires industry-specific knowledge and specialized tactics to rank well for smaller businesses.
We spoke with Westco Marketing's founder, William Westerlund, whose marketing agency helps companies in the sports betting, esports, and gaming industries with their online presence.
William shared with us how his agency's SEO efforts used Surfer to increase an e-sports company's sales by 2300% while driving a 100% increase in organic clicks.
The client is a platform for trading and selling virtual items from games like Counterstrike, Dota and Rust. Users can exchange in-game items with others or sell them using real money and cryptocurrencies.
It operates in the virtual goods trading industry, a part of the broader gaming and esports market. The client approached Westco Marketing to increase website sales by driving relevant organic traffic to their products.
Before implementing WESTCO’s strategy, the client struggled with two primary challenges.
- Inefficient content strategy: The client’s website lacked an effective content plan to achieve topical coverage and, thus, help improve its rankings.
- They also lacked the knowledge of how to proficiently rank their ecommerce product pages where users trade, buy or sell.
- Content at scale: It was daunting to manage multiple publications daily while ensuring each piece achieved a top SERP rank for its target keywords.
Here is the 3-pronged SEO strategy William and his agency team followed to build the site's organic presence and drive sales.
1. Content clustering strategy
An SEO audit revealed that while the client had engaged in SEO before, they took a haphazard approach to the pre-writing process.
This could have stemmed from a lack of expertise or from an inability to understand how to implement their SEO strategy.
Our client's biggest challenge was the processes they performed before starting to create content, meaning they hadn't done substantial keyword research or considered working with clusters of topics, categories, and keywords.
- William Westerlund, Westco Marketing's founder
This was obviously a poor way of deciding which content to go after.
William’s team researched the client's niche to identify content clusters, even breaking them down into sub-clusters depending on the size of the relevant market.
Since gamers frequently use social media platforms and community apps, they were able to find important terms and searches that their users were interested in.
To streamline their resources, they prioritized keywords with enough search traffic instead of going after all keywords.
Covering your topic well can ensure that your website is seen as a trustworthy, authentic information provider in Google's eyes, thus helping you rank higher.
You can identify content clusters yourself by integrating your Google Search Console data with Surfer.
Let's say Westco's client provides a marketplace to trade in-game items from the Counter-Strike game and wants to rank for "Counter-Strike skins" and related terms.
Here's an example of topics and keywords under a content cluster for "Counter-Strike skins."
You can use the keyword difficulty and search volume metrics to decide which articles to prioritize.
2. Keyword optimization
William's team leveraged suggested keywords from Surfer to create comprehensive content briefs that made sense.
Since Westco's outlines and briefs included suggested keyword recommendations from Surfer, the content was naturally optimized for search engines.
While including your primary keyword in the H1 and URL are important on-page SEO optimization measures, adding relevant keywords in the main content of your page helps search engines understand your blog post.
Here's an example of suggested NLP keywords for an article on how to sell in-game items for real money.
Using valuable keywords to ensure your page is understood correctly can drive organic traffic growth.
We made sure to choose the most relevant search results to base the content and brief upon, and move on to edit the headings provided by Surfer to look like we best thought would answer the search intent.
- William Westerlund, Westco Marketing's founder
Picking their organic competitors in Surfer allowed William and his team to select already-ranking relevant pages that they could analyze for keywords and information.
Like all good editors, they reviewed Surfer's outlines and made changes to the headings.
3. AI content for scale
To ensure that they produced content at scale, given their limited resources, William and his team used Surfer AI to generate AI content.
We've been able to increase the quality of our content by having the writers focus more on what really matters, providing value and trust in the article through their own experiences and expertise on the topic.
- William Westerlund, Westco Marketing's founder
Since they could choose the brand's tone of voice and other pages to base the content on, it helped streamline their content production.
Writers and topic experts reviewed and enhanced the Surfer AI-generated content, adding valuable insights and ensuring the final piece was user-friendly for their target audience.
Typically, they retained about 30–50% of Surfer's AI content, significantly reducing their writing and briefing time.
We use a similar strategy for informational content on the blog, generating content with our AI tool and then editing and reviewing content to humanize it.
This efficiency led to a 30% reduction in content costs while maintaining, if not enhancing, the quality of content delivered to the client.
In general, I'd say we keep about 30–50% of the Surfer AI content, and it does save us a lot of time in the whole writing and briefing process, which in turn lowers our content costs by about 30%
- William Westerlund, Westco Marketing's founder
AI content writers can be very useful when in the right hands. Instead of just generating and publishing content, you can use them to produce a first draft that you can edit before publishing.
Since Surfer AI's articles are optimized for search engines, you will save a ton of time in finding relevant keywords and can get straight to editing.
Here's an example of an article, "How to Sell In-Game Items for Real Money."
Results: 2300% increase in sales
The client achieved 100% year-over-year growth in organic traffic, having the highest share of voice in their industry.
But WESTCO Marketing's content marketing efforts didn't just improve traffic and keyword rankings. They also led to an impressive 2300% increase in sales from organic traffic, from $5,000 to $120,000 over 24 months.
The client witnessed a dramatic increase in organic sales from their online store, significantly boosting their overall revenue.
They also grew to become the leading website in the industry today in terms of share of voice for in-game trading, buying and selling..
Since the cost of acquiring a new client was cheaper than online advertising, it also helped improve their ROI.
As for the second challenge, Surfer's Content Audit can help you monitor the search performance of your pages in one place, so you're not going back and forth between several tabs.
Surfer also has features that help you identify low-ranking pages and how to optimized them for better results.
600% increase in sales
Westco Marketing's SEO strategy worked so well for this client that they refined their process to follow a similar approach for another SaaS website that experienced a substantial rise in monthly customer lifetime value, contributing to sustained business growth.
They were astounded at the quick growth that William and his team were able to accomplish as a new client.
With Surfer AI's assistance, Westco built blogs and landing pages to help them acquire 14 new paying customers for their high-ticket SaaS product.
I believe that Surfer AI allows experts and writers to focus on providing value instead of spending time writing information that can easily be provided by an AI.
- William Westerlund, Westco Marketing's founder
Their monthly LTV surged from $2,800 to $19,600 within eight months, a 600% increase.
Key Takeaways
- Conduct thorough keyword research and plan content clusters before writing for more successful SEO outcomes. Identify and organize content clusters to significantly improve your website's topical coverage and SEO rankings.
- Integrating primary and relevant keywords into your content helps search engines understand and rank your pages better.
- Using AI tools like Surfer AI can streamline content production, allowing you to maintain quality while reducing costs and time. Combining AI-generated content with expert insights and human editing ensures the final product is valuable and user-friendly.
- A well-executed content strategy can dramatically increase organic traffic and sales, even without more time-consuming SEO efforts like link building and programmatic SEO.
