SEO in Finnish Game Industry Lassi Saarinen Bachelor’s Thesis Degree Program in International Sales & Marketing 2020 Abstract 12.5.2020 Author(s) Lassi Saarinen Degree programme International Sales and Marketing Report/thesis title Number of pages SEO in Finnish Game Industry and appendix pages 33 + 74 The main objective of this thesis is to find out what kind of connection SEO has with a growth of a game company. The research discusses four topics: what kind of keywords are driving traffic to the companies’ websites, what kind of keywords are driving traffic under the topics of the released titles, are those keywords relevant and what kind of opportunities the unutilized SEO opportunities have. The research is a quantitative study. The researchable data was gathered with an SEO tool Ahrefs. The data has information about the ranking keywords of the case companies’ domains, keywords generating traffic under chosen topics, the average CPC of those keywords and how difficult it is to rank with the keywords. The relevancy of the keywords was manually filtered based on their position on the marketing funnel. All of the chosen case companies have shown growth regarding business result during 2016-2018, but the chosen titles are competing on different genres of games. The results showed, that in many cases the domains are usually ranking on branded keywords related to the company or their titles. The keyword research on the titles showed, that all of the titles have unutilized SEO potential usually in the discovery or retention stages of the marketing funnel. In conclusion, all of the case companies have potential to increase their visibility in search engines. This sets the companies in SEO terms on the same line, meaning that even smaller companies can compete for the same users with more established businesses with relatively small resources. Keywords SEO, Keyword Research, Game Industry Table of contents 1 Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 1 1.1 Commissioning company ......................................................................................... 1 1.2 The thesis goals ........................................................................................................ 2 2 Basics of search engines and SEO .................................................................................. 3 2.1 Search Engine Optimization ..................................................................................... 3 2.2 Basic business needs of SEO: Compete, Engage, Revenue, Purpose .................. 3 2.3 Google Webmaster Guidelines................................................................................. 4 2.4 Keyword research ..................................................................................................... 5 2.5 On-page optimization ................................................................................................ 6 2.5.1 Title tag .......................................................................................................... 6 2.5.2 Meta description ............................................................................................ 7 2.5.3 Page URL ...................................................................................................... 8 2.5.4 Page content.................................................................................................. 8 2.5.5 Website structure ........................................................................................... 8 2.5.6 Page speed.................................................................................................... 8 2.5.7 Sitemaps ........................................................................................................ 9 2.6 Link building ............................................................................................................ 10 3 SEO and Marketing Funnel ............................................................................................. 11 4 Game Industry in Finland ................................................................................................ 12 5 Research plan ................................................................................................................. 15 5.1 Ahrefs ...................................................................................................................... 15 5.1.1 Keyword Research Volume ......................................................................... 16 5.1.2 Clicks ........................................................................................................... 17 5.1.3 Keyword Difficulty ........................................................................................ 18 5.1.4 Traffic Value................................................................................................. 18 5.2 Research process ................................................................................................... 19 5.3 Case companies ..................................................................................................... 22 5.3.1 Futureplay Oy .............................................................................................. 23 5.3.2 Housemarque Oy ........................................................................................ 24 5.3.3 Rovio Entertainment Oyj ............................................................................. 24 5.3.4 Small Giant Games Oy ................................................................................ 25 6 Results ............................................................................................................................. 26 6.1 Futureplay ............................................................................................................... 26 6.2 Housemarque ......................................................................................................... 27 6.3 Rovio ....................................................................................................................... 28 6.4 Small Giant Games ................................................................................................. 28 7 Discussion and conclusion .............................................................................................. 30 7.1 Research goal and results ...................................................................................... 30 7.2 Author’s personal evaluation .................................................................................. 33 References ........................................................................................................................... 34 Appendices........................................................................................................................... 39 Appendix 1. Future Play domain data sheet ................................................................... 39 Appendix 2. Battlelands Royale Data Sheet ................................................................... 41 Appendix 3. Battle Royale Games data sheet ................................................................ 45 Appendix 4. Housemarque Domain data sheet .............................................................. 50 Appendix 5. Nex Machina data sheet ............................................................................. 56 Appendix 6. Shoot ‘Em Up data sheet ............................................................................ 59 Appendix 7. Rovio Domain data sheet ........................................................................... 65 Appendix 8. Battle Bay data sheet .................................................................................. 71 Appendix 9. Boat Games and Boat Battle Games data sheet ....................................... 76 Appendix 10. Small Giant Games Domain data sheet ................................................... 80 Appendix 11. Empires & Puzzles data sheet .................................................................. 88 Appendix 12. Puzzle Games and RPG Games data sheet............................................ 93 Appendix 13. Puzzle RPG data sheet ............................................................................ 98 1 Introduction Even though the hype around Finnish game industry seems to have gone past its biggest success for the larger audience, the full potential is yet to be seen. Fortunate or not, during the COVID-19 epidemy mobile games received their biggest download numbers ever (App Annie 2020). Companies with massive marketing budgets can, however, make the competition really hard for smaller companies and succeeding can become difficult even with a good released title. Search engine optimization (SEO) provides a more affordable opportunity for smaller companies to improve their visibility and reach to gain new users. This research will look into Finnish game companies and how SEO is connected to the growth of their business result. The research will show how the case companies’ domains are ranking in search engines and whether the keywords currently driving traffic are relevant to those companies. Keyword research will be conducted to one released title from each case company and the SEO potential to get more visibility for the titles will be researched. This thesis presents some of the main theoretical concepts related to SEO, explains why it is practiced and what kind of rules apply