How an Esports Platform Grew Site Traffic by 10,015% YoY
https://www.gamechampions.com/
Stats
10K to 1M Monthly Visits
Industry
Sports & Entertainment
Niche
Esports
Reporting Date
May 2024
GameChampions is an online gaming platform that facilitates free and pay-to-enter esports competitions. It connects gamers to online cash prize tournaments, enabling them to monetize their gaming experience.
Based in Malta and founded in 2020, GameChampions gained significant worldwide visibility in 2024.
Within just 1 year, its monthly organic traffic skyrocketed from 10K to 1M global visits.
That’s an incredible 10,015% year-over-year (YoY) growth.
In this SEO case study, you'll learn the specific strategies behind their meteoric rise and get tips from their traffic-winning playbook.
In This Article
The Catalyst: How GameChampions Went From 10K to 1M Monthly Visits
For this analysis, I’m going to share performance metrics from the U.S.
However, each of GameChampions’ traffic-generating countries display a similar growth trend.
1. Content x 10: New Blogs Bring New Rankings
Between May 2023 and May 2024, GameChampions was busy building the content on its website.
Pages went from a mere 140 URLs to 1.7K over these 12 months.
This tenfold increase touched every corner of the website, including blogs, reviews, and crossplay subdirectories.
Blogs emerged as the #1 contributor to GameChampions’ newfound organic success.
In total, over 600 new blogs were published on the site during the year. These quickly became the top-ranking pages for GameChampions.
Keyword rankings shot up to 133.3K, and traffic was quick to follow.
Blogs generated 55.8% of all U.S. traffic in May 2024.
As for the blogs themselves, GameChampions aligned its SEO content strategy with its audience’s interests. This includes blogs about cheat codes, release dates, character skins, and more.
This is important because these topics drive qualified traffic to their website, i.e., gamers who may be interested in competing online for cash.
By creating high-quality content that reaches the right people, GameChampions positions itself as a valuable resource in the gaming community. It also increases the likelihood of conversions.
Why this matters:
GameChampions' content strategy highlights an important concept when growing your online visibility: you need to reach the right people.
By understanding your audience, you can tailor your content to their specific interests and needs. This builds authority in the eyes of users—and search engines.
Search engines have an easier time understanding a website with content around a central theme. (For example, online gaming for GameChampions.)
And the easier search engines understand your website and its intent, the better your chances of ranking in your niche.
How to create an SEO content strategy:
The key to replicating GameChampions’ success is a well-defined SEO content strategy.
An SEO content strategy aligns your content efforts with your business goals and audience’s needs. Keywords are integral to the process and will help you reach the right people with the right content.
Here are a few steps to get started:
- Get to know your target audience.
- Determine the search intent behind a keyword.
- Pick the best content type for your keyword (i.e., blog, video, podcast).
- Use on-page SEO when creating your content.
- Link internally to build topical authority.
Tools for your SEO content strategy:
After creating your content, the next step is to get it seen by users and search engines.
That’s where content optimization tools come in, like All in One SEO (AIOSEO).
AIOSEO is a popular WordPress SEO plugin that helps website owners navigate SEO and ensure their content reaches their target audience.
They have a ton of user-friendly tools, but one of my favorites is TruSEO.
TruSEO simplifies on-page SEO by providing a clear checklist. It highlights any areas you might have missed and guides you toward optimizing your content for maximum reach.
For example, the Focus Keyphrase Checklist might suggest adding your target keyword to more subheadings within your content. This small but mighty suggestion can make the difference between you and a competitor.
Next, let’s see how GameChampions optimizes its content for one of the most covetable search results—featured snippets.
2. From Blog to SERP Spotlight: Mastering Featured Snippets
Featured snippets are enhanced listings at the top of Google search results. (SEOs refer to this as position zero.)
They aim to answer the user’s query directly on the SERP, like in the example below.
In 2024, GameChampions has ranked for more featured snippets than ever.
In May alone, they received featured snippets for 2K keywords.
Featured snippets are unique because they’re generated on a per-search basis. This means there’s no singular strategy for getting them.
With that said, there are best practices to increase the likelihood of featured snippets.
And this is what GameChampions did to get them:
- Used a question-answer format in blogs. If you browse GameChampions’ blogs, you’ll notice many have question subheadings like the example below. Then, they answer it immediately in the body copy.
This format performs well in featured snippets and Google’s People Also Ask box.
- Write straightforward answers. The space for featured snippets is limited, so it’s important to be concise. Put your answer directly below the subheading, like GameChampions, and give users the information they’re looking for without having to search for it.
- Use schema markup. This one has a caveat for GameChampions because its schema markup could be better. Schema markup is a type of structured data that helps search engines understand a web page.
There are several types, and each can be used to categorize your website. For example, food blogs often use recipe schema, eCommerce sites use review schema, etc. Implementing schema markup is a technical SEO best practice for winning rich results like featured snippets.
Why this matters:
According to SEO statistics, featured snippets have the highest clickthrough rate (CTR) at 42.9%.
Due to their prominence on the SERP, they excel at getting user attention and boosting brand awareness.
They can also help you boost your credibility, considering how users often trust featured snippets.
How to get featured snippets:
This tutorial shows you how to get featured snippets, but here’s a quick recap:
- Optimize your content structure in a question-answer format.
- Implement schema markup.
- Add a table of contents.
- Check out the competition.
Tools for featured snippets:
A schema WordPress plugin can streamline your optimizations for featured snippets.
Take the AIOSEO Schema Generator, for example.
This tool implements schema markup with the click of a button. You can choose from the catalog some of the most popular schemas for featured snippets, like FAQ and How To.
AIOSEO will format and implement the schema markup automatically for you.
Now that we’ve seen how GameChampions optimizes its body copy, let’s see how they do with images.
3. Image SEO: Pictures Worth a Thousand Clicks
Image SEO is the art of optimizing your images to be understood and ranked by search engines.
After all, search engines can’t “see” images like you or me.
So, we have to translate an image’s content into something it can understand—text.
Some of the most important text elements for images include:
- Alt text
- Image filenames
- Title tags
- Captions (when applicable)
You should also include schema markup that accurately represents your page and image.
As for why you’d want to do image SEO, it can help your page rank higher for your focus keyword and generate text result images in search results.
Text result images are thumbnails next to a search listing, as shown below.
Let’s see how GameChampions optimized one of these images to display on the SERP.
This image is the blog’s banner:
And here are GameChampions’ image optimizations:
- Image filename: mortalkombatcharacters.webp
- Alt text: all mortal kombat characters
The on-page SEO is also strong, which helps send search engines additional signals regarding the image’s content.
Overall, GameChampions has had success with image rich results in 2024.
In May, they’re at 3.1K keyword rankings with text result images.
Why this matters:
Optimizing your images can significantly impact your website's visibility and potential traffic.
Here's why:
- Boost in Traffic: Ranking statistics show that rich results, which include images, can capture 58% of all clicks. This translates to a significant increase in organic traffic.
- Broader Reach: In addition to ranking in traditional search, image SEO can help you rank in Google Images, where there are over 1 billion searches every day.
- Higher Rankings: By providing clear information about your images, you help search engines understand your page. This can improve your overall ranking for your target keywords.
How to do image SEO:
Here are the key text elements to focus on for image SEO:
- Alt text: This is a short description of the image that appears when users hover over it or if the image fails to load. It's crucial for accessibility and tells search engines the content of your image.
- Image filenames: Use descriptive filenames instead of generic names like “IMG_0001.jpg.” Instead, include relevant keywords that describe the image’s content.
- Title tags: While not as important as alt text, title tags are displayed when hovering over an image on some platforms. Use a concise phrase that describes the image.
- Captions: Captions provide context and additional details for your image within the webpage content.
For even more tips, check out this article on how to optimize images in WordPress.
Tools for image SEO:
Image SEO can be time-consuming without the right tools.
But with AIOSEO, the image SEO feature reduces the manual work for greater efficiency and ranking potential. You can use smart tags to automate certain optimizations, like writing alt text or image titles.
Standout SEO Wins
Before recapping the top takeaways from GameChampions’ SEO, I'd like to address their use of author bios.
Beyond the Byline: Compelling Author Bios Build Trust
At the end of each blog post, GameChampions includes a brief author (and a pretty cool avatar).
This simple strategy fosters a connection with their audience.
Users can click on the author's name to learn more about their background and even visit their social media profiles, adding a human touch to GameChampions’ content.
Author bios are an excellent way to establish trust and credibility with your readers.
They personalize your content and showcase the expertise behind your website.
This is becoming increasingly important as AI-generated content becomes more prevalent.
Author bios serve as a differentiator, ensuring your audience connects with real people who are passionate about the topics they write about.
And they can help with SEO.
Effective author bios demonstrate your team's expertise. This strategy can send positive E-E-A-T signals to Google, helping establish your site as an authority in its field.
Note: Google E-E-A-T stands for Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.
Tool: The Author SEO addon makes writing and displaying captivating author bios easy. It allows you to add details like education, credentials, a photo, and more.
For a full tutorial, follow this guide on adding Author SEO to WordPress.
Takeaways
Now that we’ve seen the strategies behind GameChampions’ organic growth, let’s review the top takeaways for your own SEO efforts.
Top 3 Strategies to Emulate
- Publish fresh content aligned with users’ interests. Regularly publish fresh, high-quality content that resonates with your target audience's interests and needs. This will attract qualified traffic to your site and establish you as a valuable resource within your niche.
- Optimize your content for featured snippets. Optimize your content for featured snippets by crafting question-based subheadings. Then, answer the question in the body copy in a clear and concise manner. Appearing in featured snippets increases your visibility, drives traffic, and positions you as a trusted authority.
- Use image SEO to increase the likelihood of rich results. Optimize your website's images with descriptive filenames, alt text, and captions. These elements help search engines understand your image, potentially leading to higher rankings. They can also help them generate an image rich result on the SERP.
Bottom 3 Strategies to Reconsider
- Skipping schema markup. Schema markup is like a cheat sheet for search engines. It provides them with additional information about your webpage content in a structured format. And while GameChampions has a few schema types on its site, they could be better aligned with the web page’s content. For your site, you can easily add the appropriate schema with the help of a schema generator.
- Forgetting image title tags. While image titles are often overlooked, they offer an additional opportunity to provide context for your images. These brief descriptions appear when hovering over an image and further optimize your visual content for search engines. You can add them automatically using an image SEO WordPress plugin.
- Exceeding metadata character limits. Meta titles and descriptions play an important role in the SERPs. They convey your page’s content and entice users to click. Exceeding character limits can lead to truncation, which could potentially confuse users. Instead, run your metadata through a SERP snippet tool before publishing to see how it looks.
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GameChampions' SEO journey serves as a powerful blueprint for achieving online success.
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