Is My SEO Strategy Doomed?

[orangeoctop.us]

Hi Mozzers,

Second time poster here and still a major rookie with SEO.

I run the website http://OrangeOctop.us/, it provides winning tips for video games such as FIFA, NBA 2K, NHL. All of the tips are written by experts and professional gamers.

The site has been trying to rank for the term "NHL 14 Tips". To give you some more background info, the actual game, NHL 14, does not come out for another two weeks. I was just being proactive with trying to rank for a term that will be popular in the future.

My Wordpress category page, http://orangeoctop.us/nhl14-tips/, ranked as high as #5 for "NHL 14 Tips", but it seems that as it gets closer to the game's release date, I get pushed further down the google rankings. In the most recent Moz crawl, my site just dropped 11 spots.

Any recommendations would be appreciated.

[KempRugeLawGroup]

Considering you rank 4th or 5th, I wouldn't guest post for a direct competitor. Maybe if you were like 200th, and you did for someone in the top 3 it could help you, but it doesn't strike me as a winning proposition.

Instead, I would try to go after a high ranking non-sports video game blog. There has to be at least some crossover between the people who play the games you blog about and all the other video game genres other people blog about. Contact those website owners and see what you can do about building appropriate link-able content.

At the very least, you could get yourself, a 1st person shooter blog, and an RPG blogger together to do a three way linking system. On your page, you could have a sidebar that says "For tips on Call of Duty) with the 1st person shooters blog linked and the same for the RPG. The other two could do it for you as well. Just make sure everything links to good content.

[orangeoctop.us]

Hi Kemp,

Thanks for taking the time with your response. Because the NHL game comes out every year, I have access to a lot of previous data for content suggestions.

By using google trends, I found out that "NHL 13 tips" is the most popular NHL 13 related search. Then using Ubersuggest for "NHL 13 Tips", I was able to see that people are looking for tips about different aspects of the game (such as faceoffs, scoring, & tricks) rather than team specific posts.

Still, you're suggestion is a great idea! Team specific posts are definitely coming and I will test it. Thank you for the reply!

[orangeoctop.us]

Yeah this is something I am working on! Thanks Ahmed, I appreciate your response.

[orangeoctop.us]

Would you recommend any specific or actionable steps?

[orangeoctop.us]

Thanks for the response Michael! You're right, the link profile needs serious work. The only links are press releases from contests that I won.

As far as domain authority is concerned, it seems my domain authority is only going down. For link-building, I sent over the #1 ranking site an article as a guest post and when they posted the article they refused to link back to my site. Do you have any suggestions for link-building??

Also posts from my site, OrangeOctopus are ranking 4th and 5th for "NHL 14 Tips". However these rankings are for articles and not for the category pages! My goal was to rank the category page for the short keyword "NHL 14 Tips".

Need your help

[AWCthreads]

I'd add that those longer tail keywords are also less likely to have large amounts of the stronger competition.

From my experience the strong domains go after the shorter tail keywords.

[KempRugeLawGroup]

If you can't compete with "NHL 14 Tips" why not be more specific? Try to rank for team specific keywords, like "NHL Tips For Detroit Red Wings" and on down the line. Personally, I wouldn't want to know how to win at NHL 14 in general, I'd want to know how to win with my team (The Lightning, of course). That level of specificity would require more videos obviously, but it could work. Think of it this way, if someone is typing in "NHL 14 Tips" and then, in the autocomplete section" your "NHL 14 Tips for the Chicago Blackhawks/Detroit Redwings/etc" pop up as options, I could see people going to the team specific tips more than the generic ones. You don't know till you test it, but it seems plausible to me.

[AWCthreads]

This strategy has made us money and I would not dismiss it.

A person just has to understand that stronger sites will push them down in rankings as competitors add their content and show up in the serps.

A merchant may or may not know how strong the competition will be for a particular product or how quickly the competition will start showing up - or how many of them. These unkowns are windows of opportunity to get the sales while the getting is good.

I like your sense of urgency and "first in line" attitude.  Couple that with some improved on and off-site SEO and you'll be pushed around a lot less.

[EGOL]

...as it gets closer to the game's release date, I get pushed further down the google rankings...

This happens to everyone but the strongest site.  As an important date approaches more news, content and product pages are added to the search results.  The competition gets heavier.   The only way to survive this is to improve your website so that it is stronger than the competition.

[MickEdwards]

In comparison to the sites overtaking you your domain authority and page authority is low.  You need to seriously work on your link profile which seems full of press releases and syndicated articles.  This strategy will at best not do you any favours.