Am I Good, or Did I Just Get Lucky?
While I didn’t come to LOVE board games until I was out of college, I did grow up playing them with my family.
We were’t die hard fans or anything, so it was mostly the classics:
My dad always won Clue because he is a very logical individual
My sister always won Scrabble because she has loved Jane Austen since she was 8 years old
My brother always won Monopoly because he would never make a deal unless is was wildly in his favor
My mom always lost at Risk because when I was a child I would have a MELTDOWN whenever somebody swept through the two continents I FINALLY conquored (definitely will be a post on THAT in the near future).
Like I said, all-time classics.
But there were a few games that I have not only never seen at a friends house, but I’ve never heard anyone talk about it EVER.
One of those games: Bazaar.
The setting inspired by the famed markets of the medieval middle east. Cities like Damascus, Baghdad, and Constantino-…. Istanbul (sigh). Each player is a jewel trader with rare gems from the far east, looking to make a profit.
Your goal was to gain points by trading in jewels for cards. The more stars on each card, the more points each card was worth. The less gems you had leftover after your trade, the more points you got.
There were only two ways to get gems: 1) Roll a dice and select a gem, 2) Select a trade on one of the two trade cards….
Ok Riley… time to get to the point…
Right right right sorry about that…
So as a kid I LOVED this game. I have vivid memories of sitting on the faux-persian carpet in my parents living room with my kid brother and sister, playing during late at night during Christmas time by an open fire. A CORE memory for sure.
And because I have so much nostalgia attached, I recently asked my family to all play during a trip back home.
Long story short: it wasn’t a good time; it was pretty boring….
The game had three big flaws:
You couldn’t negotiate and trade with other players (the whole theme of the game is trading… so why the hell is there not a mechanic to trade with other players???)
There were limited ways to gain gems
And most importantly… the CARDS MADE NO SENSE!!!
Number three is the true deal breaker… there could be a no-starred card that was three greens and two blues that you are going for, and then as soon as you take it another card is drawn, and it is ALSO three greens and two blues, but THIS TIME its two-starred!!!
In other words: a lot of winners were just lucky… not skilled. They happend to have the right gems when the right card was drawn.
Now here is why that is relevant to anyone engaging in board game marketing:
EVERY SEO BLOG GETS LUCKY ONCE IN A WHILE.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is all about making sure your website and content rank. The higher it ranks on search engines (whether that be google for blog posts or youtube for videos…), the more people will actually engage with your content, learn about your game, and consider supporting/purchasing it.
And as you can imagine, there is a lot of competition for those keywords that thousands of people search every day. And to stand out, you need to not only 1) write, great content, it also has to 2) be somewhat unique, AND it has to 3) be written in a way that search engines can make sense of it.
And that content isn’t cheap: gone are the days of $50, 500 word blog posts that drive customers to your online storefront. Now you need to optimize everything from keywords to alt text for images. And 3000+ words is almost ALWAYS going to dominate rankins.
And yet…
When I talk to people about this SEO stuff, at least half the time I hear something like: “well I didn’t do any of that stuff, and this post ranked for ___ keyword!”
And I totally get it… because sometimes you get lucky!
Sometimes you throw a blog post out there and it just sticks. Everyone gets lucky sometimes (yes, even me!).
But guess what?
Almost always… NONE of their other posts are ranking.
I don’t say this to encourage everyone to invest in an SEO blog strategy. In fact, for a lot of tabletop game companies, they DO NOT need to do it. It is time consuming and you have to be in for the long haul.
But if you do, you need to realize what it takes to make a true impact on your site traffic. Because when done right, it can account for around 70% of the visitors to your site! And results like THAT make all the investment worth it.
