2013: refreshing and relaunching GameZone
SEO audit and strategic planning / Editorial overhaul, analytics improvements / Site relaunch plan / Wireframes / Product management, traffic modeling /Business development
Starting in February 2013, I accepted the challenge of overhauling GameZone, with an eye toward improving its natural search, tightening its editorial strategy, and ultimately, relaunching the site with various new user-facing services. I was also tasked with building relationships between GameZone and various third-party game publishers, developers, and content sites, as well as remotely supporting development teams in Florida and South America.
The SEO cleanup phase
The first order of business for GameZone was a massive SEO audit of the site, working closely with our lead developer to triage the work into things we could do immediately (refactoring entire URL architecture, e.g.), and things we wanted to hold off until the relaunch, like an overhaul of core page templates. The cleanup phase resulted in a 90% reduction of duplicate crawled content, and a small reduction in organic traffic which has since bounced back. In early October, we saw inbound organic traffic hit two-year highs despite the considerably-reduced number of crawled pages, signaling a successful strategy.
The editorial & analytics phase
Step two's editorial phase began with writing the first official editorial style guide for the site, continued through individual meetings and reviews with each of the editors, and ended with writing individual growth plans for each person in the editorial team that were shared with the Editor-in-Chief for follow-up and execution.
In addition to standardization of tone and style, I worked with the editorial team to develop a unique daily process for scraping and recording overall topical volumes from specific gaming news aggregators and data sources. This provided us with not only a daily window into what was trending in our space, but enough data to map trends over time.
I also put analytics in place that allowed us to track aggregate pageviews, referral sources, and shares by topic; by comparing trend data to our new analytics, we were able to develop a deeper understanding of our editorial world, as well as the mechanics of user flow around news content.
In June 2013, the GameZone team attended E3 in Los Angeles, which provided an opportunity to build face-to-face relationships with not only publishers and developers, but other service providers and gaming journals. The plan coming out of E3 was to use our newfound analytical knowledge and publisher relationships to drive great cross-promotions with other journals; and to work with our new service and content partners to create unique, valuable content and promotions.
The strategic planning & relaunch phase
In the meantime, we developed a new content model for the site to keep it current: rebuild GameZone as a semi-social network, complete with network imports from users’ gaming accounts (Xbox, PSN, Steam), automatically-updating user libraries and achievement histories, and an all-new Help Center that could improve on the standing models of FAQs and Wikis for help discovery.
The redesigned site launched in 2014, continuing GameZone's trajectory of organic growth with a clean user experience that provides genuine value to the gamer and advertiser alike.
