GAME Sees +146% YoY Black Friday Revenue Using Organic Search as a Strategic Advantage

Technical obstacles & limited resources

With over 20 years of precedent as a leading video game retailer in the UK, in recent years GAME shifted its focus from brick-and-mortar shops to e-commerce. Although organic search is critical for the brand, SEO had become difficult to manage at scale: years of snowballing technical debt and an inflexible tech stack made it difficult to implement sitewide optimizations. As a result, engineering resources were limited to the point of being inaccessible, and lengthy internal processes meant to safeguard the site were prohibitive to SEO improvements. After creating a ticket, submitting it to engineering, scoring and prioritizing the work, testing, staging, and deployment, a simple change such as a title tag update could take anywhere from six months to a year to implement.

The barrier to access for SEO changes kicked off a vicious cycle. Because optimizations took so long to make, it was impossible to show impact across valuable metrics. Without provable impact, there was no leverage to secure buy-in for greater engineering resources or sitewide changes. And without those resources, optimizations were subject to deprioritization and long implementation cycles.

This led to a lack of control over what was shown to consumers in the search engine results pages (SERPs.) Out-of-stock product pages from years past were appearing alongside fresh inventory, and there was no mechanism in place to get their most valuable pages seen as a priority for Google. The result was a bloat of over 200,000 pages on the site, only 18.4% of which were being crawled by web crawlers —with no way to ensure that those crawled pages were fresh, valuable content.

As the e-commerce site continued to grow, the SEO team at GAME knew something needed to change. These issues were impacting important high-converting product pages, which meant that their most valuable content wasn’t being crawled due to an exhausted crawl budget. On top of that, a highly profitable season was right around the corner.

Seasonal risk and opportunity

As a video game retailer, GAME sees significant revenue opportunity during the Black Friday and holiday season. 2023 was an especially important year: for the first time since they launched in November 2020, the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X consoles were freely available. The supply chain issues that had impacted inventory for years were resolved, and GAME knew that competition for rankings and visibility would be fierce as the industry launched Black Friday deals. More traffic to these top product pages would mean more revenue — it was just a matter of getting them found and seen.

Where most brands won’t prioritize SEO in the lead-up to peak periods, GAME saw that it had a chance to capitalize on seasonality and position itself as a strong competitor to console manufacturers like Sony and Microsoft. If the SEO team could find a way around the technical blockers in time for Black Friday, they could surface their most important product pages, optimize their crawl budget, and boost traffic to their highest-converting product pages. What’s more, they would be able to prove the impact of SEO to internal stakeholders, earning buy-in and support for future organic search efforts.

GAME needed to find a tool that could help them make SEO changes quickly and show immediate, provable results during a peak retail period.

The digital marketing team at GAME partnered with Botify’s SEO experts to come up with a solution. If GAME could optimize their site architecture by lowering its crawl depth, more high-converting product pages could be discovered by search engine crawlers and enjoy greater visibility in search results.

Botify’s PageWorkers solution enables large-scale, automated optimizations that can be launched or rolled back immediately. With PageWorkers, GAME was able to add breadcrumb links to its most important pages. This optimized the site’s internal linking structure, created a shallower click depth, and surfaced its most valuable content to search engine crawlers and customers.

“Before Botify, even simple updates required engineering resources. PageWorkers was a crucial tool for us: now we can make sitewide changes quickly and independently, in a matter of seconds.”

Jerry Hughes, Digital & SEO Marketing Manager, GAME

Because PageWorkers is implemented via a lightweight JavaScript tag in the site headers, setup was simple and prioritized by the engineering team in time for the coming holiday season. The SEO team was able to reclaim control over deploying their optimizations while saving engineering time and resources. Additionally, because all optimizations are managed within the Botify interface, there was no need to rely on lengthy internal processes that bottlenecked SEO work. The team could launch or roll back changes at will and focus engineering resources on hard-coding the most impactful updates. Upon activating PageWorkers, the GAME SEO team suddenly had the power to control optimizations at scale. In just hours, they could enact sitewide changes that would have previously taken months. As Black Friday neared, the SEO team at GAME was ready to meet the challenge.