Helping a gaming server earn $35,000 in revenue through organic search

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Valheim Server Hosting (VSH) is a new hosting platform for the popular Viking-themed survival game that decided to try out our services after seeing the results we’ve provided for MentorCruise.

In less than five months, we’ve helped Valheim Server Hosting appear on the first page of Google Search for very lucrative queries and earn more than $35,000 in revenue.

This Ahrefs number is significantly lower than the actual amount. 🥳

In this case study, you’ll learn how we’ve helped Valheim Server Hosting:

  • Start their SEO strategy from scratch to getting thousands of monthly search visits.
  • Compete with large incubents in a crowded market.
  • Replace their paid search initiatives with a more affordable organic search strategy.

The Problem - Zero organic search presence.

Before VSH reached out to us, the platform primarily relied on paid search to get new clients. While these were initially successful, there was a fixed cost behind each new client acquired, which increased as the ads became less effective over time. 

The business came to the conclusion that ranking organically for their most lucrative keywords was the best way forward, as it would allow them to get new clients without having to continually spend money on ads. 

As Xyrenne Khaice Eustaquio, the gaming server’s marketing director, says, “We had so many competitors who were ahead of us. Valheim is a very popular game, and big companies like G-Portal and Shockbyte are offering the same service. We wanted to invest in our SEO for a long-term customer acquisition strategy as we heavily relied on paid ads.” 

After searching for SEO marketing agencies to help the business move forward, VSH’s founder, Xavier Alabanza,  stumbled across our case study with MentorCruise, a mentorship platform that we’ve helped reach two million search visits in under two years. Xavier was also a client at MentorCruise and was impressed with the content we had made for the platform, so Valheim Server Hosting decided to use our services. A few months in, Xyrenne found that we were “very hands-on and transparent” as an SEO content marketing partner.

We suggested a budget-friendly SEO content strategy centered around creating helpful, high-quality content related to Valheim servers to start ranking for relevant queries by building the platform’s topical authority. Our main goal was to overtake the large incumbents on Google Search while working on a relatively tight budget. 

The Solution - Becoming a topical authority in the niche.

The tight budget didn’t keep us from helping the platform rank quickly for related queries. As we do for many cash-strapped startups just venturing into SEO, we decided to employ a topical authority building strategy, which consists of:

  • Prioritizing relevant low-competition, high-volume queries on one core topic. 
  • Building a monthly content calendar targeting these queries.
  • Creating an internal linking structure that helped Google identify related pages.
  • Ensuring our articles outcompete the others in terms of content quality. 

As Xyrenne says, “the process is straightforward as they always provide the best topics for our SEO articles.”

By building topical authority, our goal was for Google to identify us as an expert in Valheim server hosting and rank us faster for relevant queries. Five months in, our actions paid off, and Valheim Server Hosting has been ranking much faster than anticipated. 

The Results - Gaining relevant search traffic & $35,000 in revenue.

Satisfied with the results we’ve provided, Xyrenne mentions, “Embarque’s expertise in SEO has been crucial in the growth of our product. Frankly, their services are worth the investment. Our website is now ranking on the first page of Google search for relevant queries, and we’ve earned $35,000 in revenue thanks in part to Embarque.”

In less than five months, we have helped Valheim Server Hosting:

  • Earn $35,000 in revenue.
  • Overtake CPC campaigns with our organically-ranking pages.
  • Scale their search traffic from zero to nearly thousands of monthly search visits.
  • Substantially increase their traffic from highly-lucrative US-based gamers.


Takeaways:

  • Topical authority can help a website rank quickly. Valheim Server Hosting only had the budget for blog posts, but we still managed to rank for lucrative queries against large incumbents through an effective SEO content strategy based on building topical authority. Today, Valheim Server Hosting is ranking even faster for relevant queries.
  • High-quality content can outrank large competitors. We executed a content-first SEO strategy with almost zero backlinks by building our topical authority. Today, we’re outranking companies like G2 by having very high-quality content.
  • SEO is much more effective than paid search. Organic SEO is a long-term strategy that allows you to reach people looking for what you have to offer. While paid search can be effective, there will always be a fixed cost attached to ad campaigns.

Scale your SEO content marketing strategy with Embarque.

Today, Valheim Server Hosting is still one of our loyal clients, and it is safe to say that we’re only at the beginning of scaling the platform’s SEO growth. Interested in our services? Feel free to email our founder today: julian@embarque.io.