A launch date is not an SEO strategy. It is a constraint. If the title URL, store path and press kit are still being invented in the last fortnight, search will not catch up because someone bought a blog package. Hire SEO when there is still time to choose URLs, templates and redirects, not when the trailer is already out and the site is a holding slide.
We are Shinobi, a Quezon City studio of Bright Forge SEO, the parent company. This is how we would brief a studio that has a date and a finite art team.
If you only need a post-launch cleanup, say so. That is a different job from shaping the information architecture before store pages go live.
01
Hire When The URL Map Is Still Soft
The useful moment is when the game has a name, a platform list, and a site that can still change. Then we can decide which URL owns the title, which owns the franchise, which owns support, and which announcements are allowed to die.
If every landing page is a unique campaign microsite with no redirect plan, you are paying for future 404s. SEO hired late inherits that mess and spends the first month on cleanup you could have avoided.
Bring Search Console, the CMS, the store URLs, and the person who can deploy. If those do not exist, hiring SEO is premature. Build the site enough to inspect.
02
What The Brief Must Include
Platforms, regions, ratings, the difference between coming soon and released, language versions, and whether players are sent to Steam, the App Store, a launcher or a waitlist. Also the support path after day one.
Tell us what must not break: the reel, the art direction, the legal lines. SEO that demands you delete the motion is the wrong hire for a game studio. SEO that cannot measure whether the motion blocked the title text is also the wrong hire.
Ask the supplier to name the first pages they would change. If the answer is “content calendar”, keep looking.
03
What Not To Buy Before Launch
Do not buy a hundred launch blogs. Do not buy a link package aimed at gambling domains. Do not buy a rank guarantee for a title that is not out. Do not hire someone who wants to noindex the whole site until after launch “to be safe” without a recrawl plan.
Paid media can cover the week. It does not replace a title page that can still be found in six months.
Local SEO for a studio office is a separate brief from player-facing title SEO. Mixing them on the same invoice confuses both.
04
A Sensible Sequence
Week one: crawl, indexation, URL map, title template, store and support links. Week two: metadata and on-page for the title and studio pages. Then press and patch templates that will actually be reused. After launch: measure queries, fix the pages players actually land on, and redirect the campaign URLs that will rot.
Google’s SEO Starter Guide is the timing reminder: some changes show in hours, some take weeks. Waiting without checks is not a plan.
Our games and interactive page is the service home. To put a live title in front of us, request a review.
05
People And Proof
You do not need a twenty-person SEO department on a single indie launch. You need someone who has shipped technical changes on media-heavy sites and will not invent player counts.
We will not put Dee, internal tools, or fake Manila producers on the call. The published Shinobi cast stays the published cast. Parent Bright Forge cases stay labelled as parent cases.
Hire SEO before a game launch if you still control the templates. Hire it after if you need recovery. Do not hire it to sit in Slack and wait for the date. ## Store Pages, Ratings And The Week Of Launch
Store listing copy is not a substitute for the owned title URL, but it should not contradict it. Age rating, platform and region should match. Searchers who bounce from a mismatch rarely come back for the patch.
Press kits need a stable URL. Journalists will scrape it. Changing the slug on launch morning is how embargoed coverage points at a 404.
Influencer codes and creator programmes belong on a page that can be updated without a full rebuild. Do not hide them in a Notion doc with noindex if you want players to find the official source.
Load testing the site is not SEO, but a launch that melts the title page also melts crawl budget. Coordinate with whoever owns hosting.
If the game is multiplayer-only after a date, say so before that date. Player search after shutdown is brutal. Plan the message while the team still exists.
Translation vendors and SEO should see the same string list. A beautifully localised trailer page with an English-only title tag is a half job.
06
Who Sits In The Launch Channel
SEO should sit where art, web and publishing already argue about URLs. A separate SEO Slack that sees screenshots a week late will miss freeze dates.
Give them a freeze list: strings, titles, redirects, store URLs. Last-minute legal changes need an owner who can still edit production.
After week one, schedule a recrawl check. Launches that noindex by accident are common. Someone has to look.
07
Budget The Work Against The Date
If the launch is four weeks away, buy diagnosis and title-template repair only. Do not open a content stream. If the launch is four months away, you can still choose directory structure, language versions and support architecture.
Tell finance that SEO is not a trailer invoice. It is closer to localisation: strings, paths and a pass after freeze. Underfunding it shows up as a beautiful site that cannot be found for the registered name.
Keep a small post-launch retainer in the plan. The queries you guessed in preproduction will be wrong. Players will search bug names, platform errors and phrases marketing never wrote. Those pages are cheaper to add when the team has not already disbanded.
If publishing is a third party, put SEO in that contract as URL owners and redirect duties. Otherwise the publisher site and the studio site will both try to rank for the same title and both will look unofficial.
If the freeze already happened, hire for recovery: indexation, title copy, redirects and a support URL. Do not hire for a new brand story two days before store submission. Tell the board the difference so they do not expect a trailer bounce to become organic demand in a week. Organic demand after launch is a function of the name, the coverage and whether the official page can still be edited. Keep that editor in the company.
Keep legal, community and publishing in the same URL conversation. A rating change, a delayed platform or a region lock should update the title page the same day the store updates. If SEO only hears about it in the recap meeting, search will advertise the old facts while players already know the new ones. That gap is how official sites lose the name to wikis.