A fictional business. The figures are a modelled scenario, not a client result.
Hollowpine Games · Indie game studio · Montreal
organic wishlists9 months · Authority plan · North America
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World 1 · Signal Meadows
Turned the studio's own play-test telemetry into a data story — 'Which cosy-game mechanics make players quit?' — and pitched it to games and tech desks in three languages.
Boss fight · The Storefront
HP = share of page-one results it held for the world's target queries.
Game over · the challenge
Store pages took all the search demand for Hollowpine's own game, and its site had no authority to capture wishlists or guide searches.
Hollowpine's debut, the cosy roguelike Lanternfall, was heading for launch with a growing wishlist count — but every search for the game, its bosses or its recipes landed on someone else's page. The store listing owned the brand query, a fan wiki owned every guide query, and forum threads filled the rest.
With five people and no ad budget, the studio needed the one thing paid launches buy and indie launches have to earn: enough authority for its own domain to rank where players were already searching, and a wishlist button waiting when they got there.
Inventory check · audit
11 of 18 were engine showcases, store mirrors and jam listings. Zero editorial links to the studio domain.
Every one of 23 reviews linked the store page. Without a reason to cite the studio, authority leaked out.
Hosted on a file-sharing service, uncrawlable, and impossible to link to a specific asset.
Players searching bosses, recipes and endings found a fan wiki and forum threads. The studio ranked for its name only.
Two years of build notes sat behind a stray noindex tag on blog.hollowpine.example.
68% of visits were mobile; the wishlist button sat under a 1.4 MB autoplay trailer.
Quest log · strategy
Built on our Authority plan (digital pr & links). The rule for every world: give journalists, creators and fans a better page on the studio's own domain to cite than the store listing — then make that page the one with the wishlist button.
Signal Meadows
Turned the studio's own play-test telemetry into a data story — 'Which cosy-game mechanics make players quit?' — and pitched it to games and tech desks in three languages.
Boss: The Storefront · +52 referring domains
Dune of Kits
Replaced a Dropbox zip with a crawlable /press hub: fact sheet, GIFs, key art and an embed code, so every review and listicle links to the studio domain, not a file host.
Boss: The Zip File · +38 referring domains
Streamer Keep
Sent 140 hand-picked creators early keys with a one-page brief and a trackable /creators page; video descriptions linked the guide hub and wishlist page.
Boss: The Aggregator · +31 referring domains
Frostlore Peaks
Built an official guide hub (bosses, recipes, map) and supplied the fan wiki with sourced data, so community pages cite the canonical guides.
Boss: The Mega-Wiki · +25 referring domains
Speedrun · 9 months
Link audit: 18 referring domains, 61% from store and engine directories. Wishlist page instrumented.
RD 27 · WL 900
Play-test telemetry story pitched; first 14 editorial links land, two in mainstream tech press.
RD 39 · WL 2,600
Zip replaced with a /press page set. Unlinked-mention sweep reclaims 27 credits.
RD 56 · WL 5,400
Embed code shipped with the demo trailer; festival listicles link /press and the wishlist page.
RD 75 · WL 9,800
140 creators briefed. /creators page gives each one tracked guide and wishlist links.
RD 97 · WL 16,200
62 videos publish over six weeks. Guide hub begins ranking for boss and recipe queries.
RD 119 · WL 24,600
96 guide pages with original maps. Fan wiki adopts sourced tables that cite them.
RD 142 · WL 34,900
Follow-up story on player habits earns a second PR wave and refreshes old links.
RD 164 · WL 46,000
Launch-week searches land on official guides; 46,000 organic wishlists attributed.
RD 164 · WL 0
Stats screen · results
Referring domains
Wishlists from organic
Guide keywords top 10
Press-kit downloads
Modelled scenario for a fictional business — not a client result. Rankings and traffic are never guaranteed; see our Terms.
| Keyword | Vol/mo | Month 0 | Month 9 |
|---|---|---|---|
| lanternfall guide | 9.9k | — | #1 |
| lanternfall boss weak points | 4.4k | — | #2 |
| lanternfall recipes | 3.6k | — | #1 |
| lanternfall map | 2.9k | 48 | #3 |
| cosy roguelike games 2026 | 8.1k | — | #6 |
| games like stardew with combat | 12k | — | #8 |
| lanternfall release date | 5.4k | 14 | #2 |
| hollowpine games press kit | 320 | 22 | #1 |
Continue?
Earned links, a press hub that gets cited and guides that rank — scoped to your launch window.