Lumosity is the world’s best known online brain games company with a user base of 75 million.
Founded in 2007, Lumosity was already the 800 pound gorilla of brain games yet they only ranked for their own name. Not surprisingly, they had never done SEO before. In 2018, they were redesigning their site and wanted to take SEO into account so they hired Cogney.
In order to understand why Lumosity.com ranked poorly for keywords obviously relevant to brain games, Cogney did a thoroughgoing analysis of their existing site. The site was #1 when it came to authority, because it was the best-known and most established brain games brand in the world but their old site suffered from some glaring problems. Pages were written without any intention to rank for a specific keyword. Games were not classified by type, e.g., memory game, concentration game, problem solving. Rather, the directory page was just one big list of all the games stated by their proper names. Like many clients which were already famous brands, the website had authority but its on-page SEO was deficient.
Thus, Cogney analyzed the existing site for content but otherwise completely ignored its design and layout. Instead, we reviewed the design mockups for the new site and consulted on those layouts. We also analyzed competitors’ sites but they weren’t particularly compelling references because brain game sites are devised to appeal to children, the industry’s primary user group.
Next, we conducted keyword research into the different categories of brain game, in order to understand the mindset and lingo surrounding the different categories. We then combined this research with our knowledge of best practice SEO to come up with a new site map plus detailed instructions about how to write copy and present each type of game on the site.
Finally, we introduced a rating system on the site because Google looks favourably upon this kind of content and gives it disproportionate positive weight when computing site rank.
To ensure that our recommendations were sound and the implementation rock-solid, we ran simulated Google crawls on the beta site and iterated several times before making the new site live.
SEO audit (1.5 months)
Consulting retainer (3 months) to implement redesign
Recommendation: Think about SEO before designing your website in order to avoid the oversights and mistakes that this company made
Different types of brain games attract different users with different motives. Indeed, you could even say that each category of brain game has its own conventions and culture. In order to meet the desires of the target user base for each type of brain game, Cogney had to identify the factors influencing each user group the most when conceptualizing the presentation for that type of game on the website. Whereas you could merely call this “keyword” research, our research definitely went deeper than that.
The copywriting and design teams of Lumosity were separate. Therefore, not only did Cogney have to work with each team closely but coordinate and supervise all phases of implementation in order to ensure a perfectly integrated result.
Repeated Google crawl simulation testing and iteration ensured that the live site was the best that could be achieved.
Lumosity broke into the first page of search results (previously ranking on page 4) for their golden keyword "brain games", searched more than 150,000 times per month globally, as well as other important keywords like "mind games", "free brain games", "memory games", "brain exercises" and "brain training".
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