Esports SEO

Most vertical SEO terms we measure are held by agencies at DR 50 to 80 plus a directory or two. Esports SEO is not. It is one of the softest results pages we have recorded across more than 40,000 phrasings, and it sits next to a publisher set that is the opposite: gaming media at DR 60 to 85 that price links like anyone else and, unlike casino, never say no. This page covers both halves, the term and the publishers, with the numbers we measured rather than the numbers agencies quote.

Who ranks for esports SEO

We ran the query in the United States on 14 September 2026 and pulled the Ahrefs Domain Rating of every organic result. There were nine, no Reddit, no YouTube, no directory.

The median is DR 18. Six of the nine results sit at DR 24 or below. Position four is a DR 0 domain. The one strong result, seo.casino at DR 72, sits at position six, below five sites that are between 0 and 42. Nothing on the page is a directory, so there are no structurally unavailable slots either.

For scale: across the vertical SEO and marketing terms we have measured this year, from gun ranges to limo services, the median of the per-page medians runs in the 50s. A page that can be entered at DR 18 with a single well-built service page is rare, and the volume is small, 10 to 100 searches a month in the US, which is exactly why nobody bigger has bothered.

Two buyers, one keyword

Read the page titles and the results split down the middle. Positions 1, 2, 3, 5 and 7 are written for esports teams and organisations. Positions 4 and 6 are written for betting affiliates and sportsbooks that want esports traffic. Google is serving both because the query does not say which one you are.

That matters for two reasons. If you are a team or a tournament organiser, half of what ranks is not talking to you, and the agencies on it will happily sell you a casino playbook. If you are the one trying to rank, you have to pick a side on the page: a service page that speaks to organisations, or one that speaks to affiliates. The betting side has its own set of terms, and we cover those separately in SEO for iGaming sites, where the publisher refusal rate is the whole story.

It is not the same page as gaming SEO

The obvious bigger term is gaming SEO, at 100 to 1K searches a month. We measured it the same day. Nine results, median DR 59, four of them above DR 60: 1digitalagency at 59, globalmediainsight at 77, seo-hacker at 71, pagetraffic at 60, gamedeveloper.com at 83. The softest result is ssinvent.com at DR 22, at position nine.

The two pages share zero domains. Google treats a gaming site and an esports organisation as different buyers, and it is right to. A page that tries to rank for both will be a gaming page with an esports paragraph, and it will lose the esports term to the DR 13 site that only talks about esports. Build the esports page on its own.

What esports SEO actually covers

Entity queries. Your team name, each player's handle, your coach, your event. These are the searches a fan types after a match, and they are the only searches nobody else can answer better than you. An organisation with a thin site loses its own player names to Liquipedia, Twitch and YouTube; the first job is making sure the roster page, the player pages and the results pages exist and are current.

Event and results pages. Every tournament you enter is a query with a spike. A results page per event, updated the same night, is the cheapest recurring traffic an org can earn.

Game content, with care. Tier lists, builds and patch analysis are where the traffic is and where the competition is. In our prospect records u.gg and blitz.gg both sit at DR 61 for League of Legends tier lists. You can write this content, but it ranks on freshness and depth, and it needs someone updating it every patch. Most orgs do not have that person, and a stale tier list from 2025 is worse than none.

Recruiting and sponsorship pages. Two audiences that search with commercial intent: players looking for a team, and brands looking at esports sponsorship. Both deserve a page, and both attract links from the sites that cover them.

Links from the gaming media. Everything above ranks faster once the sites that already cover esports mention you. That is the part most orgs leave to their PR contact, and the part the rest of this page is about.

The sites that cover esports are much stronger than the term

Here is the contrast that makes the vertical unusual. Our outreach system prospects sites for every customer, and 84 of the sites it has qualified across 23 customer accounts are gaming or esports sites, by domain or by the page it found. We have a Domain Rating for 81 of them.

The top of that list is the gaming press: PC Gamer at DR 85, Game Rant at 81, Dexerto at 79, Gamezebo at 69. The middle is where an org can realistically get covered: gametree.me at 50, dinogame.gg and chitchat.gg at 37, flipsidegaming.com at 29, gamingcouch.com and overmental.com at 27. The bottom is small: two hobby sites at DR 16.

So the term you want to rank for is held at DR 18, while the sites you want links from sit at DR 52 in the middle and 85 at the top. That is a good position to be in. The ranking fight is cheap and the link sources are strong. The reverse, a DR 70 results page and DR 20 publishers, is the normal state of most verticals we measure.

If you are choosing which of those to pitch, our note on relevant backlinks covers why a DR 29 gaming site that writes about your game is worth more to an esports page than a DR 80 general tech site that does not.

What gaming publishers charge for a link

Publishers who sell placements tend to send a rate card in their first reply, and several of them price by niche. Across 4,476 inbound replies in our records, four publishers put a price next to the word gaming or esports.

An entertainment and film site prices a permanent guest post at $65 for a general topic and $120 for esports, which is above its casino rate of $110 and its legal rate of $110, and below only finance and crypto at $150. Its link insertions run $35 general.

A lifestyle media rate card lists $195 per general article or inserted link, $275 for CBD and vape, $295 for casino and gambling, and $335 for crypto, forex, NFT and gaming, one tier below adult content at $345.

A small gaming blog covering MapleStory, horror games and Guild Wars 2 quotes $12 for a guest post, $16 for a sensitive one, and $8 for a link insertion.

Two of the four price gaming above their general rate, by 1.7x and 1.8x. That is worth knowing before you negotiate, because the surcharge is a habit borrowed from the casino side of the industry rather than a reflection of any risk in linking to an esports team. The broader spread of what a placement costs, 175 first quotes with a median of $175, is in how much backlinks cost.

Refusals exist, but read them before you believe them. We searched every inbound reply for a refusal-shaped sentence naming gaming, video games or esports. Eleven publishers out of the 2,203 who have replied to us match, across 14 messages. Ten of the eleven use the word gaming inside a gambling list ("casino, gambling, gaming, betting", "gaming, casino, gambling or essay writing"), where it plainly means iGaming. One publisher, an auto and legal site, lists e-sports by name among its prohibited topics. The same search for casino, gambling or betting finds 87 publishers, most volunteering the exclusion in a rate card before anyone asked. So esports is not refusal-proof, but it sits about eight times closer to the accepted side of the line than casino does, and a pitch that says esports organisation in the first sentence avoids being filed under gambling.

Our own outreach into gaming, honestly

We would rather show a small number than an invented one. Of the 84 gaming and esports sites, our system extracted 72 contacts. Customers pitched 29 of them. 21 more were queued and expired before a customer approved them, 5 are still pending, and 1 bounced.

None of the 29 has replied yet. That is a sample too small to turn into a reply rate, and most of the sends are recent. For context, across the whole platform 15,936 contacts have been emailed, 979 replied, which is 6.1%, and 449 of those replies were positive, which is 2.8% of everyone pitched. We will update this page when the gaming sample is large enough to say something.

What the sample does show is who gets pitched. The 29 sends went to the DR 25 to 60 middle of the list, not to PC Gamer. That is the right instinct: the mid-tier gaming sites answer email, the press does not, and a link from a DR 37 site that covers your game counts.

Links an esports organisation can realistically get

Event coverage. Every LAN you attend has a local newspaper and a venue, and both write about it. A results page to link to is the difference between a mention and a link.

University programmes. Collegiate esports lives on .edu domains, and a scrim, a clinic or a recruiting partnership gets a page there. These are the strongest links on the list and the least contested.

Game community sites. The .gg sites and fan wikis for your title. Eight of our 84 prospects are .gg domains. They cover rosters, transfers and results, and a roster change is news to them.

Sponsors. A peripherals or energy drink brand that sponsors you will list you on its site. Ask for the link rather than the logo.

Player interviews and podcasts. A player is easier to book than a brand, and the show notes link to the org.

Tournament organisers. Participant lists link to team sites. Make sure the URL they have is the right one.

What you should not buy is a batch of gaming guest posts from a marketplace. They are priced from $12, and they read like it. A handful of real mentions from the middle of the DR list above will do more, and the how many backlinks note explains why the count matters less than people think at this size.

The pages worth building, in order

Roster page with one page per player. Handle, real name, role, history, socials, a photo. This is where your entity queries land.

Results and schedule. One page per event, updated the night it ends.

Recruiting. Open roles, tryout process, what you offer. Players search for this.

Sponsorship. Audience numbers, past partners, contact. Brands search for this, and the sites that write about esports sponsorship link to it.

News. Roster moves, signings, results. Short, frequent, and the thing the .gg sites cite.

Game content, last. Only if someone owns updating it every patch.

Doing the outreach part without hiring anyone

The slow part is not knowing which sites cover esports. It is finding the 80 that cover your game, getting to a named person at each, and writing something short enough that an editor at a DR 37 gaming site answers. Then doing it again after every roster change.

That is the job MentionAgent does. It finds the sites, pulls a contact, drafts a pitch tied to the specific article it found, and shows you the draft before anything sends. Replies land in your own inbox, and when a publisher sends a rate card like the ones above, you see the price and decide. The Domain Rating figures on this page come from the same research step it runs before it contacts anyone. The starter plan is $99 a month for one site and one sending inbox, with the full ladder on the pricing page.

It will not write your roster pages or update your tier list, and those come first. Build the pages, then use the outreach to get them mentioned. The link building checklist is the short version of that order, and outsource link building covers when it makes sense to hand the whole thing to an agency instead.

Frequently asked questions

Related guides