How Keyword Research Led Me to Build a Niche Game Portal

Most people treat keyword research as an SEO task. I've come to think of it as a business model discovery tool. The site that convinced me of this was 2playerfun.com. The keyword came first. The business followed. What I was actually looking for Ten years ago I was thinking about browser game portals as a category. The major players — Miniclip, Addicting Games, Newgrounds — were all pursuing the same strategy: maximum breadth, every genre, something for everyone. Their homepages were catalogues. Their category pages were catalogues of catalogues. The SEO implication of that strategy is that you compete for everything and dominate nothing. A site that covers every genre will always rank below the threshold for any specific genre query, because specificity is exactly what it's trading away in exchange for breadth. I started pulling keyword data for game-related search queries, looking for volume that wasn't being captured by a dedicated destination. The keyword that stood out "Two player