Marketing & discovery for indie devs

Most games don't fail. They just never get found.

You can build something great and still watch it vanish because nobody knew it was there. SeeIndie is about the other half of the job: being findable. No agency budget, no growth hacks. Just practical things that actually move discovery, tested in the open.

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crit pick — livesep 2026 keywords ranking74 in the top 3011 best position#16 visits from ai57 google clicks4 all visits192 backlinks98 referring domains1 built from zero, in public. chatgpt sent 57 visitors last month; google sent 4. clicks come from search console, visits from ghost’s cookie-free counter with the bot range removed — clarity and analytics only ever see the visitors who accept them, EU rules, so those read lower again. no two sources agree, and that’s the honest part.
A Steam page is the floor, not the ceiling.

Discovery isn't one thing. Your Steam page, your social presence, and your own website each pull players in a different way. Most advice stops at the first two, the ones that need constant feeding. The website, the one you own and that keeps working while you sleep, is the piece most indies skip. SeeIndie covers all three, and goes deepest on the one everyone forgets.

Where games get found

Start with wherever you're weakest.

liveWebsiteYour own site, built so search engines, AI models and players can actually find it. The multiplier nobody uses. liveSteamThe store page is the only page most players will ever see. Tags, capsule, description, wishlists — and what the algorithm actually counts. liveSocial mediaWhich platform is worth your evenings, which are not, and the one community move that still pays: a Discord people stay in. livePress & creatorsHow coverage really happens in 2026 — the pitch, the timing, the keys, and why a streamer often beats a magazine. in the steam guideLaunchThe last 90 days: release date, price, discounts and the build Valve has to approve. Covered inside the Steam guide until it gets a page of its own. liveBrandYour name and your game as things people search for on purpose. Naming, identity, the SERP that shows up when a publisher googles you.

Latest posts

New guides and case-study updates, newest first.

8 sep 2026Ubersuggest vs Semrush: I ran the same keywords through both, four timesFour head-to-head tests across three niches: the search volumes are identical in origin, one keyword in ten diverges by more than 5x, and an un-refreshed difficulty score is off by an average of 23 points. 3 sep 2026Semrush pricing and review 2026: what it costs, and who should actually pay itSemrush advertises $139.95 a month. A realistic setup runs past $800, because what looks like three plans is nine separately sold toolkits. What it really costs, and who should pay it. 1 sep 2026Ubersuggest review: is it worth it for an indie dev?Should you buy Ubersuggest? Tested against Semrush over 125 keywords, checked on a site with no audience, with the part of the lifetime plan the pricing page buries. Three verdicts, one per experience level. 29 aug 2026Why marketing your game feels grossMaking the game is fine. Posting about it is not. What the research says the cringe is actually detecting, and the three things I am not going to tell you. 27 aug 2026What eight weeks of Crit Pick data actually showEight weeks of real Search Console data from the Crit Pick experiment. What internal linking did, why a tool page flopped while a guide compounded, and an honest verdict so far. 25 aug 2026Your brand SERP: what a publisher sees when they google youBefore a publisher, journalist or player replies, they google you. Your brand SERP is that first page — here's how to shape it with schema, sameAs and one handle.
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Who's writing this

A dev who does SEO for a living

SEO pays my bills, mostly in finance, which is about as cut-throat as search gets. I've also got a game dev degree and studio experience on console projects. The console, unfortunately, never released. SeeIndie is me pointing one skill at the other, out loud, so you can copy what works and skip what doesn't. :)

Common questions

What is SeeIndie?
A site about marketing and discovery for indie game developers: how people actually find games, and what a solo dev or small team can do about it without an agency budget. Written by a game dev who does SEO for a living.
Do I need a marketing budget to use any of this?
No. Nearly everything covered here is free to start: a page people can find, a Steam page built for wishlists, and Google Search Console to see who arrives. Paid tools save time once you are serious, they do not unlock the results. The toolbox is sorted free-first for exactly that reason.
Is SEO even worth it for a game, or is it all Steam?
Steam is where most wishlists come from, and nothing here argues otherwise. But Steam's traffic starts once people are already on Steam. Search is how people find you before that — and it's the one channel you own outright, rather than rent from an algorithm.
How do I know any of this actually works?
Because it's being tested in public. Crit Pick is a gaming site being built and ranked from zero, with the real numbers published as they come in — including the months where nothing happens.
How often do new posts go out?
The newsletter goes out every other week — the short version, no filler. Posts land as they are finished rather than on a schedule, because a padded post to hit a date helps nobody.