How I Led MPL to #1 in Real-Money Gaming Search

TL;DR. I led the product-led SEO programme that took Mobile Premier League (MPL), one of Asia’s largest gaming apps, from a brand-only search footprint to category leadership. The strategic shift was simple to name and hard to do: stop depending on people searching “MPL”, and build a non-branded engine that owned the games themselves. By 2023 that engine reached 10M+ non-branded organic visits a year, 135,016 ranking keywords, 6,342 in the top 3, and the number one organic share of voice in India’s real-money gaming category. Branded search pushed total organic past 2.5M visits a month.

The number that frames it: to buy the traffic this programme earned, MPL would have paid roughly $300,000 (about Rs 2.5 crore) every month on Google Ads. That is the value of owning organic in a category where paid clicks are brutally expensive.

The mandate: escape the brand

When I took ownership of organic growth in 2020, MPL was visible mostly on brand keywords. People who already knew MPL could find it; everyone searching for the games could not. Even the non-branded rankings we did hold were mostly brand-navigational variants like “www.mpl.live”. In December 2020, Ahrefs counted just 250 non-branded keywords in our top 10, and only 35 at position 1.

The opportunity was enormous: more than 100 million monthly searches in India were directly relevant to the business, across real-money gaming, casual games, and the cricket content that surrounds them. The mandate: own non-branded search in a hyper-competitive, trust-sensitive category, and do it durably.

The December 2020 setback, and the call I made

Early growth had been fast, and some of it was fragile. A December 2020 Google core update cut organic visibility hard. The easy reaction would have been to chase the old rankings back. I made a different call: treat the update as a quality signal, not a bug.

We ran a forensic diagnosis, mapped the loss to thin and overlapping pages, and rebuilt around E-E-A-T: genuine expertise, original value, and pages that deserved to rank. The June 2021 core update marked the turn, and we never looked back. Full recovery to a sustainable 1M+ monthly peak came by 2023, this time on foundations that held.

From branded to non-branded: the real growth story

This is the heart of it. In 2020 the footprint was branded and brand-navigational. The work was to build genuine non-branded category authority, keyword by keyword, until MPL ranked for the games rather than only for itself. The before and after is stark:

2020 counts are exact from Ahrefs (India). 2023 position-1 and Page-1 figures are first-party from Google Search Console; the top-3 figure is Ahrefs. Total ranking keywords grew from 10,034 to 135,016 over the same period.

Category dominance

We did not just rank, we led the category. At peak, MPL held these positions across its core real-money and casual game buckets:

The levers I led

Content decay and pruning, the unglamorous lever that mattered most

The single highest-leverage decision was to prune aggressively. We continuously audited for content decay, then consolidated, redirected, or removed pages that diluted topical authority or carried thin-content risk. Cutting the wrong pages is how you protect the right ones. This discipline is what let the recovery stick and the footprint compound, rather than re-inflating the same fragility.

A content-intelligence engine

We built informational content around the cricket and gaming intent that feeds the category. At peak this ranked number one for queries like “who is the king of ipl” and top 3 for “god of cricket”, funnelling huge, relevant audiences toward the product. Editorial content around real-cash games and variants grew from a few hundred monthly visits to over a million by 2023.

12-language vernacular expansion

We launched Hindi and Indian vernacular variants across 12 languages, growing vernacular organic share by more than 1,000% and taking Hindi from zero to roughly 80% of vernacular traffic. The data shows it: “paisa kamane wala app” at position 5 and “एमपीएल” at number 1. In India, language is one of the largest under-priced opportunities in organic, and we moved before competitors saw it.

Conversion-rate engineering: 50% to 78%

SEO that does not convert is vanity. Driving traffic was only half the mandate; the other half was turning sessions into installs. I ran a structured programme of conversion experiments that lifted session-to-download conversion from 50% to 78%:

• Download-button UI/UX revamp. We redesigned and A/B tested the download experience and button variants until the highest-converting version won.

• Page-speed optimisation. We cut load times so the download intent was never lost to a slow page, especially on mid-range Android devices on Indian networks.

• Vernacular how-to-install videos. We placed short, language-specific “how to download and install” videos immediately after the download button, removing the friction that lost first-time users.

• CTA and copy testing. We systematically tested call-to-action wording and placement.

• Colour and contrast testing. We tested button colours and contrast to maximise tap-through on the primary action.

A 50% to 78% lift on session-to-download is worth more to the business than another keyword cluster. It is why the SEO programme was measured on installs, not just rankings.

Authority: a real Digital PR programme

Rankings in a trust-sensitive category need links that are earned, not bought. We ran a sustained Digital PR, outreach, and link-building programme. Ahrefs shows the result cleanly: referring domains grew from 706 to 3,282 over the window, while Domain Rating climbed into the 70s.

The results

I have led with first-party GSC results and used Ahrefs and Semrush to corroborate the keyword footprint, authority growth, and multi-million traffic scale. Tools differ on the exact month-to-month traffic shape; the trend and the keyword growth are consistent across both.

Leadership and the decisions that mattered

This was product-led SEO, not a checklist. I built and led the team, set the strategy, and owned the calls: choosing recovery-through-quality over chasing lost rankings; pruning hard when the instinct is to publish more; investing in vernacular before competitors saw the opportunity; and treating conversion rate as an SEO metric, not a hand-off. MPL’s organic growth became a pioneering example in India’s real-money gaming industry.

Durable category leadership, built on quality, authority, and product thinking, not on tricks.

Takeaways for any competitive category

• Escape the brand. Branded search is a floor, not a strategy. The growth is in owning the category terms.

• Treat core updates as quality feedback. Recovery through E-E-A-T beats clawing back fragile rankings.

• Pruning is a growth lever. Topical authority is protected by what you remove, not just what you add.

• Vernacular is a moat. In India, language expansion is one of the largest under-priced opportunities in organic.

• Measure conversion, not just rankings. A 50% to 78% session-to-download lift beats another keyword cluster.

• Earn authority. In trust-sensitive categories, links must be editorial.