Back after a challenging year, Mypokercoaching.com CEO Tadas Peckaitis reveals how he adapted to the destructive impact of Google updates on search traffic to provide his audience with new reasons to return.
There is hardly a site in the affiliate industry that hasn’t felt the impact of recent Google updates, which severely impacted the search rankings earlier this year. The ones on the worse end of the variance saw search traffic drop by as much as 90% or even disappear altogether.
Obviously, the number of visits is critical to a site operating on an affiliate model, and this new reality created a big challenge, leaving only two options: wait for Google to update the update and hope for the best, or try to adapt. Mypokercoaching opted for the latter.
When search traffic takes a hit, the only viable alternative is to try and increase the number of direct visits. To achieve that, however, you need to give people a reason to keep coming back.
The new route saved us from losing the business and helped grow direct traffic by over 240% over the span of a few months
Even in the relatively small poker niche, there are hundreds of similar sites, so we decided to take a new route. This saved us from losing the business and helped grow direct traffic by over 240% over the span of a few months, and this is how we did it.
What can you offer?
We went back and forth analysing the industry and identified the lack of free resources for live poker players. Free is the key word here since there are plenty of paid tools that most players are not really interested in using and no viable alternative where players can get everything they need for free in one place.
If we wanted to recoup big traffic losses from search rankings, we had to offer something unique and valuable so players would keep coming back.
After brainstorming all of the possible options, we went straight into development and launched three applications:
- Poker hand replayer – where players can easily submit and share the hands that they played
- Odds calculator – a tool to check mathematical chances of winning in any given situation
- Preflop charts app – a collection of poker ranges showing what hands to play
The most significant tool developed as a part of this new strategy is a free poker hand replayer. For several years now, poker players have been lacking a reliable and functional tool to recreate and share their hands, be it for training purposes or just for fun.
If we wanted to recoup big traffic losses from search rankings, we had to offer something unique and valuable so players would keep coming back
We stepped in and filled this gap, offering a simple-to-use yet very functional tool with options such as UTG and button straddles, big blind antes, the ability to show stacks as chip values or big blinds, and much more.
A tool like this gives people plenty of reason to bookmark the site and keep coming back, especially when there are no real alternatives out there. Here is how the actual replayer hand looks.
The other two tools were not that groundbreaking and already existed online in different formats, but we decided to still recreate them by refreshing the design to bring a sleek user interface and sharp graphics.
Having all three tools together means that players have all they need to recreate and analyse their hands on the same site entirely for free, making it a website worth visiting and recommending to friends.
How can you adapt to the new environment?
Everything that’s happened over the past several months has shown (once again) that there are no guarantees when it comes to affiliate business. Things can change quickly and without a warning, and site owners don’t have any control over them.
The only thing they have control over is their site.
With the search traffic on a downward trajectory, we realised that the only way forward was to change the approach and move on with the times. If you can’t bring in people via Google, you need to give them a reason to come to you directly.
Lessons from Mypokercoaching can be valuable to everyone in the industry currently dealing with the same problems. With the new approach, we were able to increase our direct traffic by over 240% in the first six months, and we hope to continue this trajectory by introducing new tools and offering additional value to our readers.
If you can’t bring in people via Google, you need to give them a reason to come to you directly
Even with dropping traffic from search engines, we managed to increase our revenue in the second half of 2024 and have a plan to continue this journey in 2025.
What’s next?
The old “if you build it, they’ll come” adage may be a bit of a cliché, but I do find that they have some truth to them. If you can give people something they need, especially if that something is free, they’ll come. After all, why wouldn’t they?
Therefore, the most important thing is to stay in the game until you can figure out your unique value proposition and how you can do things better than others.
Can you notice a gap and create a new product? Can you tweet an existing one to be easier to use? Can you find a way to create actual value rather than rewriting the same content that everyone publishes?
If you aren’t prepared to pump a lot of money into marketing, you need to get creative. Think long and hard about how to answer previous questions, and you might outmanoeuvre your competition and all-mighty Google algorithm.
At the end of the day, if you start getting direct traffic, you are very likely to see those rankings coming back as well.
When old ways stop working, it’s not the time to despair and hope for things to go back; on the contrary, it’s the time to act and create a new narrative.
Tadas Peckaitis
played poker professionally for over a decade and founded mypokercoaching.com to offer helpful resources to players. He has launched multiple affiliate websites over the years and has became one of the leading experts in the gambling industry. In 2021, Tadas founded the fast-growing iBetMedia agency helping other gambling brands to reach their targeted players and acquire new customers.