TRAFFIC & STRATEGY
Back from the brink :
Google update forces strategy shift on poker affiliate
After a challenging 2024 , Tadas Peckaitis reveals how he adapted to the destructive impact of Google updates on search traffic to provide his mypokercoaching . com audience with new reasons to return
There is hardly a site in the affiliate industry that hasn ’ t felt the impact of the Google updates that severely impacted the search rankings last March . 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 . My site 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 .
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 more than 240 % over the course 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 the 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 ,
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