iGaming Daily

Ivana (00:00.972)
Hello everyone and welcome back to the iGaming Daily Marketing Edition with Ivana. Today we are going to be talking about a super new topic and that is creating your own search engine. My guest is Vadim. He has been here with us before. Welcome, Vadim.

Vadim (00:16.782)
Hello everyone, for inviting.

Ivana (00:20.12)
Fantastic. Thank you for joining us. So I invited Vadim because he is an amazing SEO, even better with blackhead PPC techniques in black and gray markets. And we'll talk about that. And then he is always full of surprises and he looks into what's new and what needs to be done. And he is proof that iGaming industry in the SEO, PPC and marketing space is very innovative and we think extremely outside of a box.

And he has created his own search engine. So we'll be talking about that. How is that working? How we came up with that idea? What's the vision? Which market is it covering? And we'll be covering. So stay tuned because this episode is going to be something that we never talked about before. It's completely new and I think it will be very enriching for all of you listening to us. So first of all, we start slowly with discussing. I think this is as good as any moment to discuss.

The state of SEO 2025-2026, what we're seeing as it's coming, we are in half of the year, we are almost exactly the middle, closer to Christmas than to New Year's by now, and to start of 2025. So what have we seen? How is 2025 shaping from SEO and PPC? And why are you being so creative, Vadim? So what do you see from PPC trends? I mean, it has been a ride with the black and gray markets for PPC for sure.

Vadim (01:43.446)
Yeah, yeah, I think that the major indicator of this year, the major thing for this year for SEO, PPC, everything related to search is that we cannot predict anything right now. We cannot predict anything for next year or even that we will probably we don't know how this year will end up because everything is changing on the weekly or even daily basis.

And this is good, think. That's the pace that we have in our industry that we are developing new things. That's the pace that we have in technology right now. So there is always a race between software and hardware, yeah? And we're talking about AI, obviously.

And I believe as long as we have some issues with hardware, the software will be a late with updates. But the same moment we have some breakthrough in hardware, we will have breakthrough in AI and in SEO and PPC also. just one sentence for each direction. SEO.

will be first of all it's not dead yeah it's not dead first of all yeah SEO is not dead SEO is no no no no no no but it's changing like never before it changing like never before in a good way for the user PPC becoming more and more humanless

Ivana (03:06.575)
It was dead, mean... It's not dead.

Vadim (03:31.188)
Soon, believe even next year, you don't need to have a team of 20 PPCs to run your accounts. Everything is AI, everything is automated. If let's say right now Google is giving you an option to choose if you would like to run this campaign and manage it manually or not.

Soon we will have like, just pay, connect your credit card, connect your bank, and we will do everything. Just upload your website, install the tag, that's it. That's the future, very, very near future. I believe it's good in general for the industry.

But let's see how it will be implemented and what other competitors will do. It's all about the quality of the results that we'll get. And speaking about the quality of results, speaking about the changes that we see. Now, last year, at the end of the year, I believe everyone who is doing a black or gray PPC noticed that it's a bit tougher than usual, a bit tougher than usual.

And then around December, generally, it become almost impossible. And that's the first time when we thought, OK, let's be creative. Let's create a new search engine dedicated for casino only. And when we started to think about this and brainstorm about the startup, we were thinking more about technology company.

technology startup not another affiliate not another marketing not another

Vadim (05:20.526)
portal of casino, okay? And we said, okay, let's take it for specific country. Let's create a technology, real search engine, not a review website. And this is exactly what we did. We have our own index ranking algorithm. We have our own crawler. We have our own all around.

environment to give the results to people and it's independent. No one is paying us to be number one, number two. No one is paying us to promote. It's absolutely independent. There is no any affiliation there. There is no any payments involved that somehow

manipulate with our results what we have in SEO. So SEO today is the fight of budgets. If you have budget, if you have skills, if you have good team, you will win. Same for PPC. And we think it's a bit going to the...

problematic area, especially in markets such as Finland, who is introducing a new regulation next year and who wants to ban all the affiliation at all. Okay, it's kind of crazy, but I believe they will do it. So right now, it's absolute startup. It's everything with our own technology and enthusiasm.

We are thinking that each and everyone in Finland who is looking for the best online casino should go to our website and search for casinos because once they will search for any casinos they will see casinos only as a search result page. No payments, no nothing optimized. We know what we're doing, we know how to show it to the users.

Vadim (07:31.502)
And we think that we are better than Google in the way how to rank the results right now.

Ivana (07:39.15)
So first of all you're starting in Finland. The FinSpin is available right now only in Finland but I believe that will be going to another country when it becomes more successful because right now the idea is starting, it is still in diapers, it needs time but what would be your next country you would like to take if this is very successful?

Vadim (07:54.496)
absolutely.

Vadim (07:58.626)
Yeah, yeah. So the idea is to connect other countries and it's not only because we like and know Finland that we do. We started with Spinfin in Finland. It's also because each and every country we believe should be built in a localized way. So if let's say the next market can be Germany, can be Netherlands, can be UK, can be any market.

based on the experience that we will get with Spinfin, based on the technical innovation that we already have and see in Spinfin. So I believe one of the European countries can be next and even US or Canada, it's not a problem once we see the feedback from the clients, from industry. So far the feedbacks are really, really nice, really good, positive.

Ivana (08:52.91)
Okay.

I saw it. actually liked it, but I like how I mean, I saw it, obviously. That's why Vadim is here because I thought this is brilliant idea and it looks really cool. So when you put online casino, Finland, Nettie casino, Finland, know, Coli, Coppeli, whatever, there's like a little like a slot machine that actually pulls the trigger and starts to search. it's starting with gamification right away when you search. So I think for the player, it is going to be whole new journey. So in this way, I believe you are better than Google because Google is not providing any gamification, right?

Vadim (08:58.168)
Thank you.

Vadim (09:12.59)
Mm-hmm.

Vadim (09:17.036)
Thank

Ivana (09:25.552)
Sometimes they change the logo with like, it's our birthday or it's Mother's Day or something, but it's not gamification. So that is the first interesting thing. Now, going to the fact that you think you're better than Google outside of the gamification, can you tell us how you rank the websites? What are your main ranking factors? If you can.

Vadim (09:42.498)
Yeah, yeah. Now I will not give you all the secrets that we have, but the idea is we plan in the later stage to open our rankings, secrets and everything outside to everyone. We don't think we should or we can hide something from anyone who would like to know exactly how it works. Cause people are asking. So we have our pages on Facebook.

and we're promoting a bit to see how people actually in Finland, how they react. And they ask questions. Why don't you take money? Why don't? So how does it work? And we said, OK, what if we open the actual real ranking secret? And right now, we do have our own.

index with specific text that describes each and every casino and we have a special weight that we give for each placement. let's say casino name. So if someone is looking for this casino name, they should see this casino name. The majority of the searches actually are brand searches in our industry.

If they're looking for specific bonus, they should see the specific bonus here. And we are trying to teach our search engine what's the difference between welcome bonus or redeposit bonus. Because Google doesn't know exactly these small details, these small things about the product.

what Google sees and think they know is what SEOs and PPC managers is entering in Google. So here we'd like to show the independent description idea of bonuses, wagering and so on. It's not easy to show everything in the search engine result page in the SERP because if you put a lot of information it becomes just another review website.

Vadim (11:47.894)
So right now the SERP is very look like Google, if you will go. And we're trying to a bit complicated more and more, but just in a way that it will be easy enough to understand that this is exactly what we're looking for and not too over complicated with too much information for the users to make the decision and so on. And one of the ways how to retain clients will be, we'll absolutely get our own app for iOS, Android.

give better retention and communication. We are not collecting any personal data. We are not asking people to log in, we are not taking any emails, but the app will give us few opportunities how to communicate better with our clients.

Ivana (12:44.782)
and we'll talk about how to communicate better with your clients after the ad.

Okay, so we have a break and now we continue. Let's say I have a website in Finland and I really want to be listed in your FinSpin. How do I go about it? How do I know that I get indexed, that I'm ranking? How does this work? I mean, I know it will be like google.com, you go there, you put keywords and it starts to rank. So I'll go to your website, put keywords in and I'm not ranking because I'm not indexed. How do I make sure I am indexed?

Vadim (13:07.032)
Yeah.

Vadim (13:15.628)
It's a good question. First of all, if you really want to be indexed, you can email us right now. We are not offering any technical interface to add the website to index. And I believe we will not give it in order to avoid some abuse. We do know how to crawl. We do know how to check other casinos and everything.

We are a bit cautious right now with adding more and more websites due to regulation coming and everything and we we're still finding the best kind of webmaster tools or search console you can call it for webmasters but

will tell you the truth, we do plan to monetize it, because we are not a non-commercial organization, we are a very commercial organization. And in the future we do plan to monetize.

this project and in other countries by becoming a media platform and giving let's say brands and other websites an opportunity to buy ads on the CPC basis. It's absolutely in our plan and one of the monetization

that we think about. But right now we are not giving anyone this tool to add the website.

Ivana (14:59.406)
I have one more question. Is it just text that is going to be indexed or as well you're to have videos, images, because for now I think it's only text, right? It's only text results.

Vadim (15:11.904)
It's text, we tried with logos, we tried with images, again it becomes a bit too busy and too much review affiliate website like page.

we try to keep it as clean as possible. Our major innovation here is that we understand the semantic of these keywords here. So let's say for Google, best online casinos or non-registration online casinos, they don't really know the difference between the...

products. They don't have to. Google doesn't have to know the ideas of what is MGA licensed casino or non-MGA what does it mean for the Finnish or other clients. We know so we can help to give better results. We can have to show better results so there is a better match between the operator, the casino and the client.

So once the clients, they will understand that it's much easier and better to search for casinos in Spinfin, they will never go again to Google and try to find the best casino among all the manipulation that we do as a seahouse and PPCs right now in Google. So that's the idea, the quality of the results.

Ivana (16:44.046)
And is it right now only casino or sports book as well?

Vadim (16:48.034)
Mostly casinos. We are not differentiated between casinos and sportsbooks for the website exactly because it's sometimes impossible to do. But if someone is looking for a brand, they will probably find it, if it's sportsbook of course, because we are not against sportsbooks. It's also our clients.

Ivana (17:15.382)
Okay, but it will always stay just iGaming or are you planning to then add maybe adult or pharma, any of the other gray niches?

Vadim (17:24.43)
No, no, it's a good question. It's per product and per country. When we first were thinking about it, we were thinking to create a universal world.

casino search engine but then we understood that we can't guarantee good quality in the beginning if we will support all the countries and all the languages and everything so we said okay let's let's succeed let's give something good and high quality in one country in one language if we'll succeed there we will add more countries and crosslink and everything and the products

Ivana (18:07.416)
And I think this is a question everybody is thinking at this point. How much does it cost? know that search in Google, just search is like 26 million a day just for search. And all you said, all the development and all the search and all your own crawler, your own bot, thinking of your having your own webmaster tools, it has to be expensive. Can you tell us how much it costs daily or monthly or anything that you can enclose? How much is this?

Vadim (18:31.822)
It's a good question. It's not millions. I wish it will be millions because Google costs millions because there are a lot of people using Google. Once a lot of people will start using Spinfin, it will also cost us much, much more. But as I said, in the era of AI, everything is much, much more faster executable.

So we started to think about Spinfin, about Search Engine in November, December. In January, we had the first PRD document, product document. In late January, in February, we have it almost done. Everything is written by AI companion. Everything is AI-written code.

In late February, I think in March, we were improving and the stable version we have in March, think, again, everything is written by AI. We are using Elasticsearch. It's one of the biggest search engine.

technologies they work together with Google that they provide startups this in the actual Brains and everything but you need to know how to implement this brain. Yeah so it's a real search engine and not just I Don't know a WordPress website with some simple

code that searching for queries here. It's a real one learning search engine not expensive not expensive

Ivana (20:25.346)
That's very good. Good to know. And one more technical question. How do I make sure that your bot is not blocked on my website? How do I make sure that your bot is able to visit my website? Because I actually want to be crawled and indexed in Finland by you.

Vadim (20:38.542)
No worries, once we have something crazy to change, just like Cloudflare thing changed yesterday, blocking AR and everything, we will let you know. You can't block our crawler right now, so no worries.

Ivana (20:48.494)
yes.

Ivana (20:58.634)
Okay, fantastic. Sounds like the future of iGaming in Finland for sure, especially with all the changes coming. So if you are working in Finland, make sure to visit Spinfin, speak to Vadim and see if this is a traffic you can have right now for free. In the future, obviously paid because Google wouldn't want to make money. Thank you very much for sharing with us and I'm looking forward to have you on a podcast again. Thank you.

Vadim (21:23.63)
Thank you.