iGaming SEO, Decision-Making & AI

She trained as a professor of French language and literature but realized teaching wasn't for her; freedom is her biggest motivator and SEO provides it. After some event management and TV work, she applied as a link builder at Dejan SEO, learning from Dan Petrovic early on.

Asked by Nik · answered by Maja Jovančević

After ~3 years at Dejan SEO, she started her own agency. Her best move: she never did her own lead gen — she partnered with web development agencies (met via a business incubator) that resold her SEO and content. After ~3 years she burned out and closed it, then a conference talk led to an iGaming affiliate job in Malta.

Asked by Nik · answered by Maja Jovančević

For iGaming affiliates, SEO is the only traffic source (PPC is largely restricted), so the SEO is the most important person in the room: redirects, content and tool requests get implemented fast, and devs build for search. The flip side is pressure — dropping one keyword for days can cost €50–60K.

Asked by Nik · answered by Maja Jovančević

Maja: it made her focus on money, not just traffic and rankings. Sara: rankings alone are no longer a goal — with AI Overviews you can rank high and get no clicks; focus on ROI from clicks.

Asked by Nik · answered by Maja Jovančević & Sara

She sees two schools of thought: 'Google is broken, black hat your way in' (higher risk tolerance) and 'AI is taking traffic, so report on business outcomes, not traffic.' Both have merit; either way SEO must become a system, not just execution.

Answered by Maja Jovančević

Understand, decide, execute. She reviews technical setup and redirect history, compares traffic swings to revenue and seasonality, does a topical map investigation (headings, breadcrumbs, schema), assesses content linguistics (fluff, proprietary info, UGC), E-E-A-T signals, agent-readiness, markets, SERPs, backlinks, and historical versions (catching expired or repurposed domains). She found a correlation between fixing E-E-A-T issues and appearing in AI Overviews.

Asked by Sara · answered by Maja Jovančević

She burned two test websites with AI content tools and found they added external links to competitors' sites — a breach of trust she'd consider suing over for a client site. In a talk on decision-making, she noted AI lets you generate and execute 10,000 bad decisions over a weekend; experience and judgment matter more than ever.

Asked by Nik · answered by Maja Jovančević

Maja: right now, don't — junior tasks are being automated and nobody knows where search is heading, though people who make good decisions will still be standing. Nik agrees SEO has become much more complex to enter.

Answered by Maja Jovančević & Nik

Sara: search is now multi-platform (Reddit, ChatGPT); AI output looks good but is often subtly wrong; AI company claims are partly propaganda. Maja: look beyond North America — AI is developing globally (e.g., China). Google has the index, Maps and user data to ground AI; nobody knows the outcome, but smart people will be okay.

Asked by Sara · answered by Sara & Maja Jovančević

She's in a consulting/decision phase, so she uses AI to gather information that she verifies against her processes. A PPC specialist asked her about switching to SEO because they don't see a future in PPC. Anyone can launch ads, but that doesn't make them good — Google will happily take the money. Experience is more important than ever.

Asked by Nik · answered by Maja Jovančević