Interview with the Head of SEO for the World's Largest Online Casino

[Music] hey guys what's up welcome back to the channel and welcome to the first interview of 2025 where I'm interviewing SE entrepreneurs and experts from around the world in today's episode I've got a very very very interesting guest for you he is the head of SEO for the world's biggest online casino and one of the top Platforms in the world please welcome to the show Peter minov ladies and gentlemen I apologize for the that's okay I

knew you going a butcher the name I was kind of like betting in my head if you got a butcher or not so my name is Peter minkovich so all the yeah it's a Croatian surname I don't look Croatian I'm a Filipino but that's basically that and yeah that's thanks for the intro there Charles like that yeah hi I'm glad appreciate I I should have asked you straight away there but we can jump straight into it

and kind of I I I I I love it when people butcher my name cuz it always gives me a chance to like rith them a little bit early and it actually is kind of an ice breaker like some people hate it but like I love it I actually had training today for like um some uh like testing software and a guy called me Luke he just like missed me up for like half an hour I'm

like dude I'm like yeah so like that's a lot better because at least your mispronunciation is a complete understandable well I appreciate you jumping on and I know the time zones are a bit crazy for you over in Australia and things yeah yeah yeah it's 100% like it's like it's 9:30 p.m. where we are now but like that's kind of it's kind of it's kind of strange that a company does so much business in like Europe

you like the um um Africa Latin America and like um Canada and those kind of things yet we the company's based in Australia so it's actually such it's like the worst part of the world to base our business yeah a lot of late nights I'm guessing with those time zones there yes yes a lot of late meetings and talking to people such as yourself yes well I appreciate you getting on for so the the first question

that I had for you is how actually did you get started in SEO how did you get or end up working in literally the most com competitive vertical and space in the industry and how did you end up working for what is arguably the world's biggest online casino right now yeah sure so like I started my career like at 2011 and that was my first exposure to SEO but I wasn't an SEO then I was like

a I started an agency I was like what you probably call like an account manager/ producer so like a Swiss Army chainsaw of someone who can design a little bit someone who can code a little bit or someone who can meet with clients a little bit and that was my first exposure cuz in 2011 SEO was very different than what it is now like it was essentially just like very input driven and like those of us

who've been around a while can remember the days of scrapebox and ex Ruma and GSA and it was all like a local plumbing business will legitimately have like 300K backlinks of pure unadulterated spam page rank was publicly visible so you could actually like calculate the scam uh scam spam you can calculate the actual page rank coming from the Google's eyes itself but that and it's very very very different landscape and that was how I was first

exposed to SEO and I was interested in it ever since so I just kept along like read like all the blogs did like a little like um I don't know if you know squid do squido is like kind of like a hub Pages type of website was like who whoever created it but like essentially just did some side ones there while I was still at Uni and I just did that but SEO was never my primary

career it was mainly just a digital allrounder like I was I wanted to be a project manager SL just someone who worked on the web and I did that for a few years it sucked I actually realized like as you do early on your career in your early 20s you realized what you thought you were going to do like straight out of uni wasn't what you're going to do but I had a knack for digital marketing

so um like essentially I got into digital marketing in a very very small uh e-commerce retailer like just ran by pharmacists who want to sell beauty products online and Shopify and I spent about four and a half years there and even though they had no budget didn't know what they were doing I got them to make at least some money H but because I was technical I was really into SEO I didn't realize how much how

good I got at SEO and I ended up becoming the world's best Shopify SEO like un least from a technical standpoint because I invented some early hacks for some really really big Shopify problems like I was I invented ways to like store variables to um create metadata for tags which was like physically impossible at least at the time but I had a weird hacky system that worked and then I did a presentation at the mbour SEO

Meetup I've been going to the Melbourne SEO Meetup since 2014 I was always interested in SEO and I did a presentation that was two hours long and my future boss was in the audience and he said hey I've got a client called JB HiFi and for those of you who are not inro JB highi is the biggest um online Electronics retailer in Australia there also many other things but it's the reason why Amazon take off in

Australia is because we have JB highi it's we it's like headphones mobile phones um gaming any like music and DVDs anything you think of they were the top retailer for it and they were switching to Shopify and they're like let's get the best Shopify SEO guy to do it so that was actually my first proper job just being an SEO as a technical SEO was like a senior role even though I didn't technically work um as

an SEO and I did the largest Shopify migration in history like it was like 250,000 URLs from their old uh web platform which is called EP Server kind of like a Magento like platform to 55,000 Shopify euros and that was very very challenging but after like six months to a year after like the painful parts of the migration where I told him not to do it um but I still nailed the redirect and all that kind

of stuff it took off did really really well so that means if you're in Australia and you Google the word headphones iPhone TVs anything we dominated and as a result of that work and also other top tier clients at this agency so I did like the largest like home builder I did the largest like I don't know like large equipment hire website I did T2 which is the international T brand those kind of ones I had

a reputation as like one of the top seos in Australia so like I had a very good reputation as working basically on the biggest brands getting the best results and just dominating the serup it was like a pitch where whenever we pitch new clients we showed graph and sem rush and say guess when Peter started working on their account it was like that's the kind of pitch so it was awesome so to how I got into

stake and eigo which is the parent company don't ask me about the legal structure and stuff like that but like essentially like eigo was the uh there's a company here in Australia which operates stake and kick and those kind of ones but at the time kick didn't exist it was mainly stake they were looking for an SEO role in their company their company must have been like 40 people at the time when they advertised the role

but they just hired 3 months earlier their head recruiter a person called Jasmine is and Jasmine has been trying to head hunt me for six years like always wanting to get me like every single time whenever she was at agency or even when she were to a new place like she was always saying like hey do you want to get an SEO role blah blah blah and I was like no I'm fine it like the company

I was at um or when I switched the agency I was like no I'm doing really really important work but I happened to be interviewing for which was like the largest um job boards website in Australia and probably one of the like like of my of the five dream jobs I would ever have was that website because it's like a billion Pages job listings very like very very complicated from technical standpoint so it kind of like

interested me but she made a very compelling point to sell me on that was essentially like listen you don't understand how big this website is and they suck at SEO and you will get the opportunity to work to grow grow yourself grow your future team and be part of something that they have all the money in the world to Resource you and you could once you show Once you show proof you'll be able to grow it

so I did that I accepted the offer I in I quote unquote interviewed but it wasn't really much of an interview because they didn't know much of about SEO like I basically said in the first two minutes okay you're dis technology stack spell kit you're using S CMS but I don't really see any evidence of you structuring your data so tell me about it they didn't know anything about that and they're like great so I got

to jop off half an hour after the interview and I accepted the role um I got started and my first year was very much like Technical and product related it was all building the technology the custom stuff because it's a custom web application large gambling platform a lot of challenges dos all that kind of stuff just to get make SEO possible so it took like four months to even get started to have like metad dat and

like the basics of SEO what I would call the basics the foundational stuff of SEO and about nine months before like it started getting its first results right so like that's the kind of thing and for context St was already a billion doll company when I was hired and it had like maybe say half a million brand searches a month at the time but non-brand was like less than like a couple hundred like tiny like the

99.99999% brand so like just no non brand at all so I did that um after about a year I was able to make my first high on my team which was Min who worked with me in the previous agency and she and I together are probably did like combined cuz we cover each other's weaknesses we're probably the best SEO there is in Australia like that's a twers group because we cover each other's weaknesses she's very productive

and um we are live and strategy so just like just very very fast Cadence and after that we just started like after being hit by like the March algorithm update of next year which happens which is always fun not to see some progress we just started pumping out content building out processes and then just started seeing results and like today we have eight people on the team including myself like growing internally and we're ranking for some

of the most competitive terms and kick like Kick's not my idea like that's the company there but that's the fortunate part of being in such a creative and Company that's hungry to win and dominate is that they would come up with hey let's who what kind of company would say hey let's compete with twitch like we don't like them let's build a competitive twitch and resource it and take their best stream is and build a platform

so because of that I get the opportunity to do SEO for like legitimately a top 200 website in the world and like not it's very mechanical type of SEO but that's kind of how I fell in like this is my career Journey like I've followed SEO for a long time didn't apply it to like 2019 like properly as a full-time role but I was always doing it as part of my roles as a digital marketer and

that's kind of like and basically because I got very skilled because I can code and I can and I'm like pretty well versed in that kind of stuff and I'm good at communicating that was my weapon to succeed in my career and that's why I was in the opportunity to be where I am today essentially wow that's awesome so you kind of led me straight on to asking you something to about kick which is how do

you kind of manage this large scale ugc especially kind of the content creator profiles I noticed when I was doing some background research for both kick and Stak especially on kick you seem to be the only platform you also mentioned twitch there and a couple others out there you got Rumble and some other ones as well out there um that uses site links and schemer effectively I've seen some others implement it and then roll it back

or do things like that um but you you guys are the only one that actually have got it that it doesn't break and that it it seems to work properly in the Surs which gives you these kind of ser extra additional Sur boxes which I'll show up here and the you get the edited show in a link here for you yeah sure so kick is specific specifically a nextjs framework but uh for context it was in

beta what we call beta for like a year and a half or something like that cuz it launched very quickly so just to go backwards when um obviously when twitch didn't like our main website stake.com anymore on their platform um we explored alternative like me like I wasn't personally involved but obviously the company explored Alternatives and Ki was born like within a month or so like when the when the company decided to do something about being

like their off twitch Journey essentially so that first iteration of the website that was around for a very very long time had probably the worst SEO possible it was a laravel app and vue.js but nothing was service i' rendered um very it was very quickly developed which is the which is the impressive thing but the website had a lot of performance problems those kind of things but the website was still very big as a brand so

Google colled it despite the fact that it was terrible like it has a massive crawl like the amount of crawls it gets per day is really really high amongst the highest I've seen in my career with many many websites I've worked on so by the time we switch to nextjs which is a react framework that can do stuff like serde rendering and like nice SEO stuff we came out of the box with all this kind of

stuff like the good metadata good stuff but you mentioned schema schema is something that I'm probably world class in uh not many people understand schema properly there's a lot of opinions on schema on the internet I don't want to name and shame some people some of these people are my friends but they don't know schema at a very very good level like as in like they didn't read Greg kog stuff in 2016 like I did they

went in the Google groups in 2014 2015 2016 and they didn't understand the point of schema they've created like a labeling service and they're treating it like it's 2011 and people are doing meta keywords in the title and they're over optimizing it that is not the point of schema schema is supposed to be providing guidance and context for the robot and the way I design it I design it to how the spec is intended and I

only use the parts that actually move the needle and through that's through testing like I actually know which schema elements are used that actually matter and which don't people just treat it like labeling service like oh this thing this thing but they don't actually understand how to use it properly whereas I do so I prepare documentations for the engineers and I write a doc and say okay for profile page it will be a specific type of

web page called profile page because that exists as one of the 10 specific subtypes of web page and then I treat it like it's a social media link now the challenge with kick specifically is that the profile page is also our live stream video page so it's the same URL because when you visit say Aden Ross so it's like kick.com aen Ross if he happens to be streaming is also a video element so there's actually Dynamic

parts to render the schema so you render it as a profile page but then you have video object and broadcast event and they're joined by using IDs then IDs can join these elements together there's a very specific structure you have to follow and even that gets tricky to try to meet Google's specification for live broadcast and technically we don't meet it but that's not my fault I designed it right at the time they changed the specification

on me but I designed it so that if someone happens to be live streaming it'll also render broadcast event and uh video object and they actually change it around so you had to do with the other way around with video object has the broadcast event I originally did the other way around so it's an iterative approach but um because of my like long long history like it's been 10 years of working with structured data and understanding

how Json works that I know how to design each page type to a generated schema so every single page type is is also true for stake for our sports book and those kind of things and that provides Google with what is the next or most important Pages related to his Pages using the mechanisms of the website so like the related streamers or the sidebars or the footage and that kind of it just gives Clues and that's

the kind of stuff that people misuse schema for is that they treat it like a labing service for like hyper optimization you're actually better off using going offsite and doing that kind of stuff in content um even with specific ways to ride but for URL Discovery having site links related to even sub Pages um having related games pop up into like site links and those kind of stuff um before they nerfed it having a vent schema

in the serps they nerfed that last year the year before like that's the the kind of stuff that we would have because it would occupy space it provided context and it also improved indexability which is actually the core thing I'm optimizing for especially a website that's so mechanical like Ki KI doesn't have like it still doesn't even have a sitemap because we haven't honestly decided the best way to do it because there so many URLs but

Kick's main job is that we have very specific things like on the vods the video on demands we have an expiration uh using meta unavailable after which is a a terribly underused Meta Meta tag that is the best version of the no index people it does what people think the no index tag does essentially tells Google on this date this URL should not be in the index and it works better than a no index because it

doesn't require a crawl after that date once they see it they just have it in their system and they'll remove it so we have a lot of Craw control mechanisms with that we have a lot of URL Discovery for example uh Clips we did not have a discoverable way to find Clips because they were only available via share so we just have to have hidden anchit Texs and as long as you do the mechanics well and

you identify the types of pages so I generally have like main Pages the website schema which is sitewide applies for everything that's important for entity stuff so we do a lot of Wikipedia work and supplementary um article Works in reinforcing um brand articles for entity stuff so when you Google stake for example it says in the little article box of the side stake gambling company not just organization that's very deliberate and that was by Design that

kind of schema really moves the needle and any way you take advantage of people who are public figures uh kick is wonderful as a ugc platform uh the problem with that is that um we're at a very immature stage of SEO for kick as opposed to steak which is quite mature now where it's purely mechanical it's purely just like my generated schema and like my basic craw control mechanisms which works well for the platform but it's

nowhere near like the content production or like the hyper optimization that we do for stake on a category level for example like we don't do that kind of stuff for kick at this time but we will eventually it's more about you know like when you get to a website this large with different competing priorities it's more like fitting that into schedule and then it opens up possibilities where you can resource that uh hopefully that makes sense

in regards to like what you can and can't do with that kind of stuff yeah no 100% And I think that's a fantastic kind of trick that you gave everybody there with the with the Met tag instead of going through the no index R and stuff with the expiration yeah no 100% like and one of the hard things to deal with like ugc content is that a lot of people stream like uh violate our terms and

conditions because with ugc content there'll be stuff like spam content scam content um there's stuff like um illegal broadcast of copyrighted content that we will so essentially my search console is continuously with if Google complaints dmca complaints those kind of things there so the way you have to manage that you have to manage that within the mechanisms of Google itself um so like essentially if there's a valid complaint you don't complaint against it you just let

it slide and you um you try to remove the URL from Google using the removals tool those kind of things there you wouldn't block it from the index that's not the correct mechanism you just allow the mechanisms with ins search console to actually handle that kind of stuff whereas say for stake like if we get flagged for Stuff i f I fight it to for now because usually it's competitive span because it's just a shady industry

that's kind of that how that kind of stuff works yeah you you answer the question without me asking it oh yeah yeah yeah it's just one of the challenges that is because like ugc content is hard because like I'll give you an anecdote for example like people can um before we had templated metadata people could write one of like their own descriptions and also the chat messages appear in Google so sometimes those things can be like

um inflammatory or racist or like whatever and Google when they overwrite The Meta description could show a chat snippet that has something that's incredibly offensive on there and you would have to use the clear Snippets tool but what we end up using is data data no snippet as a over like say chat overlays navigation and stuff that's ugc content and also from the creators themselves because they could also do it as well we actually take that

control away from the um creators and actually have templated metadata just that's just for pure brand protection doesn't help us from like a SEO traffic standpoint that is a pure reputation I get slacked and tagged in the middle of the night because um Google AI over roded description actually that was being for that specific example but like there being overr a duck du go overit because they get from being and then I have to research and

figure out how to overwrite beings generated metadata which turn out there's a very specific um like um thing you have to give into like the robots or something like that and you block that and then you have to give that clear that from the cash and all that kind of stuff so it actually becomes almost like you're a moderator but the thing you have to moderate is your presentation in search if that makes sense yeah 100%

and kind of literally controlling The Entity making sure that no spammers or hackers are kind of abusing it and all that kind of thing so there's all there's I don't know if you recently saw it but there's actually a lot of hackers recently using parasite SEO on platforms like Spotify and things and also even a couple of the download websites and things to basically rank for kind of hacks downloads crack downloads things like that and then

they were just infecting people's computers with viruses it wasn't even a uh you know it was just straight to the uh to the infection kind of with the virus stage yeah it's Prett very shady like the casino industry is incredibly Shady with these kind of practices not necessarily on our website because like uh you can Google when we get but it's not usually generally for monetary reasons and stuff like that so that's quite publicized and involves

law enforcement but like people do like brand sniping so like there might be some like you know stake app and we don't have an official app for example so they might create a web page that optimizes for that term and then they'll either be our own like someone in our affiliate Network who just wants to get commission or a shady third party who when someone clicks and they think they get an affiliate links they go to

some redirect Shenanigans say that uh Stakes not safe website his five other Casino Alternatives and get a commission that way just as a brand sniping technique so like it's for the Cino industry actually becomes an offsite thing where we have to have takedown processes like there's like legal and it involvement and like operational stuff to take that down so it's beyond seo seo just happens to have toolings like with semrush ah refs and those kind of

things we just happen to have tooling that we actually are a primary mechanism of flagging these kind of things for sure so St and kick both have a huge number of pages and in multiple GEOS and all sorts of different things as well how do you manage crawling indexing your CW budget your technical SEO all of that for such a large platform and not just one platform but actually two platforms how are you managing kind of

so many Avenues all at the same time yeah so there are different maturity levels like I said stake is something that I designed very specifically from a technical standpoint whereas kick I have contributed to so I would contribute a little bit to it and kick gets away with craw budget by legitimately being a incredibly strong brand so like they're able to overcome it by sheer Google wanting to discover it so it's almost like Google's up to

the challenge to craw kick and we just found like the most basic things like the infinite Scrolls or like the the biggest problem with kick always was the vods the videos on demand where it'll crawl a video and just keep an index forever and PE uh people will find um four fours because they expire after day so 99% of the 44s that appeared in our Google search console was that so that was The Meta unavailable after

um thing that controlled that the best whereas stake stake has awesome awesome crawling and indexing like it's not a fast website but it almost is almost an indictment on page speed and those kind of metrics where it almost like they don't matter because stake fails cor web vitals with flying colors I guess we fail comfortably and there's many reasons for that but primarily is because we have a pre-loader and we have to have a pre-loader for

technological reasons for legal reasons and so on and so forth so that is a battle that I like as a SEO who's technical would love to have a faster website but it's something and everyone in the business wants a faster website but there's too many real life obstacles of the platform itself that prevents that we have at any time about three and a half Casino three and a half thousand casino games on the website and you

multiply that by 15 for all the languages so that's however many thousand so of that 3 and 12,000 games in that in our specific site map for Casino there will be probably like only 40 not in Google so it's like 99.99% indexing like perfect like like never in my career have I achieved this high of indexing so we have sit maps for very very specific parts of the website by Page type so we have like some

static Pages which would be like the homepage like certain terms conditions those kind of things we have the casino one which is small enough to have both casino and and casino groups which is the list version of the pages that's for like slots like Casino like our most important um Pages for from anos SEO standpoint um that's the one that has three and a half thousand we have our Sports one which is segmented so we have

sports which is like soccer um basketball that's high level we have a sports category level which is kind of like the second level which most of it is not business interest but it also contains like UFC so and then you have tournament which is a third level that's the weakest part from a indexing standpoint because you might have some really really old tournaments in the system that we just very difficult to manage but that's also for

a very specific league so like the Premier League would live in there the like actual tournament that's like the Wimbledon or Australian Open would be in there um the US election would be in there so we have specified sit maps with CW priorities even though Google says they don't respect that I disagree because our most important sit map from a priority standpoint is what we call fixtures and fixtures are individual sporting events that would be like

Everton versus Liverpool like this Sunday or what whatever whatever the schedule would be it would be individual match 65% of the web traffic for a soccer match or any kind of individual match happens within the 4 Hour span of the event itself before and after and you would get that as like stray bullets of like saying bet evidence Liverpool or if it's in Liverpool like whatever whatever the variation of those keywords are and that's purely up

to charts because those pages have a short lifespan they have like less than a week to rank sometimes they have a span of like half a day to rank and it's good because competition's way lower but they have such a limited lifespan that they they might not even be eligible for the index and we have very similar to um the casino section almost perfect index ability on that and that's all because of sitemap prioritization uh very

sophisticated schema on our list Pages for the sports the category the tournaments we have natural interlinking mechanisms for that and that is purely mechanical and it's probably my greatest achievement on stake from a technical standpoint from an SEO is that essentially these event URLs which have short post lifespans we could get like 800 clicks for a third League aradian or like Iran soccer league game between two random teams I've never heard of in my life and

it will just happen to take off and that's purely by chance but being available we're able to create that opportunity and you can look us up in ahfs you can see that we rank for UFC betting like number one in Canada we rank number two for sports betting in various various countries like all these high level high volume most targeted most valuable keywords in the world and I will tell you that 50% of our non-brand Sportsbook

traffic is these fixtures so like it's the stuff that would never show up in AHS the stuff that would never show up there the stuff that actually drives user signups and user deposits and actual business metrics that's the kind of stuff that I'm proud of and it's like really really sophisticated systems of site map generation like the scheme of stuff like the kick stuff's not being compared to the steak um schema the steak schema is probably

the best schema in the world I would say like that and like the stuff I did for JB highi before they changed it because I haven't touched that website in three years was some of the most advanced schema in the world because essentially I've created mechanisms that use event schema that combined with entity schema and sitewide schema and it helps out content as well so there's like very specific mechanisms that you can add content HTML within

the schema that helps improve the individual indexing of text itself on a page and that always helps with entity SEO and just deep passages and stuff like that so that's a technique I've used for like seven years now so it's like it's not new but people don't do it and I'm like why don't people do it they it's like in the spec you they have examples of how to do it like it's in the description of

whatever entity you're describing and you can put HTML people did it when they did FAQ schema and that and also strong interlinking the interlinking part is that stake you know as much as I've designed it there's actually a lot of technical limitations like we don't have a good related uh like the same way in e-commerce and Amazon you have good related products we don't have that in stake our related games is like a fixed list it's

the same six games on every single page so if you run a screaming fog you don't have that we have like 2,000 out of the 3,000 games have content probably like some of them probably discontinued but like almost all of them have like strong semantic well done interlinking that was done by hand by our content team and that's a process that we've done originally we refined we scaled it up that covers so much of our technical

weaknesses that we end up dominating because of that manual work it's one of the reasons why we're so strong in English that and like a little bit weaker in other languages is because our English cont content actually solves a technical problem like we use content like as an SEO you only can use the tools that you have we were able to create content as a mechanism on the thing so we use it to solve all our

SEO problems we solve it just for optimization standpoint but we also solve it from a technical a relevant standpoint interlinking those kind of things and we just Hammer at home and we just use that like it's not about the traffic at blog post has it's about like what it's information is passing through internal linking and we have a very mature process it's not AI it's not anything like that it's all manual but because it's manual it's

guaranteed to be good and because it's guaranteed to be good like it does well one of the things I don't do from a technical standpoint I haven't done in many years is a redirect we don't I don't really redirect um we it's a it's more it's not like I can't do a redirect it's just a pain to do it because I have to do it manually with within code so I can do it but I only

do it if it's important so I'll give an anecdote like there was a category that got renamed it got Ren name from featured buy slots to bonus byy slots and we couldn't redirect that because I was too busy to Lally do the co- train just with the engineers so we decided to update every single internal link on the website from the old one to the new one and this was every single blog post every single casino

game that would have it manually added so that took that was 500 pages manually done now normally you do like a screaming frog and all that kind of stuff fortunately we have a um a headless content management system called sity and we have quite a mature operation where we just query that so like these days we could find that list in like 45 seconds we can say show me every page that internal link to this and

we just um modify our query because we have a template for that to query the um content management system and we can actually get a spreadsheet to say here's the page here's the anchor text um here's the URL to edit it in the admin and actually can we can actually knock that out really quickly man manually and there's ways to do it B but we haven't figured out how to do that yet but that process where

we updated manually instead of doing redirect only experienced a twoe drop so it dropped from Google when the URL got disappeared we updated all the URLs internally and it returned to its previous position under a new URL in two weeks back to like position two or position one um so I learned that you don't need to do a redirect if you just do the do it the hard way yeah take the extra longevity can of approach

to it all right so yeah as kind of a sub question that I know you said you do a lot of manual work and I know you talked about ah Su already but is there any other tools that us use like deep crawl or anything like that or is it just kind of some local crazy huge screaming frog run so yeah so we do weekly screaming frog crawls but our screaming frog crawls are English only and

what we call plus one so it's like we feed the S map URLs and we call all the side map URS plus one so like whatever they happen to link to folders yeah one one deep yeah so that just catches any Strays and stuff that we happen to miss um for examp for the stuff that we do where we have where we know there's going to be a problem or we find it is that we use

sat which is our content management system and we query it we query a language called gr which is their query language and it's like a different version of like say SQL and those kind of things and that way we don't need to run a screaming frog beefy thing to find all the like I don't need to know like I can find every single hyperlink on our website that we can control with one query it will take

me like a minute and I can have it in a spreadsheet there I don't have to run screaming frog to find that like there's no there's no reason to like the screaming frog will find all the mechanisms of that of like the photo and like menus and stuff like that but we do a weekly call anyway would find it in those and um I would know about it anyway just CU I could see the pr so

that's the kind of stuff that we do from a automation standpoint is that we just have querings I do have like some light monitoring ones they're not automated as of yet but like queries I check for like newly created content for example so like I could see when other teams like the promotions team or the casino team they're they're doing some kind of or the the acquisition and Affiliates team are producing new content and they screw

up a URL in our content management system so we have monitoring for that and we have a very squeaky clean website that doesn't have many errors and the erors that we do have can be fixed now then again like you can't replace screaming frog because like for example exle uh we redid our homepage recently but somehow in that ticket they redid the foo up of our website and they messed up the link to our Live Casino

page one of our most important pages and that caused our rankings to just go all over the place for like two weeks um it was probably other things as well it was going to shake up anyway and bounce back eventually but we didn't know how long it was going to take the back back it took two weeks but it because we did screaming frog we realized oh the footage Chang so we do do screaming frog I

will eventually do site bulb um cbob web call I've talked to Patrick from cybul and but I don't wanted to do it to find technical issues the way I Envision to do it is to create business intelligence so essentially like I mentioned fixtures the individual events we can see how many what the flow is and do that over time so let's do daily crawls on a very specific fast moving part of the website and then Analyze

That to actually forecast content creation or internal link strategy so for example if we have soccer matches we could have like like I don't use AI content but like you can do an AI section where we can talk about them um the preview the match week and talk about the five most important soccer matches that's happening in the Premier League this week or for every single league and we could do that with crawling and intelligence and

feeding that into the system and then or using data for SEO for example which is something I'm a big fan of and then like searching the queries scraping the Articles and then feeding that in as like context clues for like an AI That's the kind of stuff I want to do but we're not currently doing at the moment because I'm I'm big believer in manual content and that I would only do AI content for um probably

fixtures because they're very very limited lifespan they have like less than a week in all cases so like no big deal cuz they're going to get the they're not going to be index in a week anyway so like if it helps it index or helps it perform I'm all for it for like a big UFC launch event for example like UFC um 312 or whatever we're up to now I'm guessing this might be a bit of

a short answer because of you kind of answered a fair bit of it already but AI has been kind of all the rage and SEO for the last couple of years now have you seen much of a change at both the ser and workflow levels so both in terms of you know Surs changing with AI over viws or AI features coming in and workflows changing I know just said that you didn't use AI content but use

AI not for not for Content yeah but like I've used AI to create book markets and tools for my team like I use AI to create like a Google Docs template where um the gang can paste content in from a writer but then make sure that it's valid like the URLs are correct be like in the Google Doc before they past it into the content management system or to convert it because they might have an international

code but we don't put it we put it as the raw URL in our system or I have a book Market that creates a popup of every single casino game that happens to be on the page because the gang will filter by provider and feature or whatever like and try to get a list that physic see in a website but they don't want to copy and paste the name of the game the URL so I have

a pop bookmark that just pops it up and they can just put it into spreadsheet and then they work with that like it helps has helped me a lot operationally in regards to I see a team member under like not underperforming all my team members are fantastic but I see a team member who's doing a task that someone technical like myself can do it very quickly but um I can do that so for example we hired

a link executive very recently it's the first time we had link person other than myself and M who's also on my team doing it and you know she was going to do reporting but then she saw like how daunting the reports are because I report on every single link that we get the amount of keywords it has in aad rep and the traffic and I said don't worry about that you don't have to do it manually

like I show to like what where the metric's coming from you open up the URL exact URL and ahr here's the positions here's the traffic you don't have to do that manually open this Google collab I have paste every single URL in the spreadsheet like it could be like 150 or whatever for the month of whatever and like for this particular vendor and then it'll process it with a a like a CLA assisted Google collab sheet

and it will grab all those metrics using the a API so like that's the kind of stuff there we are on AHF Enterprise but I'm like not using it to its full potential so there stuff that I want to do for that but AI has helped me operationally just by being a better Problem Solver within the business so just my team specifically but also helping out other teams as well like it's helped me come up with

some stuff operationally that people who do stuff manually now in regards to the Surs like you said like the change in the serfs I have noticed like a difference in serps like when I started was 2022 and it's 2025 now and the amount of volume of content and web pages is very different than it is now and the amount of like re like resourcing that people have has just been Amplified so it doesn't fundamentally change that

it changes is the nature of the Surs like there's different types of websites that rank now than it is there some of there do the algorithm updates but obviously you can just filter up by the years by the people who aren't using AI or AI confusing Google and just making making everything a lot more noisier like it's it's a far more noisier Surs and I think Google struggles with it as evidence by certain algorithm updates like

I can imagine like the March update 2 years ago the March update last year and the August update last year were the ones that really really shook it up in the gambling industry that I saw very specifically um lost one of those one two of those so you know that's good but like that's the kind of stuff there because I could see Google was really falling for site reputation abuse but then like AI content that was

like looked kind of legitimate but if you knew the industry you knew was you was off but then again how much can you write about in the gambling industry like Google's not an expert to know what's real or not real content there there's no real legitimate source of real content in the gambling industry unless you happen to work in the gambling industry like I know which blog is actually a legit game viwer the rest of crap

but Google there's no way for Google to know that to be perfectly honest links can't help them they they can't tell like a person legitimately is like um into gambling games and the rest is just keyword stuffing and like probably someone else who's just generating it based on information so I have noticed it it's just become noisier but to me it just makes what the optimized for very very clear like I always joke to people that

there's th rank factors 2,000 rank factors in SEO but there's only four that matter two of them related to content two of them related to Links so like starting to run out of AIT of time here so I wanted to ask you one kind of question before we before we head off uh if you had to start over today would it be in a fresh industry or what's and what's the first thing you'd focus on for

SE okay so me personally like if I had to start over again that's a complicated like if I knew what I knew now when back in time I'd probably just become a gambling affiliate but I let's not do that because like uh it's a great way to make money I've seen how much they get paid uh if I like essentially if I was start over right now I would Pro just for my sake I would probably

want to do something incredibly technical like either a programmatic website or work like I would want to work on like a eBay or seek like the one I was interviewing before type of website like a website is really really big and like so like cuz like the stuff that I really focus on that not many people do is Real Time SEO like the only people who do publishing SEO and maybe like the job section like that

kind of stuff do that and doing the technical SEO kind of stuff is the thing that I want to like the things I think people like that I've grown the most as an SEO like and the stuff they have is actually more operational like the fact that we work with our marketing broader marketing team like the pr team and sponsorship team so they interview like Pereira uh who lost but like they interview Pereira we put it

on our blog we amplify it with our like Network they do their thing and then it gets picked up by Sports Illustrated legitimately and it's like 50 Grand worth of like good backlinks just from an interview that had with an asset like the ability to communicate with people is the actual amplifying effect that I would say um purely from an SEO standpoint just having good Partnerships as well like my relationship with my vendors is something I

treasure very deeply like I mean like vendor a great like I rely on other seos to help me be a better SEO like I think I'm I like I'm arrogant I think I'm the best SEO there is in the world but I know there's other people who are better than me at certain things or whatever like that's fine like but I I rely on other people because like knowing someone is there's no better feeling than knowing

something is good like here's however money you need or how many resources or how many team members you need and just I want to see how much you can do like and I feel that way about like many many many people in our like that I happen to work with and you know it might be hard if you're a solo SEO and that kind of stuff but like you can make these kind of connections and Partnerships

because as good as you are on your own it is orders of magnitude less good when you actually have good vendors who can get you links or good technical partners that can build you custom software like why are you reviewing website build like a mortgage platform or whatever like find a business partner or whatever that's I always do that whenever people um do Affiliates and stuff I always say oh why doing a thing for like loan

comparison as like an affiliate when you can just create a mortgage broker yourself and just partner up with someone with a license and just do like a SAS product and become like a multi-millionaire like that's the kind of stuff you just have to find good people and you'll have different experien life you work at agency you'll have to find good people good uh good clients those kind of things if you work in-house being everyone's best friend

as a problem solver is the greatest achievement you can be as an SEO because people come to me to solve their analytics problem or their respect my opinion on design and usability just because of my who is who I am and if you're a solo affiliate just having good connections to amplify your work and not don't hustling is the worst thing you could do because like it's just you're just trying harder you know the be like

you try you you can try your best but try other people's best and see what that gets you that's the kind of stuff that you can do and that's the kind of thing that you want to approach um I still think SEO is very ripe as well like I don't I know people like there might be some industry is like homework help that's and like like there's like how much does a celebrity weigh or how who

they married to or whatever that get hidden up by chat GPT and Claude and all that kind of stuff that's fine but the actual money keywords are still the money keywords out there and so if you do want to earn your stripes and find something competitive there is out there and the biggest thing I've learned working in this job particularly versus my previous job is when I first started my target keywords were like I was very

meager and I said I'll Target like back at online cuz it's not not competitive or whatever and I still to this day haven't ranked for bad online or online bad but I ranked for online casino like the hardest keyword in the world in the US um and like sports betting which is a keyword I never thought I would hit because I thought oh maybe the sports book doesn't have good enough Technical and this and that I

was not ballsy enough compared to like my boss who's like like like say Ed who's even as a child playing RuneScape was like wanting to win all the time and my my perspective is that I've learned is like you just have to go for stuff to win and don't like try to limit yourself just try to try to do your best I remember when kick was first launching people like some people internally in the company was

like oh that's not going to work mixer Tred this and that but I remember my current manager CMO he's like this is the biggest opportunity that anyone's ever had in like a decade and he was right like so just go out there and just try like just do it and don't don't do the thing where you Niche down and find something uncompetitive try something competitive cuz You' be surprised I know certain weaknesses and certain keywords where

there's an intent thing where if you know the right intent I'm not going to add like the way to defeat us for certain keywords but like if you know the right intent you could outrank a website that spends millions of dollars a month trying to preserve a keyword if you just beat them from a strategic standpoint and I mean there might not be money in it if you happen to hit that particular strategy but there might

be ways to do it and like just go out there look at the Surs and try to find an opportunity and just try stuff like try stuff and be ballsy so that's my advice generally to speaking to people that was an awesome message to end on I think and I definitely want to make sure that I get you back on the channel again so that we can kind of talk more about International links and if you

have any questions for pizza hopefully that we can get you on the on the next one in the comments down below make sure to to leave them there also want to ask is there anywhere where people can find you online to get more of your opinions insights yeah sure just find me on LinkedIn and I'm not afraid of people soliciting me for links that's what I'm here for like uh like like most people people's like I

I try to respond to all the link spam so send me your inventory I'm open for business but uh In fairness I have very very good vendors so like you know like if you want to solicit stuff from me just give me a good offer and those kind of things same with you Charles as well like that's the kind of stuff there um and that that's probably the best way to reach you um I I don't

know when this is going to released but I'll be speaking at the Sydney SEO conference in like uh two days from now so I don't know if this will gets out but then um I don't know maybe maybe I'll pitch for some other conferences but I also run the Melbourne SEO Meetup so if you happen to be in Melbourne uh myself and Nick Ranger host the Melbourne SEO Meetup uh she's also very well-known SEO so first

Tuesday of the month you'll see us hosting an event we usually have very good speakers we recently had a later soless speak and we had 110 people show up for SEO fmo event so usually not that many people but come by if you're in Melbourne and say Hi Well you heard it here guys expect 400 dsls in your inbox tomorrow Peter unfor I accept all Spam it's fine I just say just send inventory I'll have a

look at it sometime fair fair play all right so I will leave your a link to your LinkedIn in the description down below it's always a mouthful to link to your LinkedIn in the description down below it's a terrible word yeah it is terrible I appreciate you coming on so much to the channel appreciate you giving away so much there's so many insights tips and tricks there where literally I don't think anybody formerly I've interviewed has

ever gone into that much detail around Technical and things before I'll make sure to see you guys the next one make sure to like comment and subscribe peace peace