Why crawl stats and server logs matter in iGaming SEO, with former SEO director Maja Jovančević

Maja Jovančević spent six years in SEO roles at Gaming Innovation Group and was most recently Director of SEO at Gentoo Media, a role she says she left about a month and a half before this recording. John Wright asks about crawl data, AI overviews, NavBoost, product roles and operator SEO.

In this episode

• She calls crawl stats from Search Console or server logs important, expects Google to ration crawling as AI content grows, and says launching a brand-new site may be risky (2:30, 3:02, 4:32).

• She suggests checking how often Googlebot visits and which responses it gets, such as 304, 200 or stray 404s, and prefers full-stack SEOs (3:31, 5:02).

• On AI overviews, she says early data shows few clicks come from them, so the second organic result can get more clicks, and that Google has been closing the click gap for years (7:00, 7:30, 8:01).

• She describes NavBoost, in simple terms, as traffic acting as a ranking signal, links it to pogo-sticking and user experience, and values product people (13:31, 14:31, 16:31, 17:30).

• For operators, she says very large sites are mostly brought down by technical issues such as complex code, and she has seen affiliates outrank a casino's brand name (23:30, 24:00, 24:30).

• For a hypothetical new site she would pick one niche, use semantic SEO, aim for a medium-difficulty market and launch an MVP; she says good SEOs have no ego and accept being wrong (31:00, 32:30, 35:00).

Interview from Affiliate BI Podcast by StatsDrone, published on YouTube.