Sara & Nik’s Podcast:
Maja Jovančević

About this conversation

Today’s episode of Sara & Nik Podcast welcomes Maja Jovančević, an SEO expert with over a decade of experience in iGaming and who Nik calls “one of his role models”.

The topic of discussion: SEO in the AI era. Is AI a good influence or will it cause more problems down the line? Maja’s stance stems from her vast experience in the AI field:

AI can help professionals make a thousand SEO decisions per day, but it’s up to the humans to decide if they’re good.

Maja Jovančević – A French Professor’s Path to iGaming SEO

Maja started her professional career as a professor of French language and literature, but quickly realized that she valued freedom above all else – something which teaching didn’t have much of.

So, she steered her career path in a different direction: SEO, because SEO allowed her to work from anywhere and switch between industries and markets depending on opportunities and preferences. This took her to Dan Petrovic’s agency, DEJAN SEO, where he got to learn the craft of the trade from real experts.

Three years later and she decided she’s experienced enough to open her own SEO agency. That’s when she learned a strategy that she still recommends to SEO experts today: strategic partnerships for lead generation. She didn’t do any lead generation on her own, but partnered with web development agencies instead, who would resell her SEO and content services to clients.

This gave her a steady workflow and consistent revenue, but also burned her out rather fast. Three years later and numerous clients across multiple timezones and niches and Maja decided to close her SEO agency:

“I am not a person who wears the burnout badge as the trophy of honor. Like, I believe in work-life balance.”

Her well-deserved break also brought about a new career opportunity: a post-break conference talk led her to a job offer in Malta at an iGaming-affiliate company. She took it.

“SEO Traffic is the Highest Quality of Traffic”

After nearly a decade in iGaming, Maja realized a simple truth about the iGaming ecosystem and, by extension, about online marketing in general: “SEO traffic is the highest quality of traffic”.

The affiliates couldn’t rely on PPC ads for their traffic; the real value came from SEO. This means that the SEO lead was “the most important person in the room”, where any recommendations would get implemented with a sense of urgency.

Consequently, the pressure was also high: a misplaced or skipped keyword could inflict losses of 50,000-60,000 euros per event. This contrasts with Nik’s and Sara’s personal experiences where typical agencies would place SEO tasks very low on the developmental ladder.

The period spent at iGaming taught Maja to focus on traffic and rankings, rather than money, which contrasts with 2026’s ecosystem, where the AI Overview section and uneven click curves have shifted the attention to money numbers instead.

From Maja’s perspective, the SEO camp is divided into two parts. One part says that Google is broken and black hat techniques work again. The other part claims that AI eats traffic, which makes traffic an obsolete metric. In either case, Maja is adamant:

“Your SEO is going to become a system, rather than just something you execute”.

What “Better Decisions” Means in the AI Era

Maja is very much pro AI, as she uses it personally in research during her projects. But that’s the limit she’s willing to go to, because she’s witnessed herself the damage cheap AI tools can inflict when the trust is too high. She managed to burn two sites after over-relying on AI tools that would add links to the client’s competitors in what she called “a breach of trust”.

Nik mirrors the exact sentiment after seeing how the industry tends to outsource the research task to AI, which is bad from a strategic standpoint. In Nik’s view, all decisions that carry real responsibility should belong to humans.

The topic of decision-making brought Maja to discuss her conference talk in Estonia where this precise topic was the headline. Her conclusion was bitter-sweet: the rising number in Google searches for “SEO recovery” point at the fact that people are now trying to undo AI-driven SEO mistakes.

As Maja puts it, there’s only one conclusion to be drawn from AI’s impact on SEO and decision-making:

“People who make good decisions and are able to execute them are going to be still standing”

She ends on a cautious note, warning against the overly optimistic tone with which AI companies embellish their products. The current reality is that AI outputs look great at a first glance, but reveal ideas or points you never intended at a deeper look.

This means that the notion of “better decisions” still rests on the human output and that, as Maja puts it: “Now more than ever experience is truly important”.