SEO Pros: Anton Surov @ Sportsbet

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for the SEO show where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

MICHAEL: G'day, how you going? Michael Costin here and it's time for another episode of the SEO show. This week we're doing another SEO pros episode. That's where we bring on someone who works in SEO, maybe in-house or at a big brand and talk to them about their journeys in SEO, how they found it, how they learned it and what they do day to day in their role. So this week's episode, we're talking to Anton Surov. Anton is the head of SEO, SEO manager at Sportsbet, the Australian online betting company. Now I thought it would be cool to bring Anton on because online betting, gambling is a really difficult space when it comes to SEO. Trying to get links in that space is difficult, the competitors are aggressive, there's affiliate marketers out there competing for certain terms, so I wanted to chat to him about some of the stuff he does on the Sportsbet site. And we had a pretty good chat. Well, not a pretty good, it was a really good chat. I really enjoyed it because we covered all sorts of different topics. You know, we spoke about AI content generation project that he had in place to programmatically create a lot of content for the site that's had great results. We spoke about how he set up server-side rendering for what was a heavy React-based website. We spoke about how his team structured there at Sportsbet and how they structured their events pages and their betting pages and a whole bunch of stuff that I thought was really cool and interesting. So, if you're an SEO nerd like me, you're going to enjoy this chat with Anton Surov. Let's jump over to it now. I bring you Anton Surov, SEO manager at sportsbet.com.au. Hi, Anton. Thanks for joining us on the show. For people who may not have heard of you, if you could please let us know a bit about yourself. background. We'll get going from there.

ANTON: Hi, Michael. Yeah, thanks for having me. My name is Anton. At the moment, I'm an SEO manager at Sportsbet. I've been doing SEO for about 10 years. I've been in Australia for five years. Before that, I worked in London for about three to four years. And originally, I'm from Russia, from Moscow. And that's where I kind of started my SEO career.

MICHAEL: Awesome. So the reason I brought you on is you are the SEO manager there at Sportsbet, and I thought it would be cool to have a chat to you for a number of reasons. You know, one being how competitive that space is from an SEO sense and some of the challenges involved, particularly on the link building side of things, at least from my understanding of it. But before we get into chatting about what you do day to day, I'd like to have a bit of a chat about your journey with SEO, you know, how you discovered it and sort of how you got into this world, how you built your career in SEO. So maybe if we could go back to the start, do you remember how you came across SEO and those early days for you?

ANTON: Sure. Yeah. I think it's always interesting to learn about others, you know, careers in SEO. It's always so different. For me, in junior year in Moscow, I was studying marketing, but all the time I was obsessed with photography. I was actually applying to be part of the university which teaches photographers in Russia. But I found out that there is no money in this industry. And I thought, OK, I need to find a job. And I had really no skills. So I got an internship in one of the companies in Moscow. It was kind of a digital studio. And I was really managing the CMS. And I had a chance to learn a little bit about AdWords, Yandex Direct. And also, I kind of touched on SEO. And SEO became a passion for me. I started reading a lot. I read a lot in English and Russian as well. And that's where I kind of started working on it. After one year, I got invited, I got lucky, I got invited to Mediacorp Moscow, kind of an agency. My main client was Procter & Gamble, which was a very strange client because they had zero interest in performance. All they cared about was just awareness. And, you know, awareness and ACO is kind of an interesting mix. But that's the place I can learn more about the agency side of ACO. After that client invited me to London, I was part of Mediacom London, which was a massive team, about maybe 50 to 60 ACO specialists, probably the biggest ACO team at this point in time in London. It was a very good experience. I worked on a range of clients. Again, Procter & Gamble was my main client, but I also had Nikon and others. It was cool. But I was thinking I want to maybe step up and find a change. I had this offer to go to Canada or Australia. Canada felt like it's a little bit too cold. I had enough snow in my life. So I decided to go to Melbourne. I spent one year here in my prospect. It was a good experience. It was my first manager experience and it taught me a lot. But then the opportunity popped up for a sports bet. And I felt like, yeah, I want to try it in-house. And as you said, betting is very competitive. So that was my reason for me to try the betting industry. And the website itself was very interesting. A lot of issues, but the website is big. But what's, I guess, most interesting about this website, it has about 100,000 pages going in and out every week. So it's very dynamic. It's a lot of movement, and it's a lot of issues of probability.

MICHAEL: Yeah, awesome. Okay. Well, we'll talk about Sportsbet in a minute but out of interest, you know, when you started off in Russia working on SEO, were you working on Google or Yandex or both, you know, in those agency jobs?

ANTON: Yeah, it's a good question. I was working on both. Yandex probably was kind of a bit more a bit more of my focus. It's actually quite interesting search engine to optimize for. They have their own paradigm, they have their own updates, their own system and tools, which are pretty good too. But Google was always kind of more interesting for me because all the new updates, all the new trends always happens at Google first.

MICHAEL: Yeah. What would you say the main, like, does it work very similarly in terms of, you know, links, content, technical for both search engines, or are there sort of big differences between the two that you noticed?

ANTON: Yeah, I think Yandex pays more attention to behavioral factors. So bounce rate, you know, how user interacts with website actually matters. They do have their own kind of tracking software called Yandex Metrica, which provides them with enough data to understand how people in Russia really use the internet. And they have their own browser as well. So we actually have a lot of data about the Russian population. So we know pretty well what people like and what they don't like.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Great. Okay. All right. Well, um, along the way there, like when you're working agency side, um, did you learn on the job or did you, you said you sort of got interested in SEO. Did you have places that you went to learn people that you followed? How did you go about educating yourself in this world?

ANTON: Yeah. Um, I think I took a few ACO courses, but I don't remember any of them. I never thought they were quite useful, to be honest. Every time you took an ACO course, you feel like, okay, this course is two years behind. And it seems to be a very similar situation right now. Yeah, I was reading a lot. One of my big inspirations was Dan from Dejan. Dejan ACO, he's actually an Australian ACO, and I'm lucky enough that we are partnering with his agency at the moment. So it was kind of full circle for me. It was interesting. I was reading him a lot, his experiments, especially CTR experiments, and now have a chance to work with his team. So it's amazing.

MICHAEL: Great. Awesome. That's great. Okay. Well, let's have a chat about the sports bet side of things. Cause you, you know, you, you've worked agency side, then you came over to work client side on a, on a big site like that, maybe off the top there. What would you say the pros and cons are of working agency pros and cons of client side?

ANTON: Yeah. Um, It's always a very good question, right? I would say the main pro for me was that you can feel the impact of your work and you can think long term. A lot of time with clients, I found that you produce a lot of recommendations, but they're not getting implemented. Or like, you don't have a say in the strategy as well. So you're kind of left on tactical level. You only can provide reports, audits. But in terms of strategy, ACO was always kind of, in my experience, overlooked. Especially for big enterprise clients I was working with, like Procter & Gamble. Sometimes we would come to you with a question, do we need a website? So yeah, it was easy to kind of upsell ACO for them and provide a bit more innovative approaches. But for client side, definitely I like that it's more strategic. You can make an impact. You can think long term. And you also can influence where ACO could sit in the company as well.

MICHAEL: Great. Okay. Well, you mentioned when you came over to Sportsbet, you know, the betting world is very competitive. You also mentioned there are some challenges with the website. Before we jumped on the show, I had a look on your LinkedIn. I saw that you did some work with server-side rendering and it was like a sort of a one-page site, essentially, or one-page app. Can you tell us a bit about that? Maybe some of the other technical stuff that you had to maybe work on first when you came to the site, maybe the state of the site when you first got to it, maybe where it's gotten to today in terms of traffic as a result of your efforts.

ANTON: Yeah. Websites, these basic websites in general, very JavaScript heavy our website use react framework and it's kind of very A lot of different feature teams and developer teams, they work on this website, and they're not always communicating to each other. That's why some parts of the website would have server-side rendering, others would not have it. And it kind of poses a major issue for ASIO, because what we find out, a lot of elements on the website, like let's say, left menu, left navigation menu was not visible for Google bots, which is a major issue for crawling. So we had to do a lot of storytelling, a lot of communicating with developers to find a solution. and kind of start implementing server-side rendering. It was a positive culture change. I feel like now I talk to developers, they already think about server-side rendering by default, and we know it's good for ASIO. So yeah, it's definitely a big win for us. And now when we see new products being released or new pages being released, we always come to them and say, like, hey, guys, can you turn on the server-side rendering? And they tell us, oh, it's already turned on. So it definitely helps with performance as well.

MICHAEL: And were you the first SEO hire and you were sort of coming in and setting that culture of thinking about SEO and having to sell the value of it to everyone or was there other people there before you?

ANTON: No, I was not the first SEO hire. I think SEO team has a pretty long history, but I think when the first SEO team was created, it was the previous kind of setup. It was not a React-based setup. Then a few things changed, and there was a massive migration from the old kind of code base to the new code base. And when I just joined, the migration finished, and the team was only two people, and they 100% were focused on migration. And we end up with a new website, not super optimized for ACO, and also being part of a marketing team, it was hard to talk to developers. Like, you know, it's hard for them to understand why a marketing person comes to a developing team asking for some requests. So, yeah, we kind of end up doing a massive storytelling run, trying to present to anyone we can, trying to, you know, position ACO and ask for empathy. So we understand that ACO cannot work without the proper tech support. So yeah, we spent a few years just focusing a lot on storytelling.

MICHAEL: Well, on the topic of storytelling, you know, if you're trying to get something like that across the line, are you coming at it, you know, purely from a technical angle, you know, like there's no visibility here. If we do this, there will be visibility. Or are you going as far as looking at traffic opportunities and trying to tell the story of what that uplift would be? Are you getting that in depth?

ANTON: Yeah, it depends on the audience. When I talk to my growth and marketing peers, I try to package as a product. I'm always trying to get to the dollar value. Because that's the language marketing team operates, CPA and OroValue. But when I talk to developers that don't care that much, they more care about the traffic. So if I see a lot of people are using the feature they built or product they built, it gets them excited. And another bridge we found, which is kind of useful for us is called Web Vitals and Performance Optimization. It seems like developers love performance optimization, they love Core Web Vitals, but they never have time to do it. And they never have a good reason to do it, really. So they come in and they just give them a reason to actually focus on performance optimization. So yeah, it depends on the audience.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So you're finding what gets them motivated and speaking in that language to get what you want. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And so you mentioned the team, the SEO team was sort of a couple of people before you, and maybe could you walk us through what the team is like now in terms of numbers and I guess roles that you have in the team at the moment?

ANTON: Sure, sure. The team, essentially, the structure changed a little bit. Now I have two senior specialists. I have a tech lead and a content lead, and they have their own remits. They look after different parts of the website. So tech specialist, he kind of leads the relationship with developers. He also works closely with MarTech. Now we also have MarTech, which kind of facilitates this. a relationship with technology, and also we're lucky to have our own developer. So, you know, developer essentially reports to the tech lead. We also have a content lead. Content lead looks after the event pages and a few other projects we're working on. And we have a coordinator. So she is kind of specializing on supporting the leads. And she can step in and, you know, if let's say one lead goes on holidays, she can step in and help to, you know, continue the business as usual work for him. So yeah, right now it's your team sits in marketing. We have a search team, which is part of media and part of marketing. So yeah, that's the setup.

MICHAEL: Okay, cool. And with you being the SEO manager, what would a typical day and week look like for you? So what sort of big ticket items are you working on throughout the week?

ANTON: Yeah, right now I'm probably only 30% hands-on, 70% are mostly strategy and communication work. Typical, Day of work for me starts with stand-up. We're trying to run Agile. So we have sprints, two-week sprints we work on. It's not real Agile, but it helps us to keep the rituals going, so it helps us to stay disciplined. So we start with stand-up. I will spend time with my team. I have a lot of meetings. I talk a lot to the head of search. And it depends on the year, on the time of the year. I might focus on strategy. I might focus on reporting. I might focus on running conversations with different teams and making sure we're building a good network. So yeah, and when I have free time, I like data. I like data. We're using Power BI, so we're trying to transform and convert all our ACO reports to Power BI right now.

MICHAEL: Okay, cool. Very good. I had a bit of a look at the site before we jumped on this call. Very quick, but from what I could see, it looked like There's a bit of a structure where you might have events, pages around events. So it might be, let's say, the Tour de France as an events page. And then within that, it's got internal linking to betting pages, so cycling betting pages. And it looks like maybe any link acquisition efforts are going to those events pages. Is that the general strategy? And we'll talk about links in a minute because I know that's a very tricky part of betting SEO. Is that the general approach? You're trying to build out these events pages with content on them and funnel traffic from them through to the betting pages?

ANTON: It's definitely one part of our strategy. The issue we have that, as I said, a lot of pages come in and go out from our website. So we have about 100,000 pages weekly being created and then decommissioned. So it's a lot of indexing, de-indexing. And some events that only happen once a year. You have maybe like, let's say Melbourne Cup, it only happens once a year. and we try to accumulate the value and we try to stay present in index with this event page. We're exploring different tactics. Sometimes we try to run A-B tests and look if it's better to redirect the event page to the market page, or if it's probably going to work for us if we just keep internal links to the market page. But the main purpose of this page is really to stay in index the whole year and acquire customers for these pages.

MICHAEL: Okay, and so out of those 100,000 pages that come and go, is that across the events and the market pages, I assume, are the betting pages, right? Yes, we call them market pages, yeah. So do you, how do you control that? Is it you using some sort of like database that you put them into and then publishes live and then do you sort of take them down and redirect them or you leave all the betting pages up and what's your general approach there?

ANTON: Yeah, I mean, we don't control bidding pages. It's an interesting setup, like SportBit doesn't really have a backend. So all backend is created with a tool called OpenBet, which runs a backend. There is a team of traders who controls what markets go in, what markets go out. Event pages, they pretty much stay on all year. We have about maybe 100 event pages. But market pages, yeah, there is not much control. The best we can do is to create opportunities for Google bots to really discover if pages are available on the website and if it's not available on the website. We try to create sitemaps, which updates a few times a day. That helps. But yeah, looking for other ways as well, like internal linking always seems to be a good opportunity.

MICHAEL: Yeah, cool. So from my understanding, most of your control would be over those events pages. They sort of sit more in the SEO team. You can spin them up and try and capture that traffic, funnel it through user internal linking and hope that all the betting pages are crawled and indexed on the back of it. That's right.

ANTON: That's right. Yeah. And it's sometimes a bit complicated for us because there is no backend. Like, yeah, there is a CMS, but it's pretty much it's a bare minimum. So to create any functionality, even to change title tags, it required us to create a business case, talk to developers, team, sell this idea. They're going to push back and you have to find another reasons why you need to do it. It's really even to do some simple things on scale on a website like this, it takes effort.

MICHAEL: And so I take it when you do that, are you just trying to template it up? You know, you come up with a structure for the title tags and that's it? Or are you trying to control them on an individual page level?

ANTON: Yes, there's a template. Now we have the ability to edit meta tags, and we can control them on an individual level. And what we're trying to do now is essentially run experiments. We're trying to do A-B tests and find out what can we do to improve, you know, CTR for keywords, especially for brand keywords, since Sporbit is such a massive brand. Like, it seems to be sometimes there's almost nothing left to rank for.

MICHAEL: Cool. Well, on that note, have you found anything that works well on CTR? Any little hacks that you've had success with?

ANTON: That's a good question. Yeah. What we found is definitely the length of title helps a lot and it doesn't even matter how much, what do you have in the title sometimes, the length of the title, geometry, geometry always snippet is a good approach, but it's still ongoing work for us. We have a number of experiments which we want to run. So yeah, well, let's see. I know one thing we find out, for instance, that If you have duplicate kind of keywords, if you say, you know, footy or AFL two times in the title, it's not good. So it's better without it. So yeah, there's a lot of things which you wouldn't find out without running a test. Like as an SEO specialist, you would just think, you know, it's good. It's going to work out. But really, when you run a test and you look at the data, you're just like, probably it's better to believe in data.

MICHAEL: Awesome, okay. And what's your process for running these tests? Like how do you A, B test it and track it all? Is it something that you built yourself or how are you running it?

ANTON: Yeah, we run it internally. For now, we just compare before and after for a page, but still work in progress, to be honest. We rely on our insights team a lot for this. But yeah, looking forward to see what kind of other approach we can do. Thankfully, it seems to be it's quite a number of tools right now available in the market, especially for SEO to do it.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, on the topic of the events pages, you know, again, when I was having a look at your LinkedIn before, I saw a pretty interesting function or comment that you made about your work there in that you launched an AI content generation project and with AI being a big thing in the SEO world at the moment for various reasons, I thought it would be cool to chat about that if you can and let us know a bit about what you did there and maybe some of the results that you've had using AI to generate content. So could you tell us, I guess, what you did, why you did it and maybe some of the results there?

ANTON: Yeah, keen to talk about it. Yeah, it was really kind of an MVP and a test project for us. We find out we have a lot of racetrack pages, so pretty much for every racetrack in Australia and the world, there is a page. But essentially, Google would see these pages as a sort of 4-4 page. So we were not ranking super well. We wanted to do it on scale, and we were kind of pricing up how much it would cost us to write content for each page. And it cost us about 50, 60 grand to write content for each page. We were just like, OK, is this really worth it? Is there an alternative? And we thought, OK, how about we reach out to our data science team, and we have a pretty good data science team, and ask them, hey, can you generate this content for us? And we were lucky with some people who were really excited to work a little bit with natural language processing. And they built a model called Pegasus, I think that's the algorithm they used, which uses a keyword, then goes to search, it scraps the content from search from the top four websites, and then it rewrites it. and essentially have unique content. And really, like, you know, when you talk about racetrack pages, how much can you say about them? It's always the same, like, it's a, you know, Flemington racecourse, you know, beautiful racecourse and so on and so forth. So, yeah, we created, we gave a list of keywords to data science team. They created descriptions for us. Then we had a feature team who updated the design of pages a little bit. So they included internal links, and they also included this little piece of content, which is honestly pretty small. I think it's only maybe, I don't know, maybe less than 100 words. But we did it on scale. So we maybe did it for about 500 pages. And the results were really good. especially after the helpful content update, I saw that now if you google for race course name, odds or betting, like Flemington race course betting, we are pretty much number one for almost all these race course pages. The content is readable. Some of the pieces of content, we run them by copywriters just to make sure they are readable. And pretty much the model was okay. But I think it will get much better in the future. And it makes me believe that AI-generated content is really the way to go. Because again, how much can you say about these race courses? The copywriter will produce the same kind of average-looking piece of content.

MICHAEL: Yeah, look, a guy I used to work with, he started off his career writing articles about mattress covers, I think it was, and writing the same thing over and over. So where AI will shine is in that sort of stuff, right? And I like the fact that you are mentioned that you have copywriters look at it. Were they tweaking it much? Because my understanding of the way that Google and other tools will detect AI is looking at how, I guess, predictable the language is. And if a human is going through and editing a bit, you're probably bypassing that. Hence why maybe after the helpful content update, you did better out of it. Do they have much of an impact, the copywriters?

ANTON: Yeah, for some piece of content where it did had a big impact, just because it's kind of, you know, the prime race courses for us, like Flemington. For ours, I believe we don't really touch it that much. But yeah, for the security of a brand, we wanted to have a humanized run by it. So it happened. But now we've made a decision that we're going to try to scale it maybe to different pages as well. Let's see how it goes.

MICHAEL: So out of those 500, How many of them would have been soft 404ing before and then now how many are indexed and ranking, getting traffic?

ANTON: I would say maybe 90% of soft 404s. And now I don't have a percentage in my mind, but it's much, much, much better.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Okay. Awesome. That's cool. Very cool. Interested to hear how the next test goes there. So we'll have to hear that. I want to talk link building now because that's always been a tough part of the betting world. If I think of affiliate marketing and trying to rank affiliate offers in casino and gambling space is always very difficult. What sort of value do you guys place on link building? I know Sportsbet as a brand would be attracting all sorts of good links to begin with, but what value are you placing on doing outreach and trying to supplement that with targeted link building to, let's say, your events pages or other parts of the site?

ANTON: Yeah, it's a good call. Yeah, it's tough for betting to do link building. Even when, you know, there's not even many link building providers who wants to work with you if you want to get one. We are lucky that we have very good relationships with different, you know, footy teams with different stadiums across Australia. So we can rely on our PR team, we can rely on our Digimedia team to help us with links. And some of these links are very, very good. Our profile is massive. So we not just try to focus on acquiring links, we also try to focus on actually how can we groom our profile, what we can do with links which we lost. So I think that's probably the main focus for us. But yeah, acquiring new links, we must rely on our PR team and our colleagues in marketing.

MICHAEL: Okay, so your team, your internal SEO team, you're not really doing much in terms of outreach or trying to acquire links at all. It's more monitoring what you do have and maybe working on your internal linking, for example, to try and make the most of what you do have. Is that about right?

ANTON: Exactly, exactly. We tried a few times to do an outreach. But yeah, it's a website like this when you just get additional 50-60 links. It's good. It's good. It helps. But then it feels like now it's better to focus on what you have and how do you manage your link profile. Yeah, because brand does generate a lot of links.

MICHAEL: Yeah, absolutely. Definitely would. Okay, cool. Well, I guess with, you know, I spoke before about how you learned SEO at the start. Working in-house and you've got a team that, you know, you work with. How do you continue to learn now? Is it purely by thinking of ideas and testing it or are you tapped into any communities or places you go online to keep your skills sharp or come up with new ideas?

ANTON: Yeah, yeah. I'm focused a lot on data right now. I'm learning more about data. And before that, my focus was on kind of front-end development and web development because I wanted to understand our website more. And it helped me a lot with the technical aspect of SEO, especially when it comes to the JavaScript rendering. It's a very big thing. So your testing is important for me. Optimization is important for me. In terms of people I follow, I like Kevin Intink, you know, enterprise SEO. Like enterprise SEO is an interesting niche. And a lot of things which I learned in SEO agency, they kind of applied for enterprise SEO, but it was very different, especially when it comes to storytelling and presenting SEO as a product. And another thing is being a manager, being a leader. It's really another kind of different field. You really need to learn empathy, emotional intelligence, how to lead people, how to run processes. So yeah, I'm interested in Agile as well and how technology teams run themselves.

MICHAEL: Great. Okay. Well, look, it's been really awesome chatting to you today, Anton. I really enjoyed chatting about the, I guess, the more ins and outs of the sports bet side of things, because I know that's a massive site, millions of visits. So it's really cool to see what you're up to there. And I think our listeners are going to really enjoy this episode. But before we wrap things up, I have three questions that I always ask people that come on the show. It's really cool to see the different ways people think about things. And I wanted to run them past you and see how you think about it. The first one, the first cap off the rank is, you know, from your side, what do you think is the most underrated thing in SEO?

ANTON: Yeah, it's a good question. I think if I put my enterprise lens on, I would say storytelling is very underrated. Understanding what your audience, you know, focus on, what they care about and speak in a language they understand is very important. Even when I think about myself, three or four years ago, I would care a lot about the craft, a lot about the Q rankings. But really, when you talk to the senior leaders, you need to put a dollar value to your ideas.

MICHAEL: Absolutely. Very much agree with that. In our agency, With our team, we have to often remind people, you know, clients don't necessarily care about their impression share in Google ads or, you know, click-through rate. They care about the outcome. So are you painting this story in those terms? You know, why is impression share, why does that matter, you know, in the end terms of customers for them and trying to get people to think in those terms is just so important and a really powerful skill for, I think, any SEO person to develop as part of their career in SEO. So I agree with that. All right, well on the flip side of that, there's a lot of myths in SEO. What would you say the biggest myth is?

ANTON: Yeah, it's a lot of myths, I agree. Maybe a controversial point, but I think on-page optimization, I don't think it works anymore, to be honest. When the wrong brain kind of entered this scene, I think on-page optimization. I don't really think adding keywords or optimizing your headers that might change the position of the headers really makes a big impact.

MICHAEL: Okay, cool. Cool, cool. And then when it comes to tools, there's all sorts of software. In your world, I imagine you might be using a bit different software to what someone ranking a little local website would be using. But if you had to pick three tools to get the job done, what would you pick? What are your favorite tools day to day?

ANTON: Yeah, I love tools. I definitely would pick one crawler. No surprise, probably going to be ScreamFrog. I would pick something for analysis. I would probably go with Python because you can build anything you want with Python. And something to, you know, again, for managing the data and analysis, probably I would go with spreadsheets. I'll probably get Google Spreadsheets. I like them because you can write your own scripts with JavaScript. So that's quite useful.

MICHAEL: So on that topic of Python, is that something that you've sort of taught yourself as an SEO? Because I know, you know, that's not really something I've dabbled in that much, but it is very useful. So maybe could you tell us a bit more before we wrap up about your travels in that space?

ANTON: Yeah, sure. Mostly I use Python for data analysis. I use pandas to work with data and it helps a lot because when you use Excel or when you use Google Sheets, If you have a lot of log files to analyze, for instance, you're going to hit a wall. If you have 1 million lines, it's going to be hard to run any commands or any calculations to them. So that's where Python comes in. And a lot of tools I use right now, because I can afford it, we can get good tools. But really, any crawling, Any optimization, any automatization can be done in Python. And yeah, it's a lot of people in the industry already explore it. So I think it's very useful too.

MICHAEL: Yeah, awesome. Okay, great. Well, it's been really fun chatting to you. There may be some listeners that want to go connect with you, say hello after listening in. So if people do want to do that, where's the best place for them to head?

ANTON: Yeah, just Google Anton Surov. I have LinkedIn. I have a website as well. Sometimes trying to publish articles, but yeah, probably LinkedIn is the best place.

MICHAEL: Great. All right. Well, Anton, thank you for coming on the show. It's been great chatting and have a great afternoon.

ANTON: Thank you, Michael.

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