What SEO Jobs Are There In iGaming In Malta?

If You Know SEO And Want To Change Your Life, Read On…

The world is changing and there are now more jobs in content marketing and SEO than ever before. Content marketing is the workhouse of website promotion and it needs lots of staff. Since it is a relatively new industry, most people working digital marketing jobs come from a variety of backgrounds. Quite simply, there are very few university or professional courses in the specialised areas of digital marketing. Staff might have experience in programming, traditional marketing or journalism.

Digital marketing jobs are available in iGaming today

One of the main areas of digital marketing is SEO, which is more formally known as Search Engine Optimisation. In case you are unfamiliar with it, SEO is made up of the range of roles that helps to make a website rank highly in Google’s organic search results.

There are two main reasons for this importance. Firstly, there are many tens of thousands of people that search for gambling related terms in Google every month. Since they were searching for specific terms, companies know that they are interested in gaming products and so are potentially new players. Secondly, it is very expensive to find new players and gamblers via paid media such as TV, radio and magazines.

While SEO is an expensive process, it is normally much lower cost and longer lasting than something like a TV campaign. These factors mean that there are many jobs for people with relevant skills and experience.

In SEO, content is king

Although content marketing is an term that covers anything from blog posts to promotional videos intended to stimulate interest in a product or brand, in terms of SEO, we refer to the creation and distribution of relevant blogs and text copy to attract and retain a specific audience, and increase website traffic. Indeed, content marketing is quickly becoming one of the main ways to attract and build relationships with customers, which is what ultimately drives profitable customer action.

For some igaming companies, their content can be described as quite generic short articles to announce game releases or upcoming sporting events. At other companies, there is a desire to genuinely help answer every question that a visitor might have. These latter companies invest very heavily in their content production.

This level of upgrading is a response to several trends in SEO and digital marketing. Firstly, it is becoming ever harder to stand out online and only the best content really has a chance to compete and win. Secondly, Google continues to penalise low quality websites, which can wipe away huge numbers of visitors – and therefore, customers – from a business. One way to try and reduce the possibility of this happening is to write better content and build a genuinely good website.

Both styles of website require consistent written content every week and staff to oversee the process, but they have very different expectations from their writers. This means that really good, consistent and reliable content writers are in very high demand, especially in certain European languages such as German, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish.

SEO is all about research and execution

Online research is a core skill that is expected of an SEO professional. We’re not talking stalker duties, rather, the ability to do one’s own reverse engineer competitor websites and their rankings, keyword research, incorporating those keywords correctly into content, link research and outreach, monitoring insights on how the keywords are ranking and analyse the amount of traffic they are directing traffic to the site.

The keyword research role is closely related to that of a Pay Per Click advertisement manager. However, PPC roles vary quite considerably from SEO roles and so it is quite rare for a digital marketer to be genuinely good at both jobs.

As any experienced SEO professional can attest to, SEO is a secretive and fast moving industry, which requires adaptability, a desire to learn constantly and keeping up-to-date with new algorithms and updates. After all, what good is content if people can’t find it?

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Technical SEO skills are vital

Contrary to popular belief, SEO is more than just blogs and keywords. Enter technical SEO – the process of optimising a website to help search engines crawl and index it effectively, which helps organic rankings. SEO professionals do this by analysing and seeing to contributing factors such as page speed, redirects and basic HTML tags.

The really technical guys (they are almost all male) were once developers and have moved into SEO. This means that they have a good working knowledge of php and other coding languages.

It’s good to have connections

Link building with strong, high-quality backlinks, can increase site traffic as well as improve SEO ranking, as the number of backlinks a website has is an indicator of its importance with search engines.

Google considers strong backlinks profiles to be very important. This means that there is a competitive element to the process of generating incoming links. Some companies are able to create such amazing content that webmasters just naturally link to it from their own websites. This does still happen, but it is becoming increasingly rare.

What is more common is that companies have to create compelling content and then members of their SEO team use outreach techniques – meaning that they send lots of emails – to other webmasters asking for links. This process often ends up with the company buying a link because most webmasters are only interested in selling links and not placing them naturally. However it works, companies need to acquire more and more links and so the process continues.

With businesses increasing their investment in organic channels, content and SEO are growing fields for both junior and senior professionals looking for digital marketing jobs. We predict this will start to have an impact on the educational syllabus of advanced countries.

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What SEO jobs are there in Malta?

In smaller companies, SEO will usually be the responsibility of one person. Companies generally need to recruit someone quite experienced for this type of role because they will need to be skilled in many areas.

Larger companies are often present in more than one market and also often have more than one website. As the size of the web presence grows it becomes less and less likely that one person can handle all the work. At the top end, some of the largest igaming companies have twenty or more people in their SEO team. Larger companies will have a Head of SEO who reports to the CMO or Marketing Director, then a number of SEO Managers and SEO Executives, plus a Technical SEO.

Some of the largest companies also have a role they call an SEO Developer. This would normally be a competent developer who spends their time building tools, reporting mechanisms and automating repetitive tasks that enable the team to scale. Some of these roles will be split between content – otherwise known as on-site optimisation – and link acquisition – known as off-site optimisation. Teams might be split by roles, or they might be split by language or market.

As you might imagine, a Head of SEO in a large igaming firm needs to be very experienced, but at the other end, SEO Executives are often new to the sector and role, learning as they work.

The reality is that there is a limited number of people with the right skills and experience that also happen to live in Malta. Since search engine optimisation is a very important driver of client acquisition for most digital businesses, there are not enough people to fill all the roles – especially when considering the range of languages that are needed.

How much are SEO salaries?

According to a well regarded 2019 salary survey, wages for the most experienced and skilled SEO staff rose strongly in 2018. The reality is that most igaming websites are complex and operate in very competitive markets, requiring high skill levels from the staff that lead their SEO teams. As such, the salary range for the most experienced staff, as Head of SEO, was between €60,000 and €80,000 per year, plus bonuses. Experienced SEO Managers can expect to earn around €50,000 per year and the more junior SEO Executives between €25,000 and €35,000 per year. Employers prefer applicants with industry experience, but strong SEO skills will always be in demand in igaming!

If you’re looking for digital marketing jobs in Malta, let us help!

SEO specialists are in demand in Malta, especially those who speak English as a second language and have a mother tongue such as German, Swedish, Danish or Norwegian. If you’re looking to relocate or be part of this fast-growing industry, follow the link below to get in contact with us. We have partnered with one of Malta’s leading specialist igaming recruitment companies that we have used ourselves, to help our visitors find their first role and get started having fun in igaming in Malta.

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