Odys Podcast: The High Stakes Growth Show

A legitimate business opened a new bank account in the morning. A 9 million transaction arrived. By lunchtime, the account was closed.
For companies operating in iGaming, crypto, forex and other industries banks classify as high risk, losing a banking relationship isn't just an inconvenience - it can stop incoming payments, supplier payments and potentially the entire business.
Julian Goffin, Founder and CEO of Alunafi, explains why banks reject or de-bank businesses, why becoming more successful can actually make your banking risk worse, and what happens operationally when an account suddenly disappears.
We discuss the three characteristics that often trigger additional scrutiny - high transaction volumes, cross-border payments and chargebacks - and why companies need to diversify their banking infrastructure instead of relying on a single institution.
Julian also explains how payments can be rejected because of the counterparty rather than your own company, why communication during onboarding matters, and where stablecoins can solve some of the cost and speed problems of international payments.
Listen if you operate in iGaming, crypto, fintech, forex or any international business where losing access to your money - even temporarily - could become an existential problem.

Buying an existing website can shortcut years of building traffic, authority and historical data from scratch. But the numbers you see before an acquisition don't necessarily tell you what you're really buying.
In this episode, SEO consultant Maja Jovančević and Gertrud Karu, Managing Director of Odys Mentors, explore website acquisition, digital asset valuation and the due diligence behind buying an established online business.
Maja has been involved in multiple website acquisitions, from the initial analysis through integration and growth. She explains why evaluating an acquisition goes far beyond today's traffic numbers: How much is the website really worth? Is the traffic durable? Can you continue growing it? Does the asset actually fit the business you're trying to build?
We also discuss why website acquisition can solve one of the biggest problems in organic growth — speed. An established website can bring existing search visibility, customers and historical data, which Maja argues becomes particularly interesting in the age of AI.
The conversation also introduces Odys Mentors and Maja's website acquisition and valuation program, designed to give buyers and sellers ongoing access to experience gained from seeing acquisitions succeed, struggle and fail after the deal is done.
Listen if you're an SEO, founder, affiliate, investor or operator considering buying, selling or evaluating an online business — or if you've ever wondered whether acquiring an existing website could be a faster growth strategy than building one from zero.

What if ranking #1 on Google is no longer the best use of an SEO team's resources?
Terry Kyle, co-founder and CEO of WPX, argues that SEO has become too Google-focused. Instead of treating rankings as the objective, he builds what he calls traffic-generating assets: search properties, tools, video, alternative engines and other ways of reaching the same customer.
Terry explains why he sees short-form video as a major traffic opportunity, why Bing deserves more attention, and how “goal completion SEO” can allow highly useful pages to compete with much stronger domains.
He also breaks down demographic SEO - targeting other interests of the same audience rather than competing for the most obvious keywords - and explains why non-English SEO can offer radically weaker competition.
Then we get into AI: the explosion of AI visibility tools, the long game of LLM citations, his Claude Council workflow, using multiple models rather than becoming loyal to one, and why Gemini has become one of his favourite tools for technical SEO and content analysis.
Listen if you want an SEO strategy built around generating traffic rather than simply reporting rankings.

Google increasingly wants to become the middleman. AI Overviews are absorbing informational searches. Generic affiliate and marketplace content is being squeezed. And Aleyda Solís says SEOs are still obsessing over the wrong thing.
Her answer to the biggest ranking-factor question in 2026 is deceptively simple: user satisfaction.
In this conversation, Aleyda explains what she saw in Google's 2026 updates, why some affiliate sites continue to grow while other “middlemen” lose visibility, and why deep research and real experience still create an advantage even as AI answers more searches directly.
We get into SEO ranking factors, E-E-A-T, SEO vs GEO, AI Search attribution, AI citations, Reddit, informational content and search beyond Google. Aleyda explains why AI-driven customers can disappear into “Direct” traffic, why many AI citations come from third-party websites and social platforms, and why chasing Reddit citations with fake reviews is exactly the kind of short-term SEO thinking she believes will fail.
Then we get into AI-generated content itself: why scaled AI content can grow before it tanks, where LLMs genuinely improve SEO workflows, and why replacing an experienced SEO operation with three prompts misunderstands what the difficult part of SEO actually is.
For Aleyda, SEO eventually stops being a knowledge problem and becomes an execution problem — aligning developers, content teams, digital PR, business priorities and real user needs.
And her final argument is bigger than Google:
SEO is search optimization wherever discovery happens - Google, AI platforms, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Reddit and whatever comes next.
Listen if you work in SEO, affiliate marketing, ecommerce, SaaS, content, AI Search or organic growth and want to understand what is actually worth optimizing for next.

Binance manages more than 100 million URLs and has grown from roughly 10% to 50–55% share of voice across crypto search.
In this episode, Dinesh Sivapragsam, Head of Organic Growth and SEO at Binance, explains what SEO actually looks like when conventional playbooks stop working at enormous scale.
He breaks down how Binance built SEO into a major acquisition channel, how a relatively small team prioritizes more than 100 million URLs, and why the speed that drives growth can eventually create technical SEO problems involving duplicate content, canonicals, redirects and discontinued pages.
Dinesh also explains why link building remains one of Binance’s ranking accelerators, why strong pages can still be pushed from the top ten toward position one with links, and how scaling link acquisition created an entirely different operational challenge: reviewing thousands of articles for quality and compliance.
We also get into AI and SEO. Dinesh explains what Binance now automates, why headlines and introductions still need human judgment, and why he believes today’s general-purpose LLMs are not yet SEO specialists.
International SEO becomes another major part of the conversation. Binance found roughly 16,000 variations around searches for buying crypto and Bitcoin in Latin America, while in Turkey a seemingly small product change — adding comments to a page — dramatically changed performance.
And unlike SEO teams that report primarily on rankings and traffic, Binance connects organic pages to registrations, user value and revenue, giving the C-suite a direct financial view of SEO performance.
Finally, Dinesh explains how Binance approaches negative backlinks, why the team doesn’t automatically try to create a perfectly clean link profile, and what navigating roughly 18 Google core updates has taught him about reacting too quickly to algorithm volatility.
Listen if you work in enterprise SEO, technical SEO, international SEO, programmatic SEO, affiliate marketing or organic growth — especially if you’re trying to understand what changes when SEO moves from hundreds of pages to tens of millions.

AI made producing content almost free. It did not make ranking almost free.
Kyle Roof and the PageOptimizer Pro team analyzed 10,937 webpages being actively optimized for search. The median score was just 33.1 out of 100, and 46.8% landed below 25 - the range Kyle describes as effectively invisible in competitive search.
The conversation examines what those pages were missing and why that matters in an AI-content economy.
Kyle explains why LLMs can produce fluent writing while missing basic on-page signals, why contextual terms matter more than most AI workflows account for, why Google doesn't necessarily need an AI-content detector, and how mass publishing weak pages may create a much larger site-wide problem.
We also discuss why commercial landing pages can be worse optimized than blog content, what happens when an agency sells content production instead of optimization, why Kyle believes E-E-A-T acts more like a minimum standard than a ranking boost, and what to do with hundreds of existing articles that aren't performing.
Listen if you run SEO, manage a content team, operate an affiliate or publishing site, use AI to produce content at scale, or are responsible for organic growth and want to know whether your content operation is actually building an asset.

Automated tools can scrape new iGaming license registrations and buy matching exact match domains almost immediately, creating a brand-protection problem before a new operator has even established itself in search.
In this episode, Dirk Schembri breaks down how domain drop catching, exact match domains, expired domains and 301 redirects are actually used in competitive iGaming SEO. He explains why exact match domains can still work, why he believes they may become even more interesting for AI search and AI citations, and why domain rating is one of the last signals he checks when evaluating an expired domain. Ownership history, previous niches, backlink quality and signs of abuse come first.
Dirk also takes us inside the economics of drop catching: milliseconds matter, competitive domains move into private auctions, and bidding can quickly go far beyond the original valuation. He shares the story of an expired travel domain he rebuilt using the Wayback Machine that still generates revenue, nearly 1,000 domains acquired under a due-diligence process that proved too loose, and a money page that never fully recovered after a seemingly minor URL change.
We also get into PBNs, churn-and-burn SEO, brand-domain attacks, Google updates, AI-powered domain infrastructure and black hat SEO in iGaming.
And Dirk makes one of the episode’s most controversial arguments: in iGaming, fully white-hat SEO is often not enough to compete—partly because operators have far fewer paid acquisition options to fall back on when organic rankings disappear.
Listen if you work in SEO, affiliate marketing, iGaming, domain acquisition, expired domains or brand protection—or if you want to understand how aggressive search operators think about risk, authority and ranking assets.

Gentoo Media could not find writers willing to put their real names next to casino content, so it built the writers instead.
Emma-Elizabeth Byrne explains what was inside each fake profile, why the AI generated faces had to be edited by hand until they stopped looking too perfect, and how personas were cast by market age and gender so the experience looked earned. She gives the numbers nobody else has published, one persona for a 500 page site, up to four for a large one, three to four staff on every profile.
As Director of Publishing at Gentoo Media, a company listed in Norway and Sweden, she oversees content across roughly 150 websites including AskGamblers and Casinomeister, and she presented this method on the main stage at brightonSEO before the trade press accused her of fabrication.
Listen for her answer on why nobody was deceived, and her bet on which publishing roles survive the next five years.

A click in the US costs $30, and the company bidding against you has more budget than NATO. Gaetano Romeo's answer was to concede the category term entirely and go after the searches that signal a customer is already leaving a competitor.
Listen for how organic went from 3% of pipeline to 20% in two and a half years, why Meta produces cheaper qualified B2B leads than LinkedIn, and why country-level keyword research beats translating the same page into six languages. Gaetano runs global digital marketing at EasyVista across the US, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Portugal, and is targeting 30% of pipeline from organic without cutting a euro from paid.
If you run more than one market on a budget somebody else set, this is the conversation.

45% of ads made by the best ad makers in the world leave people liking the brand less than before they saw them. Staffan Engström reached that number by scanning 600 brains over two years with Stanford professor Baba Shiv, and in this conversation he connects it to the metric almost every budget still runs on.
You will hear why last click attribution worked in 2016 and is now the weakest number in marketing, why performance channels claim 5 to 20% more credit than they earn until growth quietly stops, why radio keeps winning in iGaming while market leaders overspend defending search, and why a visible price costs you up to 30% of attention.
Staffan spent 25 years in marketing analytics, sold a network of US TV stations to NBC, and now runs Fieldstream AI with Deloitte as delivery partner, measuring budgets from 5 to 500 million a year. Listen before your next budget review, because the channels you are about to fund may be claiming credit they never earned.