Peter Macinkovic
Peter Macinkovic is the SEO Lead at Easygo Gaming.
Based in Melbourne, Australia, Peter has had a career in digital for over 10 years. In this hour-long episode, Peter walks us through how he found his way into SEO, and more importantly, how he actively increased his chances of getting a promotion and/or raise.
Interesting things about Peter Macinkovic.
- he is one of the most knowledgeable people in Australia who has expertise with modifying Shopify’s code for better crawling and indexing
- this was one of the reasons he was recruited by Innovate Online
- was trained as a Microsoft search quality rater
- spent 8 years working in digital marketing without officially having a SEO-related job title
- started to earn $100k in late 2020, 9 years after starting in digital
- gave 9 weeks notice and helped ex-employer find a suitable replacement
- treats job interviews as an opportunity to interview the hiring manager
How Peter got into SEO (eventually).
Peter was required to do a work placement as part of his university degree. He landed a work placement role at a web development agency and this was his first exposure to search engine optimisation.
He must have been good at it because after the work placement, he was offered a job there.
This was back in 2011 and SEO was very different. That is, backlinks were very effective and onsite content was not as mature as it is in present day.
Peter’s first in-house role was for a physical pharmacy expanding to ecommerce. Fulfilling the role as a digital marketing all-rounder, Peter was paid $30 per hour part-time and was with Kiana Beauty for 4.5 years.
“I thought I was going to work here for 20 years.”
To this day, Kiana Beauty is his favourite experience because he was responsible for all the things related to the website. Plus, the autonomy outweighed the relatively low salary.
“Realistically, they couldn’t grow to match my ability to grow and command a salary in the industry.”
It wasn’t until 2019 that he formally held a SEO job title at Innovate Online where he was responsible for household brands such as JB Hifi and T2 Tea.
Peter’s success is grounded in his ability to get shit done.
If there is one single takeaway from this episode, it is that Peter is a self-starter and self-learner.
“When I learn something, I learn it at an academic level.”
He is not afraid to get his hands dirty, roll up his sleeves, and do the development deployment, carry out technical fixes, make meta tag changes, and anything else that is required for a website to perform better in organic search.
This is evident as he mastered Facebook retargeting ads to support SEO, Google Ads, and learning everything about Shopify.
And this character trait to read all the documentation, take courses, and to be as learned as possible on any given subject matter plays a critical role, in my opinion, to where he is today and why he demands the 6-figure salary that he does.
Peter recommends investing in your network.
Knowing people in the industry will give you access to information that you won’t find anywhere else. This includes job opportunities, salaries, and insights to what the roles and responsibilities are for any given job title in SEO.
“Regarding industry salaries, I get my vibes from the community.”
Peter recalls how he has mentored many people and how he has been able to help others progress in their careers.
The Melbourne SEO scene is a welcoming one compared to my experience with Sydney’s crowd. For example, they have a regular SEO meetup and continues to this day.
Peter recalls going to the SEO Melbourne meetup back in 2014 and has been a regular. In fact, this was where I met Peter for the very firs time in real life back in 2020.
One day in 2019, Peter was presenting at the meetup. It turned out to be a 2-hour presentation on all the things he had learned about Shopify SEO. This presentation was how Peter positioned himself as a Shopify SEO expert and thus marked his employment at Innovate Online.
PS – the SEO Melbourne meetup is now called the SEO Collective and Peter continues to contribute regularly.