The Brightest Minds Podcast Episode 2 | Joost de Valk of SEO Yoast

is podcast in live video stream it's a real honor to be your host today my name is Chris Jones I am a serial entrepreneur investor and best-selling author and today we have a special guest he is has been a friend of mine for nearly 15 years or so his name is yo Steve all yo say hello hey everyone nice to be R so yost to those of you that are watching this in the SEO space he's a familiar face but I he actually is much bigger than just a familiar face in the SEO community Yoast is behind the famous Yoast SEO plugin we're gonna dive deeper today about the oast SEO plugin we're gonna talk about how Yoast just celebrated its 10th anniversary but just to put things into context here my buddy Yost has built a plugin that has been installed over a hundred and thirty five million times and he is on a daily basis he and his team of of nearly 120 people are managing about 11 million active users and did I get the numbers right there yes yeah if it's 11 million active websites so it's always a bit hard to figure out how many users that really is because some of those sites have 100 user and there's a couple of people that have multiple sites so you don't really know but it's in terms of sites we do now and while that is a lot of sites yeah these are these are huge numbers and it's so impressive because I remember you priest pre Yoast SEO plug-in so we're gonna dive a little deeper here let's start a little bit more with the back story let's let's talk first about you why don't you share a little bit more about your back story in two or three minutes just to give us and folks that are watching a little bit a better history of you yeah well so when we met I was at a an agency so I I started in the hosting space as a conman sales guy but I was I've always been a geek but in doing other things and at a certain point in time I my wife was pregnant of our eldest and I decided to work a bit closer to home and try something new and a new thing turned out to be SEO this is actually at and enough for no proper reason whatsoever at that time started blogging in English which turned out quite well because well the blogs were booming people were doing a whole lot of cool things in the SEO space I was adding my voice and people like that yeah so I got a vital to speak at some conferences after a while actually through our mutual friend Dave Naylor who introduced me to a couple of people after I attended one of his conferences and he said you should be speaker you should be here listening to me so he introduced me to Danny Sullivan actually and to Matt Cutts and that got the ball rolling got me on the speaking circuit and but I was still working at that agency and I had this wordpress blog as a hobby on the side explaining to people what was happening in the CSS world because I was all into open source and open standards already at that point and was doing a lot of contributions to WebKit the core of what is now a safari Google Chrome and even Microsoft edge so I was a committer in that project was writing a lot about that and was doing a lot of CSS free related stuff all pretty technical I was blogging about that and doing that on WordPress so time progresses and I built some plugins to help myself do the SEO for this site because as a consultant I'd learned a lot of SEO I would I was lucky enough this an agency that tried to be pretty darn good at it did imagine 15 years ago me being in a team of 14 full-time SEO s which is not I mean they're not even that many companies like that anymore your knowledge right now it's like it's mostly gone up into bigger agencies where we were pretty specialized so left that company joined another but continued and doing all the B's and sse host a bit more speaking i think i brought you to dan elements at some point for killeth affiliate conferences and some related stuff and well had a couple of these plugins was having fun with that and at a certain point decided hey I need to turn all of these separate SEO plugins I have into one SEO plugin so about ten years ago slightly more I decided to start doing that and built what is now us SEO and at the same time I decided I was kind of done with being a consultant for someone else and started doing now on my own so I had some customers that really wanted just me and I was working for the bigger guys at that time so working for eBay and did a very large project for The Guardian this would work for Facebook and I knew that I wasn't gonna starve so I started on my own and did that plug-in and that I built became popular to the point of becoming ridiculously popular and had me having about a million users after a year um and quickly figuring out that a plugin without a business model is a very expensive hobby yep and so started to figure out how I'm gonna do this etcetera this was when we both started attending our good friend Marcus's conference in Munich every year and um and by the way at this point at this point I remember you being it's so entrepreneurial I remember you being frustrated that many of us in the room had already built million dollar or multi-million dollar companies and I remember you standing on stage and in front of your brothers and sisters that's what we call ourselves that go to that particular conference and I just remember frustration and I remember you saying you know I'm gonna do something and to fast forward now congratulations on your 10 year anniversary thanks you were probably like a solopreneur is involved at you and your yeah so in 2010 I was alone in 2012 we added a couple of people my wife joined in 2014 she came from a college background so she'd been working as a professor and basically and she's a PhD right she's a PhD yeah and honestly at that point it was it was still quite small or was yeah so in 14 before we released yes I see a premium and and the real big growth started um and then I knew that we'd struck gold and I mean at a certain point you know like okay this is going to build a real company and and and going to be a bit bigger than what we expected but even then I didn't really expect to do what we've done in the last few years to be honest I mean growing over the last few years we've been growing 30 40 50 percent year-on-year and it's just every time you see that happen is it's a bit of a surreal experience yeah because it's just so many you and and you have to figure out like how do you do that and we've never taken investment so it's always been okay how much cash do we have what can we do what where can we put that money to work and yeah that's it's it's been brilliant to watch and I know you know success stories aren't always up and to the right you know they they have you know trials and tribulations and struggles and and you've had them I've had them but I want to segue into some of the meat and potatoes kind of peeling back the onion of this but two things one just to speak to the glue pulled off here I interviewed you for for an article on Forbes three years ago and at that time I think we had did your downloads at like 30 or 40 million so just to put that in a perspective I mean you've almost five times that as as organization but a couple of things and then we'll dive in what you've pulled off is really remarkable you've you've mentioned that you have been pulled dancing but but you know I've had now seven companies that I've founded that I've scaled you know passed a million dollars so a million dollar companies how do you do that and how did Yost do it well you start with a fundamental problem and that's what we're gonna spend the rest of the conversation on today is kind of talking about how you solve a fundamental problem that the vast majority of folks who had a website or struggling with and that's this idea of SEO and that article that you and I worked on three years ago the title of it was can SEO be automated and at that time you were quoted as saying let's see here you were quoted as saying that good software can take all the technical pains away but in no way can any software ever take away the content development task or the real marketing side of things this is something people are often mistaken about they think installing one plug-in or running one one or a few pieces of software will magically get them higher rankings it's just not that simple do you still feel that way or if you you kind of have you kind of changed your mind on that no I still feel that way it's I do think that we can we can help a lot of these processes with software I'm but every time I come into a discussion where people mention AI as a solution for everything and etc I just don't believe that anywhere in the ended near future that would like to the five year I had future our AI will be good enough to to get anywhere close to writing proper tax that is creative and against people to buy stuff yeah and in the end what you need to do is you need to as a way as you build your website you have a couple of challenges yeah you have what is your website about and what's your product and the most important thing of course is that you have a product or a thing that you're selling that's good then nothing can save you because that is what marketing is what you need to do is you your to the market and you probably can't help you after that of course it's tough to do and and that stuff is very basic but also very hard for a computer categorizing information is something that a computer is pretty good at when it's already labeled but if it's not labeled that's pretty hard to do for a computer sure so yeah so I think we can help and I we're trying to build software where we can help and help you write more readable text and help you better recognize the most important words and your copy may be or it stuff like that but um I do think that that it's that in the end marketing is always going to be a blend of tech yeah and we can provide the tech you have to bring the creativity I think the interesting thing about how honest you are about this idea of automation or otherwise you know kind of setting it and forgetting it I think a lot of people who probably use your plugin see it as that automation that it's not now give it credence that well the thing that the Yoast o plug plug-in has done successfully and continues to is it really does take most of the technical SEO considerations and and doesn't require that you have to have a technical SEO on staff because your plug-in for instance is able to understand things about content understand things about readability among among other things can you kind of give us just a an overview of some of the core features of the of the plugins so that folks you know you know of course have a better taste a better flavor of it I think he can basically separate it into a couple of pieces so on the one hand you have the technical SEO framework that it is that provides things like URLs schema integration where we automatically add schema to pages as as much as we can and as well as we can title optimization the ability we give you the ability to write message descriptions because it wouldn't be there otherwise so that's the technical framework there's a lot of tech stuff in there and most of that stuff I don't want even people to even think about because the standards are and annoying and we're constantly optimizing those and working with those and you'll see me constantly in Fred's on Twitter as well with with Google engineers that's really going about how can we prevent this sort of needless indexing and because we're fixing that for 10 million sites I mean this is not us fixing it for one small site we're fixing it for millions of sites at the same time but matters if we optimize indexing by a bit it really makes more it cities in in in larger amounts and I can than anything else I can do so that's the technical SEO side the other side is the content analysis which splits up into two bits which is the SEO analysis which tries to give you feedback on hey this will rank well based on what we know and well there's a lot of factors that go into that this is something that we redo every year where we go through these factors and see and see like hey is this still up-to-date and it's working well enough and we we have readability now slowly have a team of linguists here constantly refining rules on how can we make this text more readable now this readability analysis is very close in some ways to some other tools that are on the market the difference between what we do and what everybody else does is that we do this in JavaScript in your browser and we don't send this data to our servers so we don't do any Big Data stuff the added analysis add a benefit of that to you is that your content stays your content we we don't see it we don't know it we don't want anything to do with it I think it's a typical result of us being a European company and and having slightly different ideas you rich but and we also do that in a lot of languages so we in our premium product we recognize keywords a bit better what we do is so if you what you put in as a focus keyword where you say hey I want to rank for this and if you have our premium product rule will recognize other forms of that as well so and if you put it in as your focus keyword by shoe then we would recognize buying shoes as well we would recognize all these different word forms mm-hmm of course that's something that we have to build per level for now we've just released Italian support for that today but we support English French Spanish Russian Dutch German and we're adding more languages as we go along with that team of the language researchers slash developers who are building all of this so um yeah so it's constant analysis mm-hmm which is SEO and readability analysis and on the other hand its its technical SEO from anything from XML sitemaps to canonical - well a great thing one of the things I know you're you're spending more time on is is schema and can you speak to it and first you know kind of what is it for folks that might not know and then what kind of opportunities are there on the Yoast SEO plugin to optimize for it yes so Google is has been moving away from this classic notion of 10 blue links for years and and for years they've been making these richer results in the search results and to do that they need to understand a bit better what's on that page so they've had all sorts of different methods of doing that and they've now basically settled on yeah we're not going to use micro formats anymore that's a thing at the past we're not going to use rdfa anymore it's all going to be schema door or through json-ld markup which basically means that we provide in the source code of the page a a blob as a condensed bit of JavaScript that has structured data about what is on that page and that structured data is specified through a standard that's called schema.org which is a project that was started by the four major search engines but it's mostly to be honest now headed by Google the people working on this full-time are very smart people but most of them work for Google and most of the work is done by Dan Brickley who used to be at the BBC he's in London but he works for Google now and they're driving that that growth and that well that ever-expanding set of structures on how to describe stuff so that can be a product that can be a job that can be a local business there's a lot of different things there so as that grows Google is adding more and more of these Rich Snippets and that and they have a lot of these in different things for that so they have products which we support fully with WooCommerce and they have FA queues and how to's which is I think one of the most interesting things that they've added last few years and certainly the most well the best way of doing SEO at the moment if you want to do something like right now that'll add value to your site tomorrow is go or zoom into one of your more important pages and and add an FAQ block if you can with some good questions about that and you'll see it pop up in Google like that like literally as soon as the page gets re spidered you'll see that Google adds an FAQ block below that page in the search results and you literally take up more real estate in the search results so you take up more room pushing your competitors down and getting more of your content into that search result yeah that not that piece of it right there is for me the snapshot of how of why folks need to be using this right because at the end of the day if you could drive up click-through rate on your organic search listing chances are it's going to move you up plus it's going to drive more traffic to your site yeah it it's an and all the place that they're doing this is there's what you've got recipe if you have a recipe site you're probably already doing schema because otherwise you you basically disappeared from the search results and jobs and other things right this is happening as well this will be coming to literally every sector in the world it's just a matter of time and when they get to you yeah and if they get to you at at the level of recipes then if you're not providing them with the best structured data that you can you've basically already lost yep so our challenge is we want to make this simple so I don't want to bother you with the technical standards what we have is an FAQ block that we'll call a structured data block so you know that is what it does but that's everything all they all that you need to do is add questions and answers and we'll do all the metadata and we'll we'll make it work that's relatively easy for FAQ and how-to things it becomes slightly harder as these standards will get bigger for recipes right now things like calorie calculators become real problems um so there's a lot of work to be done there this is also where we'll be expending a lot I think in the lit in the next few years can you speak to you know one of the things that's always kind of I've been really curious about and I think we have talked about it in private a little bit but you've built a substantial business right but you give away the tool most of the time so what are the things what are the what's the real base case for why people should make that investment in upgrading to the Premium Yoast SEO tool well honestly did the consideration we make all the time is um it's this feature going to make people better at competing with everyone else if so we put it into free plugin is this feature just here to make you more efficient at SEO in your site then we put it in the premium plugin so if your time I'm than your money then you buy premium if if you can't afford it you don't have to worry because everything that you need to rank is in the free plugin and will always be in the free plugin because that's what our mission is to give everyone the chance to compete with with everyone else yep so we're basically in many ways we see ourselves as an add-on on the mission of WordPress WordPress its mission is democratizing publishing and I think that you can only democratize publishing when you also democratize reaching an audience sure so well that's why the free plugin has everything that that you need to rank and in the premium plugin we do a lot of things that make life simpler so we recognize these work forms for you which helps you optimize your text faster we when you delete a page or a post or a category or tag we say hey we've created a redirect for you you can change it here we we try to do all these things that that keep your site healthy and that help you maintain that site health over time in an easier way that's what we do in premium and helping you rank is what we do for everyone I know you were working on this a couple years back have you made progress on providing your toolset if you will to other platforms other than WordPress so we've done that we have Yoast SEO for type of three for instance which is a pretty popular open for CMS in parches there's a couple of other platforms or were available the problem is that all of the other platforms are shrinking yeah um so we're press is growing so fast as we were talking four years ago about this WordPress would have probably had a market share around that time of about twenty eight twenty nine percent of the web and right now work thirty seven point two percent and the flywheel of WordPress growth is really kicking off I actually he's thirty seven point free I just saw um because it's added one point three percent worldwide market share seven days Wow so you or past releasing your masters on the plan so you oh go ahead so that's where you've made this basically y-yeah yeah it may we don't invest too much in it you aren't growing that's basically do you know one of the other things I wanted to mention because people might not know that you have other products you do right so you have a whole University can you speak to that as some of the education that you guys do it at Yoast and some of the other products you guys may have well next to premium we have a couple of other plugins which are specific for a specific area so we have a local SEO plugin if you optimize for local business we have a news SEO plugin if you optimize for new sites you'll encounter this stuff as you're building your site and your your work with us um we also have Yoast Academy which is our online well education tool we have free and premium courses in your Socata me and free courses on basic SEO stuff but also if you could ever work with wordpress before we've got a free course on how to use wordpress and wordpress has been investing a lot into the block editor the new editor in the environment we've got a free course for that there's got over a hundred thousand students in our us Academy and now it's a it's a vast vast growing Empire of well all these courses that we've built with our team um honestly it's both a product and a marketing thing of course because which is why a lot of these courses are free because we want people to to use WordPress and we want people to use the block editor because that's good for us as well so that's why we give some of this stuff away for free great we want what we want to give you everything you need to to rank so our which is why a lot of our courses for you we've actually made our our pretty complete SEO course now free as well for the kovat period as we thought well a we're a lot of these people are coming online now for the first time and need to need to dive in so we we've made our I think the best start of course we have for SEO available for free as well it's awesome yeah all of our new hires and all of our interns benefit from all that education so thank you for all that do you have your ring on by chance I do not actually you don't all right that is bad isn't it well no I just thought you know kind of in closing I thought we would chat about a little bit more of our personal relationship to the extent that within the context of this event that we go to right so Yost and I are part of a small community of growth marketers it is an SEO conference but a lot of the folks that get invited to this really run growth for large enterprise companies publicly traded companies from Facebook to Disney etc so you would agree that you know this is probably one of the coolest things that ever happened in our life because that network of people within that group are pretty extraordinary and Marcus Marcus tan ler who is the founder of it I've been friends with for almost 20 years and this is someone who really deserves a medal for for bringing together so many like-minded individuals but what I wanted to ask it look what it what's been the biggest benefit to you and your business and your loom part of SEO Oktoberfest well I I think what with you and what you find at some point is that a large portion of what the things you're able to achieve is through your network and just being able to reach out and ask questions and in on the other hand it's people that you see are your peers but at the same time drive you to do better too or or well in in a lot of cases make you go nuts because they're teasing you about not that's what it definitely did for me I mean being teased about hey but you're why are you doing and this as a consultant why aren't you growing you're starting your own thing why why aren't you and to a lot of these things what that's who definitely were brought to me and at the same time it's I mean well you can attest to that we have some of our friends one of them recently joined Shopify after having been a facebook for a while I mean it's it's this group of people that are everywhere and if you need someone you can it and that feels bad because it's so in crowd which is very opposed to how I normally work in the world I'm very much about everything being open and try to but it is a rather good group of friends where you can also just ask things and not have it be public it sometimes is also very helpful because being an entrepreneur is also sometimes very painful I mean I in the beginning of this code period the first month in March our company we had to start work from home and for the first hour we I just had a loss in revenue compared to the year before we were still making money inwards we were and we not really been in trouble but I I saw a declining growth so I started asking like hey what's everyone seeing what's what's happening and you can talk about these things and have a bit of a group that like that can show you like hey why what's happening this is just me am i doing something wrong or is more happening here and I think that's really valuable you need that peer group yeah yeah I mean for me it's it's the friendships you know I think we've all opened doors for one another pretty much the entire group we've we've looked for opportunities to help one another but but really it's the friendships and you know just some contacts so I was asking about the ring so this is an exclusive then where you have to it's only by invitation and so if you get invited to be there as a speaker which Yost and I have both of us I think I think I'm at 7 I think you're at what not years that you've done it is something like that but I think - yeah yeah but the but the point is is that you you it's by invite only and then you go and you speak in front of a small group of really successful individuals so it is as terrifying each year and in and out not because you were not experienced public speakers not because we don't have really great content that she cuz the peer group is really not high quality and the other piece is is that you literally get invited back only at the request of the attendees so the attendees each year decide who comes back and you know both of us should be proud because I think every year that we've attended we've we've gotten invited back year after year and the years that I missed were because I had children and stuff like that so there yeah yeah I've honestly not been the last two reasons but the only year I missed before table was because I had a daughter yeah it's a yeah yeah so we've seen you know each other and the group has seen one another go through career changes have children etc the ring is something that if you get invited back for a fifth time the ring and you know it's just one of those sort of symbols of of success that that has a sort of intrinsic value and it really speaks to not only the quality of that group but candidly you know success and achievement comes through focused dedication and a willingness to put yourself out there and I think SEO Octoberfest really represents the the sort of embodiment of of what could to happen so there's those are watching this right now and other folks are watching it and you know Yost you're you're one of that that brand that name is synonymous with search engine marketing I would say that if we looked at a sort of Google trend and just a visibility and recognize a that it's it's probably one of the most defining products companies individuals and words to describe our industry so I want to congratulate you on 10 years at Yoast with you and and a lot of my good friends your wife your brother and many others that I'm friends with nothing but success moving forward I I'm really honored that I've had a catbird sort of view of of your see Bend up to poo and I can't wait for your career man I love you as a friend and nothing but success moving forward likewise I well I can only say the same the thing I've thought about last night as I was thinking about doing this interview with you today is that I think the first time we met was in 2008 SES New York mm-hmm and your wife was there - mm-hmm because you're you were all still at pop again yep yep that's a long time ago you know and yeah it's it's just to consider that path which is it's ridiculous it's also standing still and considering that path it's not something I do very well taking time to reflect on your own success is not a thing that I and one and the luck that you've had because even though I do think that a lot of this is is hard work etc I also want to recognize especially in this day and age that I am ridiculously privileged and well for instance becoming part of a group like SEO for us is part of that privilege in a way and well that is both good but it's also good to realize that that privilege is not something that you might have completely achieved on your own and and that is therefore up to you to use that success to empower others which is something I think we're we do it just for everyone out there we just what we try to do through building yours but also through making WordPress core itself better all the time and and well if I'm can leave some words for everybody listening to this if you're successful use that success and empower others and and and let's grow this to something nicer together it's awesome man really appreciate your time this morning please send my best to your family and I will we will see each other soon absolutely thanks peers Murr see