20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast

0:00I don't think this is different from crypto. I think this has a bigger impact on society than crypto will because this has the type of impact that electricity and the steam engine had in terms of productivity changes. This is 20 growth with me Harry Stabbings, and I'm so excited for the show's day because the one element of growth We have really not done a deep dive on is the dark art of SEO and so stay which joined by one of the OGs of the SEO world Yost de Valk, as the founder of Yost, he scaled what was a side project plug -in into a multi -million dollar business used by 13 million websites and selling to new fold media in 2021.

0:36As one of the early SEO pioneers, he's also an extremely coveted angel investor, an investor in his company, Amelia Capdall. And I do want to say huge thank you to Shaq, Alex Shals and Matt Mullamweg, some amazing questions to ask today without which this episode would not have been so special. But before we dive into the show's day, I need your help, I need your input on the 20 VC Mirror Board as I'm booking new guests that we should feature on the show in 2023. Now this is the only way to make suggestions. Head on over to mirror .com forward slash 20 VC and leave your suggestions with digital sticky notes or comments as mirror .com forward slash 20 VC and mirror actually sponsored this episode.

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4:21I told you I was there to you with Chat last night hearing stories I'm also heard from Brian Hale, from Mullenlegg, from Alex Schultz. So thank you so much for joining me today. I'm sure it's a pleasure to be here with all the people that have been here before me it does feel like you're incorporated into this ridiculous group. Do you know what I'm very lucky to be ingratiated by such intelligent people but I want to start at the beginning? So you started the Yoast SEO plugin as a hobby. It's now used by 13 million sites according to the trusty Google. What was the aha moment for like I have to create the Yoast SEO plugin that even we use at 20VC?

4:53I started as an SEO consultant having my own website doing some small things and I built a couple of small plugins that did very specific SEO things and people kept saying to me like well we just want one plugin that does it all. So I just combined different plugins that I had into one thing and then realized there's basically two sides says here already, you have the technical stuff and you have the content side of things and the technical stuff is not something that anyone wants to think about. What I try to do is take all the technical stuff away from people and just fix it for them and give them good feedback on their content.

5:28Pretty simple recipes that has actually helped to grow so much. But there's a moment when it changes from my hobby that's kind of cool and kind of working to like, oh wow, we actually have something. What was that catalyst for I need to go all in on this? What was side hobby at the time? I started my own company in 2010, Basically doing consulting, I was working for Alex during consulting for Facebook and and doing consulting for eBay. What happened is that the plugin became really big so it had like a million users. WordPress was growing quite fast and I suddenly had on this free plugin that I built as a hobby a million users and I was spending way too much time supporting it and my wife was quite clear.

6:10I didn't need to make money doing this so we need to stop doing it. I first started with an add -on, so I build a video SEO add -on, but the small business plan for it is like if I'm gonna make 100K with this in the first year then it's actually worth continuing doing this because I was making quite a lot of money as a consultant so it had to actually offset that money and that I made more than 100K in the first month. Oh wait there might be a bit more to this. Do you have that moment though then as the next moment you first have that catalyst for oh shit this is something that's working and working well.

6:40When you're doing 100K a month pretty quickly, you were having people chase you down to invest. Why did you never take external funding? Why would we? First of all, don't think that any of this was a plan up front. There was no plan to sell the company. There was no plan to grow to as big as we were as we became, because it just happened. And we grew along with WordPress, and we were very lucky in a way that we picked the right platform in the beginning and built on that. But in the beginning it was very much about turning that hobby into a bit of a lifestyle business We have four children I was also spending a lot of time with them and I didn't necessarily want to build a huge business in the beginning And later on when we realized that we had quite a large business in our hands by their type It really wasn't needed anymore We were generating enough cash to grow into what we wanted to do The funny thing about our sorts of businesses that the only cost that you really have as people Why take money?

7:38If you could turn the clock back 10 years or 2010 when you saw an ankle braces, what would you do differently? Had I known in the beginning that we'd be selling the company at some point, I might have hired a bit less people. A whole lot of the things that we did, we did just because we thought it was fun and not necessarily because we were thinking about how to make the most money. If I look back at it and maybe we hired a bit too much at certain points in time and and also, we're really not that big, use to say companies not that big anymore. 13 million websites, having 120 or so people is really not all that much people.

8:13I wanna start on the first major topic there, because when we chatted before you said, you know, alongside Matt, really it's the first time we've had an open source and a kind of premium OG on the show. And I wanna start with something you said, which is open source slash premium models, who are extremely hard to make work. But when they do, they lead to incredible potential, which VC's underestimating. Let's break that down. Why open source and freemium models so hard to make work first? Two sides to that. On the one hand, freemium is always going to be hard because you have to decide about what to put in free and what to put in premium, like how do you attract the most users and at the same time get enough in premium to actually convert them into paying customers.

8:52And the add on thing that's harder when you're in open source is that when people think that you've got a good product by too much of its premium is that they might just fork your premium product. And you also have to build like a sort of trust relationship with the customer. They need to trust you to be better than the other options that are out there. What you get quite quickly with these models is that you have web skill problems and small company income. At its peak, used was a 15 million euros a year revenue when we sold. That's not a whole lot of money compared to the 11 million sites that we were running on at that time.

9:28So you're solving problems through a whole lot of sites with relatively little people. At the same time, open source community controls a large part of the web, a very, very large part. I think people still underestimate what Matt has done with WordPress. I mean, more than 40 % of websites on the web are WordPress sites. And companies like Shopify, and I heard you podcast with the Toby, which was awesome. But Shopify has like 2 -3 % of the market, if that. So WordPress is way, way bigger. And people underestimate that, and it's under invested, I think. He mentioned there the challenge of putting enough greatness in the free that they convert to the premium.

10:09When you have found this comes to you with this problem, I don't know what to do, I don't know how much to put in, how much secret sauce. What do you actually advise them? Because I'm sure you see so many. I will say that putting too much in free early on is dangerous, because you can't really take it back. I think that's where open source slightly differs from from size, because in size you can just take it back. And in open source, as soon as you've put it out, there it's out there. And someone is going to fork it if you take it out. When you look at freemium and open source today that've worked, the best in class, all of the commonalities in those that have worked well that you think could call to their success.

10:45The biggest underestimated thing in all of open source is branding and thinking about, Hey, how do we want people to look at us? What are we putting out there? How are people perceiving us? They see the hardest thing because you also have to develop a lead brand. And yes, that's what's the most challenging, which is like, I'm a brand -ing -out, but a developer lead brand, that's hard. What makes a great developer lead brand? What makes a great developer lead brand is it's not just developer lead. If I'd been the only one billion years to see it, then we would have only optimized for SEOs for developers who want very specific niche features all the time to do very specific things and honestly nobody cares.

11:24I think Brian, who mentioned in one of your podcasts at some point there, companies tend to optimize for the power user. I think that's the thing that you don't have to do, the exact opposite of what you should be doing and it's very hard to do that well so if you're just a developer leading a company like that and it's really very important that you get someone and bought who's not a power user who can help you like hey I'm a normal user of this product. When you need what don't optimize the power user I'm fascinated that because quite often they're the ones most likely to churn they're not the real lovers.

11:54I understand the optimise for the power user and for the super lover because they're your champion and they're the ones who are gonna espouse it to their friends and the community. Make the ones who love it love it more and they'll do the rest for you. Why am I wrong? Well you're not. That's a word super hard. But the fine line that I've always tried to do with Yoast is that we did the things automatically that the lovers, the really geeky SEOs really liked so we fixed all the problems automatically and very cleanly. And we tried to keep the interface as simple as possible and at the same time we horribly feel that at times the thing is that once you'll start looking at some data and one of the harder parts is that you actually don't have that much data.

12:37is that people don't look at settings. So for an SEO plugin, they turn it on and they expect it to do magic. That means that your defaults have to be incredibly good. And that every setting you add is basically just more noise. So I think that the power is to make sure that you keep on doing the right things and reacting quickly. So one of the things we always did was whenever Google came out with new stuff, it's we'd be on that and we'd have a new release ready a couple days later or even on the day itself to add the features that were needed. You mentioned the default there and that it's saddings, people don't get a saddings.

13:13I think it was Dave Morin who said by the devils in the default when it comes to products and products expectations and that she just destroys creativity. Do you agree or is actually the default is good? It's what we know and it's what we're comfortable with. I think the default is what 90 % of your users who end up using so it better be damn good. It's actually one of WordPress's core principles in its design philosophies which Matt came up with. Decisions are not options. That means we're not going to add options for stuff where we can decide the right thing for 90 % of people. We're not going to add an option for it.

13:48There might be a filter and a code to change it. So if you're a developer, you can change it. but for normal users, adding more options just makes your product harder to use. Can I ask, I think we learn a lot from mistakes. When you look at kind of the product journey of Yost, what do you think was the single biggest kind of product mistake? And what did you learn from it? The biggest product mistake is thinking that people were using our features when we didn't know for sure. So we spend a whole lot of time building features that done nobody used. And that's the problem of building a WordPress plugin because you don't have to leverage your going back to your systems all time.

14:27So we literally didn't know. And then we started building tracking to actually get sent some telemetry back and now we realize, oh, wait, we're spending a whole lot of our time working on this and nobody's using it. So what are you changing then? You spend more time on branding, you spend more time on distribution, you spend no, you spend more time on the parts of the interface where people actually do interact with yourself with. I do not have to ask that, I'm concerned when we look at the freemium model in particular, especially as we enter a different macro climate because what you see is the removal of the credit card from the user and actually it revert back to the CFO where it traditionally was and people do not have the same purchasing power on the front lines.

15:05Are you concerned in the same way as I am about that removal of purchasing power and how does freemium look differently over the next few years to how it did over the last few years? I am slightly concerned there, but I'm not as concerned for Yost because SEO is probably going to be invested in more instead of less in a downmarket because people look at their adverts bill and they go like, oh, maybe we should do something about that. But yeah, I think you're right. And at the same time, most of these freemium models are relatively cheap, so while there's not purchasing power as much anymore under front -end, I mean, Yost SEO costs like 99 euros a year, a lot of WordPress plugins have those kinds of price points, those are not the hardest decisions in the world usually.

15:46Well, why worries me also with the freemium models honestly and the kind of big cohort of startups we have today is you have the cost structure of enterprise startups, you have STRs, you have A's, you have CS teams, you have this very bloated kind of org structure, and then you have the price points of freemium, and we have no knowledge that they upsell efficiently, we have no knowledge of large ACVs at the end of the rainbow, And so you have this inflated cost base and a small ACV with premium. It just doesn't, doesn't work. Honestly, a lot of those companies are also building for scale that they're never going to reach.

16:20I think that there's a lot of opportunity to just do scrappy and small and also to price reasonably because some of these things just get too expensive and then it's too easy to throw you away. So something like Calendly, which I see a lot of people use and love, Google rolls out a new feature and suddenly countlessly is gone. Do you think so? I mean, it's the 3 -5 billion dollar company. I mean, the risk of that is quite big, right? I mean, countlessly, I don't know long I pay for it, but when I use to pay for it, it cost me more than my Google workspace account. And I was like, the deseprosings don't match.

16:53Again, I am an ambassador for a living. You said before that VCs underestimate these models. How do you look at them? How do you evaluate them? What is the mechanism of determination for quality? In terms of software, I can just look at the code. I'm arrogant enough to say that I think I can determine that myself. And then it's just looking at what users are saying, looking at reviews, looking at how people are talking about it. In these communities, which you really get is that you have like the WordPress communities are a layered thing, but the inside WordPress communities, relatively small group of people that goes to WordCamps and that goes to these conferences.

17:31And when I say small, that's a relative, right? I mean, word -campurable will probably be a couple thousand people. It's actually very cool to listen to that, to figure out like, hey, these are the ones that are really going to make a change. So that's being in that community and actually caring about that community and being aligned with that community. How do you tell pre -launch? I meet many, many in my role. Why would you tell pre -launch? You don't have to. Well, why would you fund pre -launch? Yeah, but also, why would you want to tell pre -launch? I mean, most of these things exist already.

18:00That's it. So it's a very different building atmosphere. It's very much build out in the open. How many startups actually take that approach? But that's what I'm saying. Like, this is very uncommon to, I think most VCs, that it is much more out in the open. I mean, when you sell your, it's what you sell as a brand and what you sell is not necessarily just a software, because the software everyone could just pick up and copy. Do you think any VCs does it well? So I've spoken to quite a lot of them because they do reach out and need to, and Feecees are gonna Feecee, I don't think I'll let it them get it.

18:32I think there's a wide open market. Always chance for you to become a VC, as is everyone wants to be a VC these days. I wanted to talk about kind of the highs and lows of SEO. We went through Shaq really. He told me about the instrumental work that you did on CoinDest. So timing and budgets. What does it mean to invest in SEO? I often hear like, oh, we're gonna invest in SEO. What does it mean to invest in SEO? I think that every founder should understand the basics of SEO because it's going to help them in a whole lot of different things. Because what you need to do when you do SEOs, you need to look at a whole lot of data.

19:06And you need to think about what do people search for? How do I describe my product in words that people actually use? When they have a problem, what are they searching for? What are the words that people use to describe the problems that they have and how can I tap into that? I actually think that that's good to think about when you're building a product. So investing in SEO stars there, we're actually thinking about what are we solving, which problem are we using as are we solving? That's where SEO is in the beginning and where it's important, I think. And then when you invest in SEO, you need content, you need a good tech platform.

19:38And honestly, WordPress is out there. So if you're going to use another CMS, I think you're pretty stupid because every other CMS is going to cost you more money. And then you need content, you need to write that content and in the beginning, us probably you that needs to write that content. If we go back to the founder hat of what it means to invest in SEO, the next question is like, when's the right time? A lot of founds like, Harry, I just need to get a couple of customers, I need to build the base and then I'll think about it. When's the right time to start investing in SEO? If you pick the right platform to build your website on and make sure that it's relatively technically SEO friendly already, then you're good in the beginning and then as soon as you start doing customer support, you'll get questions that you have more than two or three times.

20:21Start writing knowledge based articles for those. It's as simple as that. The things you're already writing anyway because you're answering those customers or you're fixing them, reuse that content and put it on your site. Then just build on that. I think the right time to start investing in it is fairly early but that doesn't mean hiring an expensive SEO consultant. It just means putting content on your site and making sure that people can find what you do. Imagine hiring a spandes of SEO consultant, you see so many people attend SEO, or the biggest mistakes you see founders make with SEO in the early days.

20:53One, come up with a brand that is not recognisable. Even in search, if people search through your problem area, they never search ones, right? They always have a search journey where they search for multiple words and for multiple things in over a period of time. Even if they don't click your result, if they see your brand name a couple of times in their results, you're slowly building up confidence for your brand. So being recognizable in search is super important. People underestimate how important it actually is to have a brand that people can remember and that doesn't become very vague very quickly.

21:28That's one. The other is coming up with terms themselves for the say you think you're very clever and you create your own term for what you're doing. Nobody else uses that. So don't use the words that everybody else uses. That's so interesting. So category creation may sound sexy to a VC, but actually whatever intellectual word you're using it doesn't mean shit to anyone, don't bother. So category creation is I think super important, but it's almost always it's a category that already exists as a problem. The problem that you're fixing for people already has words attached to that. If you're going to start using different words for that category, then the people are using to search it for them.

22:07You're gonna have a hard time getting people that search into your website. You can't really create demand with SEO. SEO is very demand driven, just like AdWords is very demand driven. The demand has to be there. You can't create the demand. So that's why the branding is important and you have to do other things as well and a holistic view on growth should absolutely include SEO, but should also include a whole lot of branding. Should you have SEO specialists within your growth team within your marketing team. Is this a matter of skill that everyone should have? How should that be distributed within your team?

22:40I think you should have SEO specialists on your team if you're building a larger growth team because it's a pretty specific problem area to keep track of. It's quite a bit of time that it takes to just keep track of everything that Google does. As your company gets larger, managing SEO gets a lot harder so you'll probably need an SEO team over time because what changes with time? Why does it get harder? As you move quickly on your site and all these companies want to ship every day, then it's hard to not make SEO mistakes every day. So you need people that keep track of what you're shipping and say, okay, maybe we can change this and then it's actually actually SEO friendly.

23:18Who do the SEO specialists in your team work close as with? Is it with the product teams, is it with the dev team, is it with who are their consignal areas to ensure they have that seamless integration? Both these actually, I think they should probably be in that triangle the whole time, and the content side of things should probably also talk to your PR and Combs to your people etc. SEO is a nasty habit of being in so many different places at the same time, like so many different things are important to SEO. You mentioned the kind of the centrality of content there. I think one of the things I always say with content, having done a fair here is the reason most people fail is because they give up.

23:54It just takes a long time to work. When you think about how long it takes to see the gains of SEO, how long does it take to see SEO really come into fruition? This depends a bit on where you are in your journey, but if you're starting as a new company, then it's going to take quite a bit of time. Nobody's heard of you, and you're not going to get like a whole lot of clicks automatically suddenly because you've launched a new website. At the same time, if you're a bigger company and you've not invested in SEO, which you do already have a brand, then you could see results very quickly as soon as you start actually putting decent well optimized content on your site.