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The Complete Guide: Content Development Process In SEO

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You may have heard the terminology “SEO-based content” that is frequently utilized in marketing meetings if you are not entirely new for the space of search-based marketing. Content-based SEO is an essential ingredient of SEO marketing strategy.

Content helps websites to rank on SERPs. Hence, it is essential to develop adequately structured content that enables SEO tactics.

This crucial and complete guide incorporates the vital parts of the content development process involved in SEO services.

Let’s explore a few techniques to write engaging content that helps to boost the website to climb in search engine results.

Complete Guide: Let’s explore significant parts of content development procedures in SEO:

1) Useful Keyword-based Research and Precise Content Mapping

Keyword-based research involves building a far-reaching record of different keywords for a website to get a position with the various search engines.

Also, the overall content strategy commences with the research of keywords, as you require discovering what your prospects are exploring online for you to facilitate added web traffic.

This approach helps you find the terms or phrases you require to be focusing on to position your portal on search engines.

Four stages of Keyword research:

  • Write down and plan out the company mission.
  • Create a complete list of keywords you require to be found.
  • Explore the overall search-based intent and behavior.
  • Create new landing pages or map all the vital keywords on current pages.

If you execute the keywords research precisely, you will get a thorough summary of the phrases or terminologies your competitors have employed for ranking similar pages as yours.

Usually, this summary will work as an SEO and content development guide for creating targeted content for the website.

The keywords to be targeted

Though you are a small-sized company with local SEO services, you will possibly have hundreds of different keywords to compete. However, you aren’t required to build all the website pages as well as the content immediately.

The best thing to follow a content management system is to gradually set up the targets and add the required website content accordingly.

Prioritize the keywords which you want to rank quickly. Chalk out your marketing priorities and then plan a content creation strategy.

Four sorts of keyword-based search intention

a) Information-based purpose: An individual is finding a solution or answer to a specific query and detailed information on a precise subject.

b) Commercial purpose: Individuals desire to purchase things now or in the next time and do thorough research earlier to make a product or service purchase.

c) Navigational purpose: An Individual’s willingness to explore a specific website; however, instead of entering the correct URL, he is inserting a term or phrase into a particular search engine.

d) Transactional intention: The individual is discovering to purchase something after executing his mercantile target searches.

Today, various search engines are trying to answer the very requirements the audience has, and they are improving their algorithm day by day to understand different people’s objectives more precisely.

So, if 90 percent of the users are searching for “change car tires” with information-based intent, you are targeting and optimizing the transaction objective to sell out the car tires.

2) Structure of the Web Portal

There are many significant reasons why website structure is essential for ranking and SEO strategy. Such as,

a) Effective structure assists Google to acknowledge your website easily

The website structure guides the search engines to understand what your website is all about and how effortlessly it will search and index the specific content applicable to its objective and goals.

By developing such a web formation, one can utilize recently created write-ups that have engaging links from others for helping other website pages rank as well.

The website formation will also assist in utilizing higher quality content you have developed for a corporate or services site to enhance your marketed pages’ search engine status.

In these ways, an optimized website arrangement will consequently steer to a better ranking in the Google search engine.

b) The practical structure conveys you don’t battle-out with your original SEO content

You might have many similar blogs on your website with identical subject lines. For example, you may have written on Digital marketing services.

For instance, if you have written ten blogs about digital marketing, Google will find it difficult to decide which blog is the most significant to the user query.

Therefore, you need to clarify this through your website structure so that Google doesn’t compare your blogs with each other for SERP.

To resolve challenges like this, utilizing a better internal linking structure will lead to higher rankings of blogs and web pages.

3) Copywriting

It will help if you produce eye-catching blogs, which makes your audience to remain for more time on your web portal. Additionally, you also need your SEO content appealing to Google. However, you require enhancing your content smartly, so it remains easily readable and maintains its inventiveness.

Unique SEO content doesn’t inevitably mean every time you call for creating brand-new content. If your story is entirely new, that will frankly indicate that it is original. Nevertheless, shaping your expert outlook on a precise subject is also considered as original content. Your viewpoint of a tale will turn the content exclusive and inimitable.

4) Content-focused Approach and Design

Content-focused approach and design turn the content development process more effective, concentrating on real user requirements. It doesn’t merely assist you in discovering the target audiences’ desire; however, it also centers on actual conditions. It also covers the content style, the language, and the set-up; that is needed.

5) Context with Search Intent

With search engines getting intelligent, they now understand the quality of content on web portals in better ways. They don’t just explore how frequently the keyword pops up on an in-hand web page.

They even figure out the actual context of these targeted keywords, such as synchronizing terminologies and content phrases, similar words, as well as synonyms.

Also, Google understands users’ queries more healthily, so it finds the users’ search intent. Whether someone is exploring a product or just wants the product information, it finds the applicable objective that goes well for that user.

6) Content Enhanced, Optimized and Designed for Search Engines

The motive behind producing superior content is to make sure that it is suitable for various search engines.

Optimizing the content and enabling the snippet preview will help you turn your web pages easily searchable on different online platforms. The optimizations and tweaks on your final original content can drastically increase your probability of being chosen through the various search engines.

Key Takeaways

The content development process in SEO is a significant and fundamental component of any digital marketing strategy. It covers all possible elements of writing content and arranging the same on your web portal and landing pages. Content-based SEO is highly critical. Google sets off through and precisely scans your web content using its methodologies. Finally, Google’s algorithms settle on the keyword ranking of your site principally on the quality of content produced and published. It requires writing down knowledgeable SEO-based content, focusing right on the precise keywords, as well as formulating your website in an approach that Google recognizes. So, it involves a significant amount of work. However, it will shell out with positive outcomes in the longer run.

Boost Media Logo

BOOST MEDIA- Providing High-Class Digital Marketing Services since 2011

Leave a Comment / Founder, Marketing, SEO, Tech Story / By

By now we have already become familiar with the term SaaS and the term SaaS stands for Software as a Service. In this kind of service, the company makes software whose license is given to other companies on a subscription basis. IT sector has various needs and in every company, smaller or bigger, an IT department is mandatory. It is important for the proper functioning of the business.

And, all these have eventually topped our priority list once the internet started becoming affordable by everyone. Speaking about SaaS, Boost Media is one of the largest and fastest-growing B2B SaaS companies that exist. Rob Lenderman and David Greenbaum founded the company in 2009 and since then it is excelling in the creative marketplace. Boost Media provides one of the best services in the sphere of digital marketing meeting every need of the clients.

Boost Media Logo

Boost Media Founders

Rob Lenderman went to North Carolina State University to acquire his bachelor’s degree in Nuclear Engineering. He completed his graduation in 1995. In 2000, Rob joined LendingTree as a Lead Developer and eventually, he received a promotion as SEO Architect. He left the company in 2007 and joined Interval International-IAC. He worked there as a product developer for three years.

In 2010, Rob joined Clearwire as the Director of eCare and left it for co-founding Boost Media. He was the Chief Product Officer of Boost Media until Adlabs Technology acquired the company in 2019. Currently, he is holding the same position at Adlabs Technology.

David Greenbaum went to the Yale School of Management for completing his MBA. His career started as an analyst in Goldman Sachs after which he started working for Plum Capital. In this company, he worked with many start-ups handling finance operation of them. It gave him a clear perspective of how he should start one.

David also worked at Interval Leisure Group as the Director of Strategy and M&A. After co-founding Boost Media, David also founded OnPlan.

Funding to Boost Media

Both the founders were well experienced when they founded Boost media. David, by then had already mastered the art of managing finance. The company received its first funding in the year 2011. In the seed funding, Boost Media raised $1.6 million. Some of the major investors included David Frankel, Jed Katz, etc. There was a total of eight investors that led this funding round.

The early Series A funding round took place in September 2011. Webb Investment Network led the funding round. There was another funding round in 2012 and the company raised $1.4 million. Javelin Ventures Partners led another funding round in 2013 and the company raised $2 million.

In 2013, the company raised $8 million in Series B funding from Western Technology Investment, Javelin Ventures Partners, and Battery Ventures. This year, the company also carried out its Series C funding round where it raised $19 million. Within a few years of founding the company, it landed many big investors.

Growth and Success

By this time, Boost Media has already become a well-acknowledged digital marketing service provider in the industry. From displaying advertising to social video, Boost Media released many platforms for better reach.

One such platform was released in 2016 and it was called Boost Media’s Express Platform. It was released in 2016 to help users have access to a marketplace with more than 1,000 professional copywriters.

Within 2016, Boost Media landed more than 200 customers including some big businesses like Jockey, Shutterfly, Liberty Mutual, etc. The team of Boost Media comprises of more than 1,000 experienced copywriters and designers. The company has its headquarters based in San Francisco.

Acquisition by Adlabs Technology

Adlabs Technology is a company working in the field of paid-search ad creations, optimization, and analysis which are powered by AI. The company announced the acquisition of Boost Media in 2019. The agreement included top to bottom of Boost Media’s assets including customer contracts, patents, trademark brands, software platforms, websites, etc.

The key employees of Boost Media were also accepted in the company including Rob. Currently, the company is performing all its operations under the name of Adlabs Technology. Before the acquisition, the company showed excellent results as an independent entity landed many lucrative clients.

MOZ

The Wizards of Moz: Success Story of Moz

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Moz began as an SEO service in 2004, but over time, grew to become one of the world’s leading SaaS companies. So much so, that they even launched their own Pro app! Started by a mother-son duo, Moz sells marketing analytics and SEO management software to their subscribers. So how did this mother and son, revolutionise the world of SEO marketing? Here’s a look at how the idea for Moz took shape, and the impact it made.

The Idea Hits

Rand Fishkin was an entrepreneur with a penchant for web design. In 2001, Fishkin realised the importance of organic search and web traffic. He learned about a variety of search engines like MSN Search, Yahoo!, and Google. This helped him develop SEO strategies and digital marketing analysis for clients. Eventually, as the demand for SEO specialists rose, so did Fishkin’s thirst for knowledge regarding the same.

After a while, he became not just proficient, but an authority on SEO. So. In 2004, he began SEOmoz as a way of helping people figure out the secretive world of SEO. The SEOmoz blog helped bring in a constant stream of clients. Since then, the once-struggling blog has become an SEO empire, bringing forth and introducing a slew of products. Read on to see how Moz grew from being a small experiment to one of the biggest SaaS companies in the world.

Humble Beginnings

Founded by Rand Fishkin and Gillian Muessig in 2004, Moz functions as a consulting firm which later became a software developer. The company now boasts of a massively successful online service, with a community of over 1 million digital marketers. The company started as SEOmoz in 2004, and three years later had their SEO-Pro app. In 2007, Moz launched a set of SEO-based tools and resources. This helped generate half their total revenue by the end of the year.

Towards the end of 2007, Ignition Partners and Curious Office, chipped in $1.1mm to help Moz grow. With a conversion rate of over 56%, Moz grew tremendously in the following years, and their subscribers grew with them. A year later, in 2008, they launched Mozscape which served as a scalable online crawl. The company was also able to grow its traffic at 54% during that same period.

Change of Hands

They even invented the TAGFEE code, and soon hit 5000 subscribers. In 2010, Moz became an Inc. 500 list website. In August of the same year, they launched their web app and followed it up in 2012 by acquiring Followewonk. The company received its first funding in 2007 and tried twice again in 2009 and 2011 to raise capital. The Foundry Group and Ignition partners helped them raise $18 million in 2012. Following this, Foundry employee Brad Feld Moz’s COO, Sarah Bird joined the board. This came as a result of Gillian Muessig stepping down from the helm the same year. Between 2008 and 2011, Moz grew from being a $1.5 million company to generating $11.4 million in revenue.

A Family Deal

Muessig co-founded Moz along with her eldest son, Rand Fishkin in Seattle 15 years ago. Since leaving the company in 2012, she worked as an advisor for various companies. She also sits on multiple boards, including Soro and Brettapproved. She is also the CEO of the venture capitalist firm Outlines Venture Group and co-founder of the Sybilla Masters Fund along with Microsoft veteran Alka Badshah and Anne Kennedy. In the early days of the company, Muessig’s youngest son would come to the office after work and did small duties for her. Her daughter too was huge support for her, being her cheerleader, always reassuring and comforting.

New Tools and Prolonged Success

The company rechristened itself Moz in 2013 and began to get more involved in inbound marketing. Later that year, they launched Moz Analytics, which used inbound marketing strategies to improve brand marketing. They followed this up, by launching Moz Local in 2014, which served as a platform to manage listings online. The company celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2014 by crossing 15,000 subscribers.

Their SEO Toolbox offers a variety of tools such as the Term Extractor, Trust factor and mozRank, which works like the Google Page Rank. An SEO audit tool, named YOUmoz, helps users learn about new trends in SEO. In 2014, Rand stepped won as CEO but continued to work at Moz in various other roles till 2018. With almost 85% of their users finding them through social media and organic search, Moz is a true social media sensation.

Moz currently has over 36,000 customers and 160 employees. Annual revenues are in the high 40’s with the company bringing in over $42 million in 2017. This was a steep rise from the $38 million they made the year before. Over the years, Moz has evolved to become a one-stop solution for all SEO and marketing needs, and the future looks brighter than ever before for the SaaS giant.

Search Engine Land, Success Story Of A Publication Company Pioneering In The World Of Search Marketing

SEO, Social media, start-up, Tech Story / By

The most used and the most popular search engines that have been dominating the market since the arrival of the internet are namely Yahoo! and Google. And even before Google was launched in the market, it was Yahoo! that ruled in the web search engine. But, with time many search engines came up, few of them dissolved while the rest of them are just trying hard to exist on the web. So, a lot of confusion arises regarding search engines and search marketing. To eradicate this problem from the domain of search engine, SEO and SEM permanently especially for the people who are aspiring content creators, Danny Sullivan along with Chris Sherman founded Search Engine Land in 2006.

Search Engine Land is basically a publication that has got every news, information and trendy topic related to the search engine on the website. It is a very popular platform used by content creators, search marketers and consumers from different fields as well.

Danny Sullivan

Born in 1965, Sullivan was brought up in California. He pursued his Bachelor’s degree from the University of California and started working as a reporter at the Los Angeles Times and The Orange County Register. Sullivan was intrigued by the internet and left the job as the reporter in 1995. He wanted to delve deeper into the world of search engines and hence started doing research about these engines and posted guidelines on the web which was popular as A Webmaster’s Guide to Search Engine. In 1996 he became Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Watch.

Sullivan’s guide continued for years and he finally co-founded Search Engine Land in 2006. The parent company of Search Engine Land was Third Door Media and Sullivan served as the Chief Content Officer of the company from 2006 to 2017. Sullivan, after founding Search Engine Land was named as one of the 50 marketing influencers in 2015. After he retired from the company, Sullivan announced that he will be joining Google as an Advisor.

Chris Sherman

Sherman went to the University of California, San Diego and pursued his Bachelor’s degree in visual arts followed by acquiring a degree in Interactive Educational Technology from Stanford University. In 1988, Sherman was named the Vice President, Technology of Leadership Studies International followed by becoming the Executive Editor of SearchEngineWatch.com. In November 2006, Sherman joined Third Door Media and in the next year, he became the Founding Editor of Search Engine Land.

Founding Search Engine Land

How many of you are confused between Search Engine Land and Search Engine Watch? Search Engine Land is under the company Third Door Media which was founded by Sullivan in 2006 as a digital agency to provide services in the area of marketing technologies, SEO, SMX, and related services. On the other hand, Search Engine Watch is the company that both Sullivan and Sherman worked for co-founding Search Engine Land. Search Engine Land was launched as the product of the company, Third Media Door in the same year when it was founded.

When Sullivan become a newspaper journalist and started off his career in 1995, the Internet just started gaining popularity. So, with people around him who wanted to advertise their websites through search engines barely had any idea about how they are ranked in a search engine at all or how they can improve their rank. This motivated Sullivan to do research about it, publish on the internet about search engine guideless which ultimately led to founding his own company after a decade.

The popularity of Search Engine Land

With the arrival of this new era of digital marketing, every start-up or freelancer or the content creators needs to understand the importance of SEO and SEM. Sullivan, in one of his interviews, said that he since day 1 has preferred to emphasize SEO and its importance though there were much negative feedbacks initially. But, with the site providing ample news, suggestions, updates, and guides about SEO, SEM and more, the company is leading in the publication world for technology. It covers every aspect of the search marketing industry that one user can probably lookup for on the internet and the company also conducts events and conferences around the world.

Currently, the company is having around ten team members with its headquarters based on New England. The estimated annual revenue of the company is $4.4 million and to date there hasn’t been any funding round for Search Engine Land. The website tracks more than 1 million monthly visitors and it is ranked 52,645 among all the global websites.

ahrefs

Bring in the Traffic : Success Story of Ahrefs

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Today, the internet has become more accessible than ever. This has led to the formation of a whole new kind of marketing, i.e. digital marketing. Digital marketing has become an essential part of every business’s strategy and accounts for the highest conversion rates among the different types of marketing. Whether it be in the form of long blogs, short posts, drip email marketing or Social Media Marketing, having the right online presence makes a whole lot of difference in today’s world.

With so much content available for consumption online, businesses are finding it challenging to stay relevant. That is where SEO, the Search Engine Optimisation, plays an essential role, as it helps in raising your website’s visibility. Tools like Ahrefs allows you to leave your SEO woes behind, and in turn, raise your website’s visibility. Having grown their ARR by over 65% within just two years, it goes without saying that Ahrefs is one of the most preferred SEO tools in the industry.

About the Founders

Dmitry Gerasimenko is a Ukrainian by birth, having been born in Nizhyn, but now lives in Singapore to manage Ahrefs. Dmitry’s father handed him a computer when he was six, and ever since, he has been fascinated by computing ad programming. After school, he went on to pursue a degree in computing from the Kyiv Polytechnic University. He relocated to Singapore in 2012 to grow and expand Ahrefs, after having fallen in love with the place when he visited Singapore during one of his visits to Asia.

Ahrefs founder
Image Source: ain.ua

He began his career as a C# and PHP developer for a website design studio in Kyiv. Following this, he freelanced for an American company before turning entrepreneur. Dmitry’s love for the search engine’s started in school wherein he built a documentation search engine and even started making money selling books until he lost the project due to server issues. This love led to launch a web crawler almost ten years after graduating from University.

Founding Ahrefs

When starting Ahrefs, Dmitry had no partners, and hence bore all the risks alone. He invested his savings in the company and hired freelancers when he could afford to do so. The first $400,000 went into product development and was the amount he had saved while working as a freelancer. As the company grew, he went from handling simple projects to more advanced ones and built a team along the way.

In 2010, he recruited Igor Pikovets, who was a friend from university. A year later, the duo launched a link-index paid service. The tool started as a small fish in an ocean of other such tools, and slowly built their way up to becoming one of the most used SEO building tools available on the market now. That company grew into Ahrefs, which now has over 300 billion pages in the index, and updates over 8 billion every day, averaging at 100,000 every second.

Ahrefs acquired its first customers via ads on SEO forums and focused on building a quality product. One of the primary reasons that led to this exponential growth is that they provide a product that triumphs all comparison tests. The SEO growth market is one that is overcrowded with a lot of players; hence, standing out isn’t always an easy task. This is precisely where the company has been able to do so well because they provide a superior offering that consumers find to be the best in the market.

The company markets its product as its most important marketing tool and uses its existing customers as their company’s vocal advocates. When Ahrefs was just developing, Dmitry spent all his time, improving the quality of the application and accumulating data. That was what he focused on because he felt he could do that better than anyone else and that later became the company’s backbone. All that data which was built up, grew as the company grew, and soon, Ahrefs started gaining a reputation for having the best SEO related data.

The downside of this concentrated effort was that the tool’s design and usability weren’t that great because they weren’t areas Dmitry focused on. With the customers they had gained because of their extensive data, Dmitry built a team of web developers who over the years bettered the UI of the engine, and fixed user issues, making Ahrefs an all-in-one package.

A Resounding Success

As the business grew, Dmitry took in more employees. Hence, a team that had less than six members grew to become a close-knit family of over 30 employees. Ahrefs has always had stringent hiring policies, and they hired only when it was absolutely necessary. This is one of the main reasons why Ahrefs does with 30, what most companies do with over a hundred employees!

For instance, most employees at Ahrefs wear more hat than one, with the CMO also being in charge of the blog. Having let go of the freelance bloggers who handled the Ahrefs blog, Tim Soulo took over the blog and in doing so gained more control over the marketing strategy of the company.

Another interesting point is that Ahrefs does not have a dedicated HR team for hiring new recruits. Everything from looking for new employees to finalising the paperwork is done by the core team itself, with the person in the driver’s seat change according to the position being filled. As Dmitry has a background in programming, handles the technical hiring side and was the one who recruited Ahrefs’ present CTO, Igor.

Such a dedicated team of employees who are well-versed in their respective fields has helped the company achieve a YoY growth rate of over 65% and an 8-figure revenue. Ahrefs current has over $50M ARR and employs more than 45 people, with the team having kept 50 people limit for the company. They are still growing over 60% a year with predictions putting them at $64 million by November 2019 and $102 million by September 2020.

When Soulo joined Ahrefs, their blog attracted 15,000 visitors a month, and now over 250,000 go through their website every month. They have 8 to 10 employees handling marketing, and market-related research, around 7 taking care of customer support and the rest of the employees working on web development.

Ahrefs now has plans to create a search engine of its own. Dmitry has announced that the engine will work on principles similar to that used by DuckDuckGo. This means that it will not engage in the collection and sharing of personal user data. The fact that DuckDuckGo recently hit over 1 billion monthly searches goes to show that there is potential in this market, and Ahrefs is trying to be one of the first few to harness that potential. Ahrefs search engine strategy will also enable it to share profits with publishers, helping to foster more innovation.

yoast

Share–Engage-Optimize the SEO Way : Success Story of Yoast

Leave a Comment / Founder, Marketing, Product, SEO, Social media, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

Nowadays, with Internet access having reached an all-time high, it is not easy to keep customers engaged and satisfied. There is so much content out there on the web that it is quite easy to get lost amongst all that noise and clutter. To stand out and be heard, articles, blogs and all other kinds of media need to be unique and engaging. They also need to follow the right SEO practices so that they are picked up by search engines. Search engine optimisation is every marketers and content creator’s best friend, as it helps their work get the recognition it deserves. The undoubted king of WordPress SEO is Yoast, and this time around, we will be taking a look at how the company started and got to where it is now.

About the Founders

Yoast Founder
Image Source: gelderlander.nl

Joost de Valk started his career working for a digital marketing company. He gave that up and began consulting for big corporations such as eBay and The Guardian. While doing this, he was working on a project of his own- a plugin that would help websites boost their SEO score. It started as a mere hobby because Valk was interested in the algorithms governing SEO.

After a while, he started sensing that there was more to this than what met the eyes, and he began to take it more seriously than just a hobby. He became so busy with this hobby that his actual work started suffering. That was when his wife suggested that maybe he needed to quit his job and start trying to make some money out of the plugin he was working on.

Founding Yoast

The entire empire we now know as Yoast started as one man’s hobby in 2010! He started his blog in 2004, named joostdevalk.nl, and in 2006, began css3.info. In June 2008, he began yoast.com and started making money through advertisements placed on the blog. Halfway through 2010, he felt the time was right to invest in Yoast full time, giving up his job and founding the company.

The journey started with Video SEO, then came WordPress SEO Premium, and this morphed into Yoast SEO Premium. All these ventures became so successful, so fast that they had to make a company around these services. De Valk was the only one involved, handling everything from consulting, to support for the first few years. The initial years were very taxing as he had to single-handedly manage to support the development and testing all on his own. During these years, it was his wife who served as his biggest supporter and aid. Even today it is Joost, Marieke, his wife, and their first employee, Michiel Heijmans who handles almost all the management and logistics.

Joost’s wife, Marieke, shares Joost’s busy lifestyle having majored in sociology with a PhD in Criminology. She began her career as a researcher at Avans University in Den Bosch. But, as her husband’s company, Yoast started picking up, she decided to help out her partner with his work. Her love for writing inspired her to begin creating eBooks, and soon enough, the idea flourished. Marieke is responsible for the entire Yoast Academy tab and has been a tremendous power in assisting in growing the company.

An Instant Success

WordPress is a well-oiled machine that hosts over 74 million websites, and slowly Yoast started gaining momentum, becoming a regular feature in millions of those websites. One of the most significant issues they have had is maintaining and providing support to millions of beloved users.

Joost had to focus on testing early on, as once the business started to expand exponentially, making sure the version had no bugs or errors got more important than ever before. In the early years of the company, testing was an afterthought that rose when someone encountered an error. That practice is long gone, with testing getting two full weeks, as a means to prevent trouble later on in the release.

Yoast SEO 3.0 was a landmark release, as the company shifted 35-40% of their code from PHP to JavaScript. To facilitate the extensive testing that was necessary for this, the team expanded to include about ten developers and ten other support staff. It is astonishing how such a small group is able to pull off such mammoth tasks.

With the company expanding daily, they are in “full-on hiring mode,” having deviated from Joost’s initial plan of never taking on any employees. The team now includes 32 people in the Netherlands and over 50 worldwide. The team has also introduced several fun methods to make the team feel like a family. One such plan includes a “Know Your Colleague” Quiz which contains over 26 questions regarding the music taste and favourite colour of employees. The team also has a 40-hour workweek, unlike other start-ups and tech companies which demand a minimum of 60 hours a week, with Joost working for longer hours, as he is the leading man.

Joost de Valk single-handedly built WordPress tools to help site owners optimize their content and get discovered by search engines. Doing so helped make webpages more user-friendly, intuitive and reliable, making him one of the chief names in SEO. What makes this success story so inspiring is the fact that it is essentially the story of one man turning his hobby into a multi-million-dollar business!