What started out as a hobby and a passion grew into a successful business. Joost de Valk built the WordPress SEO plugin mainly as a hobby. In his work as an SEO consultant, he saw what big companies did in order to improve their SEO. Joost was able to translate much of that in a WordPress-plugin. For years, Joost did not make any money with the plugin. And then the tide changed! Joost founded Yoast. The company grew into one of the biggest companies in the WordPress community. The journey towards such growth was like riding a rollercoaster. In this talk, Joost and Markeke will share the view from the rollercoaster. What were the highs and lows in growing the company? How did they grow their audience? How did they set up branding and marketing? Could they grow the same company outside of the WordPress ecosystem? And why is WordPress so immensely important to the company?
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Joost de Valk
Joost de Valk is the founder of Yoast and currently the chief product officer. Joost has a background as an SEO expert, digital marketer and web developer. In the early days of his career, he worked at several IT companies, ranging from enterprise hosting to online marketing agencies. This allowed him to work with several large brands around the world.
In 2010 he founded Yoast, a company with a mission to allow as many people as possible to build a findable website.
Speakers
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Marieke van de Rakt
Marieke studied sociology and communication sciences at the Radboud University in Nijmegen and earned her doctorate in social sciences in 2011. Since the beginning of Yoast, she has been involved in the company. Since 2019, she has served as the CEO. Her main focus is on marketing, human resources, and company culture. But she also loves to think of ways to improve Yoast SEO. Her expertise is on SEO copywriting and site structure.
Speakers
