 goes live on social media. It goes to the different outlets in in different time. So, you know, we may be live on some already, maybe others not yet. But now we're good. Everything's going. So let's get started. Great. Maari, I knew I was going to screw that up. Say it for me one time. Marika van der Racht. Marika van der Racht is CEO of Yoast, a popular word press. Plugin used by more than 11 million people to make their website easier for Google the index. She's a PhD in social sciences and is focused on growth and the company's online training academy, which offers both free and premium subscriptions. Maari, welcome. Thank you. It's really nice to be here. Yeah, my name is hard for people who are not that. Well, I'm going to do my best to say it right. Now, how are things in the Netherlands? Well, it's still tough, covid wise. I think we're not doing as well as the United States is doing in the in the whole vaccination part. We're pretty late in everything. So it's it's kind of in. Well, it's not in. We call it intelligent lockdown. We do an intelligent lockdown in the Netherlands. So it's not all closed, but it is. It is. Well, pretty much all restaurants are still closed and kids are going to school, but my children aren't going to school full time. So it's still it's still not back to normal. And I would really want it to be back to normal, but we're holding on. You guys have more than a hundred employees, right? So are they remote? Are they on site? Well, we have like a hundred aren't remote in normal times. And so they're in the offices in our hometown, which is in Wijchen, that's near the German border in the Netherlands. And then we have 40 people who are remote and they're all over the world. And that's mainly our support team, but we also have some developers who work from everywhere. But nowadays, almost everyone at Jost is at home, only people who have a hard time working at home. We have some people who still live with their parents and only have like a small room in the attic. They can come to our offices because we have enough space and we're not we don't have those really big office gardens. We have like separate offices, which makes it OK to work from there every now and then. But for the most part, people work from home now. Have you changed how you feel about housing employees as a result of the lockdown? Do you do you still prefer to have employees on site or are you more comfortable with remote? How do you feel about that? Yeah, we've really changed. We were a company and also in the WordPress world, a lot of people work remotely. So and we're always the ones who worked from the office. And I still believe in working from the office, but I've noticed that working from home also works for people. So I think we're going to go to a hybrid model. We're already kind of working towards that in which people partly work from the office and partly work from home. And I think that will be the new normal for a lot of companies. We're here with Mariech Wenderach. She is CEO of Jost and we're going to talk about her business, her growth targets and best SEO practices when we return. Stay with us. Mariech, you're leading a company at the nexus of free and premium software services. WordPress is a content management system built on open source software, which is in the public domain and Jost has a free version as well as a premium version and specialized plugins for video, local news and product SEO. How do you keep your balance in a community that believes in free as a defining principle? I think they believe in open source as a defining principle, and it's not the same. So we really believe in having open software. But at the same time, if you have an SEO plugin for 11 million sites and you're not making any money of it, that's not possible anymore because the risks you take if you install a plugin which doesn't have any company behind it in SEO is pretty large. So there needs to be like a solid support system. We do proper testing. We have contacts with Google. So I think it's in the best interest of the whole WordPress community that we make money from it so that we can give back to the community. And that's the thing that keeps it in balance. So we have an entire team that works full time at WordPress core. They only do WordPress core and we have been doing that for quite some time. So a large part, more than five percent, because that's the thing we say in WordPress five for the future, we give back to the community, we give back to WordPress core. And I think that's the way you can like sustain the model you can have and have a successful business because we are successful, but also give back to that community that helped us grow because we've we've grown because of WordPress. So we should give back and make WordPress even bigger. And just to get the lingo right for people who are from outside the WordPress community. When you say WordPress core, you're talking about the base of code. Yes. So we. And so you have employees on your payroll that are contributing to that base of code on a daily basis. Yes. Yes. We have an entire team. I think we're five people who work on a daily basis at the WordPress core. So not on our product, but on WordPress.org, because you also have WordPress.com and that's with automatic. But the WordPress.org part is the thing that's of all of us, WordPress is of the people of the community. It's not owned by company. Yeah, we're giving back to that. I have to ask you something about your user counts because in an interview on the tools or tools podcast in September, you said that there are more than 11 million Yoast users. Yes. But I went to builtwith.com. Yeah. And it showed there were nearly eight million live websites using the free Yoast WordPress SEO plugin and another 7.7 million live websites using the Yoast SEO premium plugin, which is nearly 16 million users. I can assure you that we don't have 7.7 million paid users because then I would have a bigger office. We don't. So I don't know those numbers. We so WordPress only gives says five million plus installs. And we know it because of WordPress. We have close connect. So we do know how many people run our product. And and what we know is 12 million. I'm not I'm not a data expert here, but I do know that we don't have 7 million paid customers because we would have made a lot more money. Gotcha. So how does it break down? When you look at that 12 million, what percentage is premium? Not even one percent. Well, I think one percent. Now, like a few hundred thousands, no, that's not even one percent. A few hundred thousands. So I think I was surprised. I'm I'm shocked. Shocked. Why is that? There's a lot of growth potential there. But it's not that expensive. It's not in the U.S. It's eighty nine dollars a year. Seems very nominal, reasonable, totally. Yeah. Why do you think the penetration with with premium users is in higher? Well, we always focused on growth of the free version. I'm not complaining about how much money we make because we are a very profitable company. And we decided never to take anything out of the free product. And if you start out with a good free product, you have to come up with new features to make your premium product better. And I think in the free version, we really have that aha moment, why people use our product. And I think we're not there yet in the premium product. I have some ideas to get us there. But I think there's a lot of potential for us to grow money wise. But that never was like our main. And it's not that we don't like money. But one of our core values is making money does not come first. So we always did what we thought was best for the customer, what was best for the web. And then, of course, your your company has to remain profitable. But that's never been our main. Well, why we do what we do. When when I look at the I'm also so I use Yoast premium, I also use the video product. Yes. But I see, obviously, there's a local product. Yes. And there's a news product. Yes. And there's also a a product SEO add on for that works with WooCommerce. Talk to us a little bit about those different niches. Which ones are the most successful? Which ones do you see growing most in the future? Well, so our base, our premium product is the largest chunk of what we do. So most people buy premium and then we have some niches, of course. I think the local one is really is something that I expect a lot from because because of covid and a lot of local entrepreneurs setting up a website. So that makes sense that they want to optimize for the local search results. And I think the WooCommerce plugin, because if you have a shop, you're probably also making money. And for us, those people that make money from their website, those are the people that will eventually buy one of our premium products. Because if you don't make money with your website, you're not going to pay for a plugin. So I think that's something we can expect some more or something more as well. As for the video, we've just recently did an update of that. And I think video is getting more and more important again in the search results. It was a way for a little while and we see it's coming back again. So that might be something that's adding up as well. But all in all, for us, we see that the premium one. So the big one is like 80 percent of all of our revenue. So that's the one we're focused on the most. Talk just for a second if you could about the news product. Who is that for? What does that do? That's to get you in Google News. So that's for all websites that present news that will get you in the news results of Google. Got it. We, you know, you're obviously trying to keep up with an environment where things are changing all the time. And, you know, Google is constantly introducing updates. How do you keep the Yoast product up to date with the changes that Google has underway? We have a close relationship with Google, especially with they have like this this dedicated team that works on WordPress. And we have like close relations with them. So sometimes we know that something's coming up because we're in in this this end we're in this endless conversations with them. But in the love cases, we don't because Google is I don't see Google as one company. They're so big that that they don't know everything. So if you talk to one person at Google, it could well be that something else is happening the next day and they don't know about it. So it's a lot of testing. And it means that sometimes Google has an algorithm update or changes something. We recently had a change in our schema, which means that we have to do like an overnight coding exhibition to make sure that it's corrected and we can ship it the next day. It happens sometimes. And if it's a big like algorithm change, you really can't do much about it until you understand the algorithm change. And then you need to have that in your product. So it's a lot of conversation and a lot of testing. And that keeps us up to speed, I hope. Yeah, we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to talk more with Marie-Jovane Dericht, CEO at Yoast about her growth targets, reinventing small business and the impact of the pandemic on recurring revenue. Stay with us. We're talking with Marach Vendoracht. She is CEO of Yoast, one of the world's most popular WordPress plugins. Marach, there are approximately 400 million small and mid-sized companies out there, which really do form the backbone of the global economy. They are the main source of job creation globally, accounting for 95 percent of firms and 60 to 70 percent of employment, which means Yoast has really only generated, penetrated a small fraction. I mean, if you look at your numbers at 11 million versus 400 million of all small and mid-sized businesses, that's less than half a percent of penetration. So talk to me this. What is the single biggest impediment to growing your market share? Well, we're only there for WordPress. And that's something. And WordPress is growing, which means that we're growing with it. But we also have a product for Type 3, and nobody knows it's in the United States, but it's really popular in Germany, so it's another CMS. And so we're thinking about and trying to get Yoast SEO and other platforms as well. But that doesn't scale as big as WordPress, because WordPress has 40 percent and every other CMS is much smaller. And it's has its different challenges. So but that's a way that we can we can grow further, although I think even within WordPress, we have some space to grow. There's a lot of challenges. And a lot of people that can build a website and a lot of them start with WordPress, which is good. But I think so the other CMSs would be a great way to grow as well. It's funny, you know, the world is full of small and mid-sized businesses. But if you went to a word camp or any sort of event where the WordPress community gathered, you would find this small group of people who understand digital marketing. And, you know, most, most small businesses don't understand digital marketing. You know, many small businesses are being wiped out by Amazon. Restaurants are losing profit share to the delivery apps. And savvy tech market tech startups who are good at digital marketing are dethroning yesterday's market leaders. So I mean, given the importance of being able to compete online, you know, why do you think more small businesses haven't gotten into the digital business game? It's it's hard. I think even like I'm not a tech savvy person. Well, I am now, but I'm not at heart. And I think it's hard. So I have a hard time setting up a WordPress website and I have all the information there. So it's pretty hard. And that's why people sometimes get into a different system, which I think isn't the best solution for them. So they go into a really close source system or they create a page on Facebook, which is then their business page. But then you don't own the data. Also, and creating an Instagram cram account can be a great way to market your stuff. But on a website, you you'll own your own stuff and you have everything on your own domain, which is and WordPress makes it the most easiest part to get that really get that thing going on, that it's yours. And you can do with it what you want. But that takes a little bit of training. And I think there are some CMSs out there that are a little bit more simple and people don't know what they're doing exactly because they never started anything yet. A lot of web agencies don't want to get into WordPress because WordPress also means that you can get up and get to another web agency and they can like get on with your website because it's really open and everybody can can can code on WordPress. But if you have a close source CMS that only you understand, people are pretty much locked in. And I think we see that happening a lot and that's not a good thing. So I really like the fact that people should own their own websites and own their own digital identity. Why do you take such an important stance on online education? Why the Academy? What are you hoping to achieve there? Well, so our mission is SEO for everyone. So so WordPress mission is democratizing publishing. So they want to or we want to make it possible for everyone to make their own website. But nobody cares if nobody finds your website. You don't want to have a website without an audience. So I think we're trying to help people get there, get the best ideas out there. So when we have a lot of free courses that will help people do the basics. And then if you buy our premium product, you'll get the courses as well. So it's done if you buy at your premium, you also get the host academy. And I think you need both. So you need our plugin to do to help you with all the technical stuff. And then you can we also help you do some of the content stuff. But then there are some things you just need to learn a little bit about. And we'll learn those things as well. As the pandemic drags on, how has that impacted monthly recurring revenue? So we had last year, we had a bit of a scare because we are we are bootstrapped. So we never had any any external money. And we never had any month in which we didn't grow, except for last year's March. That was when the pandemic really hit. And that got me scared because we never experienced that. But it quickly picked up again. So we were on what we expected to do. We see WordPress growing a little bit faster and our free plugin also a little bit faster, which makes sense because I think if people start online, they're not going to necessarily buy a premium product yet. So maybe we'll see some extra revenue coming in as this pandemic goes further, but I don't know. But we've done good. We I really can't complain. Let's we've done we've done good. Mapping site structure, contextual linking and site redirects with Maureen van der Roost, CEO of Yoast, when we return, stay with us. We're back with Maureen van der Roost, CEO at Yoast, the popular WordPress plugin for search optimizing websites. Maureen, tell me for a minute about site structure from the top down. I understand that it's foolish to use inconsistent tags at the blog post level. But at the navigation level at the top, how important is it that the menu options be specific to the business category in which you compete? So in the menu, so I think if I look at site structure, I always think of Google because Google uses your internal linking structure to index your site. So and you should always keep that in mind when you're structuring your site or when you're linking pages to each other because Google follows those links. That's just what Google does. It does it with external links, but it does it in exactly the same way and internal links. So the way you structure your website and internally link one page to another is also the way in which Google comes through your website. And if a page gets lots and lots of links, so that's the higher key, what you need, then Google will come there really often and Google will figure out well, probably this article is really important because it gets a lot of internal links. So I think that's the way you should look at site structure or internal linking, making sure that the pages you deem most important are also the ones that Google will visit the most while crawling through your site. So in terms of those of the main site menu, it's not that important to have the names of those pages or directories rather be specific to the business category in which you compete. I know when I look at your site, it's, you know, you do have SEO. Yeah, it is important. And also, it's really important for your user as well, of course, because it has to make sense. So in that regard, it's always important because Google wants what's best for your user. So, yes, that does matter. Because of it matters for the user. But I don't know how much Google reads into that. I'm not sure. But it does matter because because if it doesn't make sense, then your user will get lost and you never want a user to get lost. So I know you guys have recently sort of changed how you look at cornerstone content, right? Originally, you were looking at it more informational. And now you're you're open, open more to transactional content there. Talk us through sort of what you learned and why you sort of amended your your your view on that. Well, I think so. Cornerstone content in the in the old fashioned way, it was always informational. And I think that still really works because Google really loves those lengthy articles. But a landing page or page, a product page could also be our category page for that matter, could also be a cornerstone page because basically everything you really deem important, that could be a cornerstone. And in your approach in internal linking, you should make sure that those pages that you think are most important should get the most internal links pointing towards them because then you'll show Google that those are the most important ones. So I think I think it still really works to write these these really lengthy articles. But I also would put a lot of effort in internal linking of those landing pages, the pages you want the deal to work, the pages you want your customer to come in and to buy your product or to subscribe to your newsletter. And of course, that pages should also be really good. So you should put some effort in those as well. It should be the pages you're most proud of. That should be your cornerstones. What if you had product pages at a subdomain and you had a WordPress site at the top of a domain and you wanted to your cornerstone products to be the product pages at the subdomain and you were going to take the links from the top of the domain, the WordPress site over to the subdomain. Any reason why that wouldn't work? I can't follow you. Well, let me explain it for you. Let's say you have a Shopify store in a WordPress site. And you do all your content marketing at your WordPress site, but you use your Shopify store for e-commerce and you want some pages on the Shopify store to be cornerstone content. You could do that. Is there any special thing you need to do because I know there's no Yoast for Shopify because it's not open source. No, I think this is a good idea even to have a blog on WordPress and a shop on Shopify. What you should do is make sure that that page on Shopify has the same. It should be. So you should also make sure that what you what you're linking from resembles the pages you want to rank with. So you can have like articles that are about this product page that closely resemble that product page and then link from those pages towards the product page you want to rank with because that'll show Google. Oh, these pages or blog posts about this subject are all pointing towards one page. That that will probably be important. But of course, this only works if you link in context. So it should be about the same thing. So if you have like a shop about ballet shoes and you write three articles about ballet shoes, different types. I don't know how many ballet shoes there are, but different types of ballet shoes, you could you could then link them all towards that one important page and Google will notice that and see, oh, I'm coming here. Again, this will be an important page. There are two types of ballet shoes. There are point shoes as I know that, you know, which are the ones that you can balance on an extended foot. They're weight of your body. And then the other are the soft shoes. Yeah, I wasn't allowed to do the point shoes. Yeah, you know, it is a very athletic to be able to go on point and it requires extensive training. You know, in my book, which comes out actually next week, the digital pivot, I use the analogy of a of a dancer's pirouette turn to implementing a digital business because because before you go on point, right, you have to set up and find your balance, your stability, right? Then you have to push off, find your axis. You have to spin and you have to land gently. So those four steps look like one beautiful move. But if you break them down, they're four very distinct moves. And in my book, I talk about the first step being owned media, getting your website in order. The second step being social media, finding your community. The third step, the spin, the glorious position being earned media, digital PR and landing being paid media where you turn up the gas after you've found a product, market fit and you know you have a path to purchase that will convert visitors into transactions. Anyways, I'll send you a copy when it comes out. And what's because I did ballet when I was younger. OK, then you also have to do the hat spin because otherwise you'll get like dizzy. So you need to spot this. We call it in in in American, we call it the spot. You know, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. OK, let's talk. You wrote a piece about contextual linking last year. And I think that's an easy one to get wrong, particularly with Yoast, because when you're writing your post, you have all these recommendations in the right hand side of things you should link to. And then what's the actual because we do it in our internal linking analysis. We analyze all your texts. But every time I post one of the links, it goes away and then I get more links. Yeah, so I can live forever and I never know which ones I should link and what keyword I should use. And I don't know the one that that we suggest the most. So we always give you suggestions based on the topic of your text. So we analyze and we do it very sophisticated. I'm really proud of this part of our plugin. So we we look at your text that you're writing and we look at all the things you wrote before. And we we we identify prominent words, so the words you're using. And then on base of that, we'll suggest some some articles and if you indicated that some articles are really important, we'll make sure to put them higher on the list so that your cornerstones will appear higher. So actually, we we try to make it better for you to choose between them, but you should stop at one point. So maybe that's a good tip. You shouldn't go on and on and turn the linking. But it doesn't it doesn't tell you which words to link. No, it doesn't. No, because because that'll make it really artificial, I think. And so I would really love, but we're not there yet. I would love if we could do it like on a paragraph level, that we could see this paragraph is about this. You should link from this paragraph to this article. And we can't do that yet. Do you think are you thinking sort of down the road for passages? Yes. So explain to us what Google passages is and why you're explaining what what we're talking about. Well, what I'm talking about is if you if you write a paragraph, then. Then you within so it's not about the entire entire piece you're writing, but it could be that one piece of your article is about that. And you would want a specific link that it's about that to a link on your on your page and we're not able to do. I think we are able to do that yet, technically, but we haven't figured it quite out yet. But still, the internal linking suggestions should get you good suggestions about which articles you could link to. If we don't, we should make it better. So I have so I'm looking at a blog post here that I'm getting ready to publish. It's the latest episode of this show. It's an interview with the author of Blitz Scaling with Reid Hoffman. Chris Ye was a fabulous conversation and I see 10 different articles recommended to link to from this article. Should I link to all 10? No. How many should I link to? How long is your blog post? It's fairly short. Maybe 600 words. OK, I would choose three. OK, so so one link for 200 words. No, no, no, don't let me say that because we'll never get that. That will be in like this book. I would choose three, but I could do two, but no more than three because that it it should feel natural. And if you feel like no, but those two make sense and that third one doesn't really make sense, skip the third one because it should always if it feels like a trick, then it's probably is a trick and it should never be a trick. It should feel natural. It's what you'd feel like, oh, this could really be something that my audience would also want to read if they are reading this one. Got it. OK, I have to ask you an uncomfortable question. OK. OK, so I. Use the redirect tool in Yoast. Yeah. And my word press designer gets mad at me. Why? And she says it slows my site down and that I should be using the redirect tool that my host provides instead. Why is she saying that? I don't know. I'm not a technical person. Maybe she hates us, but is it only the redirect manager? She hates just the redirect. OK, then I'm going to talk with more technical people to get that maybe I don't know. So we were, I think we did a really big update. I know we did a really big update last year to get us much faster. So now we are much faster than we used to be. So we are saving our data in a different way. We built our own tables, our indexable tables, which also gets us. We are ready to go for a headless word persistent as well, because of that. So it could be that she's just she just remembers that we we are slow. But it also could be something with the redirect manager. And I don't know. But it shouldn't be it shouldn't be slowing down your side. Well, she's definitely not a Yoast hater. This is just one thing that she says is just the redirects. Yeah. Yeah. So because all SEO plugins are just as bloated as we are, because they all do the same thing. And we are our update last year to. Yeah, well, we just solve the whole lot with that. OK, final question. Yeah, what advice do you have for small business owners who are brand new to the WordPress community and they need to find a reliable developer to support their WordPress site? But if you are with WordPress, then even if you find an unreliable developer, you at least believe. So you've made a good decision to get with WordPress because that really gets you empowered to get to another company. If you are, if you if you feel like they're not taking good care of you. I don't know. I don't know what to start. So I would know if I was here in in in Villa, you could. Maybe you should get involved in the community because that's a good thing to meet a lot of people that will want to help you and who have like this local network because you want someone. Probably we want someone who lives relatively close, although we're now all used to working online. So how do you get involved with the community? How would you advise somebody to do that? You go to make dot work, make WordPress dot org and then and then get involved with and then you you you can get in our slack and you there are a lot of people to meet. You could also go to an online word camp now. So to see so look look it up at meetup.com. There are a lot of meetups all online and they're all locally. So that would be a great I'm giving a great advice now for these people. You just just find your local meetup and ask people there because they're people who are really generally excited about WordPress will come to such an event and they'll for sure have someone that could help you with your website. Maraah Vanderecht, CEO of Yoast. Thank you so much for joining us. Well, you're very welcome.