Yoast. A well-known name in WordPress because of their Yoast SEO for WordPress plugin. With over 9 million active installs, it’s one of the most-used plugins for WordPress. Yoast SEO doesn’t just help you improve the technical optimization of your website, but also helps you write better content. And besides the immensely popular free version of Yoast SEO, there’s also the paid Yoast SEO Premium. It adds features that will help you optimize your site faster. And, it gives you access to the lightning-fast support team at Yoast!

But Yoast is more than just SEO plugins. ‘SEO for everyone’ is brought to life in the Yoast Academy, Yoast’s online learning platform featuring a great many courses on SEO. Beginners can kickstart their career in SEO with the free ‘SEO for beginners’ course. Then, when ready for the deep dive, ​Yoast Academy​ has many in-depth courses waiting for you, like ​Technical SEO and ​SEO Copywriting​.

Do you want to know more about our gold sponsor Yoast Academy? We asked the people of Yoast Academy a few questions!

How did the company get started?

The founder of Yoast, Joost de Valk, had always been interested in computers. As soon as the internet became a thing, he started blogging about web development. This eventually lead to a job as an SEO consultant, an important milestone in his career.

Before 2006, Joost never had any interest in SEO, but that was about to change! Joost: “As I was able to write code and develop websites, I immediately understood all technical aspects of SEO.” This technical background combined with his ability to write appealing copy and to speak in public were the perfect ingredients to become an SEO expert.

Between 2006 and 2009 Joost went to a lot of conferences (first as an attendee, later as a speaker) and began writing about SEO on his blog. Joost spoke at conferences like SMX and gradually became a well-known SEO expert. In 2007, at SMX Stockholm, Joost tried to explain to Rand Fishkin how to pronounce his first name. That’s when Rand said: “O, that’s easy, just toast with a Y.” Yoast was born.

At around the same time, Joost began to work with WordPress. Joost created his first WordPress site in April 2006. “I was searching for a CMS, as that made it easier to use and maintain websites. I looked into a few and chose WordPress.”

In 2010, Joost decided to give up his job as an SEO consultant. He took a leap of faith and started a company. Back then, he was pretty sure he would never hire any employees. So he named his one-man-company after himself and his blog: Yoast.

Joost made money by doing site reviews and providing SEO consultancy at major companies like eBay. Besides that, he was developing his SEO plugins for WordPress. In October 2010, Joost finally made one plugin of all these little ones: WordPress SEO (now Yoast SEO) was born.

At the end of 2011, Joost met Michiel Heijmans, who had just started his own business as well. “The site reviews were going well,” Joost explains. “I couldn’t do them all. Michiel stepped in and did some site reviews.” That cooperation turned out to be another turning point in Joost’s career. They became close friends. Michiel’s knowledge of SEO and UX combined with his outstanding people skills was a perfect match with Joost’s ambition and drive. Joost decided to bring Michiel on board. In 2012, Michiel became the first Yoast employee.

In 2011, Yoast was Joost. At the end of 2012, Yoast consisted of Joost and another four employees. At the end of 2013, Yoast consisted of ten employees. And at the end of 2014, Yoast employed a total of fifteen people. In 2015, another nine people joined the company, which made a total of 25. At the end of 2016, there were about 40 people and at the end of 2017 more than 50 people worked in the Wijchen offices. Also, more than a dozen people are working in countries around the world.

On January 25th, 2019, Marieke took on the role as CEO and Joost, former CEO, became the new CPO at Yoast.

Today, Yoast employs over 100 employees worldwide, the far majority of them at Yoast HQ in Wijchen.

How diverse is your company? What do you do to improve it?

Diversity is a very important topic at Yoast. Not only are we trying our best to diversify our own company, but we’re also actively working on the diversity of speaker lineups at WordCamps and other tech events through the Yoast Diversity Fund. Speakers that are from a traditionally underrepresented group and who do not have enough means to travel to a tech event and can apply for funding by our diversity fund.

At WordCamp Nijmegen, Marieke van de Rakt (CEO) will be talking about diversity, feminism, and prejudices.

How does WordPress benefit your company?

Yoast lives and breathes WordPress. It’s the platform most of our customers use, the platform we’re most invested in and the platform that we think plays a significant role in the future of the web.

And when contributing to WordPress, our developers have their code reviewed by some of the very best programmers on the planet. They then share those learnings with their colleagues, thus improving the overall quality of all Yoast products in the process.

In short, Yoast wouldn’t be where it is today without WordPress.

What’s your favorite thing you are working on right now inside your company?

We are currently doing a product focus project. The aim of this project is to decide what features to add and to improve in Yoast SEO. The awesome thing about this project is that more than ever, we’re doing so based on customer research, user testing, and the expertise of different departments within the company. We’re in the middle of this project now, and it’s been great fun already. A lot of different people are involved and we’ve collected so many amazing ideas already. Now we’re prioritizing and estimating the scope of those ideas, so we can start improving our plugin even more.

How do you see your company evolving in the next 5 years?

That’s a hard question! We’re working on all kinds of cool stuff. We hope to make our product more actionable. We hope our user base will grow (inside as well as outside of WordPress). We would love to contribute even more to open source and the open web. We are passionate about making the web better for everyone.