Welcome back to Osom to Know! In this episode we discuss about AI’s role in speeding development of products and servicese. Our guest is Joost de Valk.Joost and his team have recently launched a new product, and we are taking this as an example to discuss the cold start problem: How do you start marketing a new product category and, building from zero to creating that category? Joost shares some insights from a time when he was launching Yoast. With the latest rise of AI-generated content, we discuss how to strike a balance between automation and emphasising the enduring value of creativity and expertise.

Joost de Valk [00:00:00]:
It’s a lot harder than it was. So let’s go back to when I launched Yoast SEO. This was now fifteen years ago, almost when I started, started coding on that. When I started doing SEO and I’m, as you can see, I’m old, we could still look at page rank and we could buy links and we could say, Hey, we’ve gotten this to a PR eight. The existential angst that, that an entrepreneur needs to some extent, I guess, is lacking.

Maciej Nowak [00:00:33]:
Hello, everyone. My name is Maciej Nowak, and welcome to the Osom to Know podcast where we discuss all things related to building great websites. My today’s guest is Joost de Valk, maybe best known for building his famous Yoast SEO plugin. Joost and his team have recently launched a new product, and we are taking this as an example to discuss the cold start problem. Meaning, how do you start marketing a new product category and, building from zero to creating that category? We also talk about SEO and how Yoast looks at the current SEO game from his over fifteen years of, experience. We also touch on on building versus selling software products. If you don’t want to miss new episodes and keep learning more about building great websites, please subscribe to our newsletter at osomstudio.com/newsletter.

Maciej Nowak [00:01:23]:
And this is 0s0mstudio.com/newsletter. If you are watching this on YouTube, give us a thumb and subscribe to our channel. This means a lot to us. Without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Joost de Valk.

Lector [00:01:44]:
Hey, everyone. It’s good to have you here. We’re glad you decided to tune in for this episode of the Osom to Know podcast.

Maciej Nowak [00:01:52]:
Hello, Joost. How are you?

Joost de Valk [00:01:55]:
I’m very good. Hi. Thanks for having me.

Maciej Nowak [00:01:58]:
Yeah. My pleasure. My pleasure. Let’s get straight to the, you know, the questions, and I have a very big question for you. Have you ever been a person of non grata before?

Joost de Valk [00:02:13]:
Well, maybe in high school a bit. But Oh. That that no. That’s I don’t even think that’s true. I do think some of my teacher maybe disliked me. But, no. I don’t think I’ve ever been in this weird position before where you want to actually change a project for the better for everyone, and someone responds like this.

Maciej Nowak [00:02:42]:
Mhmm. That that’s I think that is putting you on a, you know, in a spotlight. Right? Like, everyone is looking now at you because of being, you know, put in this position.

Joost de Valk [00:02:55]:
Yeah. I guess so. And, you know, the thing is, I would like for all of us to get along and do and work together in a way that that actually moves us all forward. And this makes that harder. Not impossible, I still think, but harder.

Maciej Nowak [00:03:19]:
Yeah. But not a constructive approach, would you say?

Joost de Valk [00:03:25]:
It would not be the approach I would take.

Maciej Nowak [00:03:27]:
Alright. That’s very nicely. Let’s maybe, like, move on to other nice topics. I don’t want you, you know, to celebrate that.

Joost de Valk [00:03:43]:
No, no… I’d think the negativity isn’t worth, a whole lot. I do think that, we all still need to get together and move forward in a in a way that that works for everyone. And I still want to do that. And I want to include everyone in that, and everyone I’ve been I’m talking to and working with wants the same thing. I think we all want to get rid of that negativity. And also get rid of the fear that is very palpable in a lot of people, because I can say a lot of these things because I don’t have all that much to lose in some ways. So I hope that we’ll be able to to get away from that and get to more positive things soon.

Maciej Nowak [00:04:33]:
But okay. But do you think this is possible? Like, because there is

Joost de Valk [00:04:40]:
Yeah. I said I I still I still think that’s possible. If I didn’t think that was possible, I probably wouldn’t have started Well, I wouldn’t have gone into this. I went into this quite wide, eyes wide open knowing that this was one of the risks of what could happen. But but I still think that it’s very possible to to change this.

Maciej Nowak [00:05:03]:
Okay. Alright. I’m super curious. I and I think, like, the whole community is super curious how this will evolve because the the longer the situation with the with that conflict, like, not, like, not even not, like, with you, but the whole, you know, problem with with WordPress was, like, boiling. Now it blew up. And the longer that situation is not resolved, the more we learn about stuff that happened, you know, in the past or is happening now or

Joost de Valk [00:05:38]:
or Yeah. It’s none of it helps anybody. I don’t think it’s good for our market. I think all of us want stability and and then a a stable platform that we can all build on. And I also think all of us want for WordPress to move forward. So, yeah. I, I still think that’s possible. It is not something that you do in a day.

Joost de Valk [00:06:07]:
And, it is made a bit harder by, the fact that people are afraid to speak up publicly. Means that you have to do a bit more in back chambers, which is not really a position that I prefer in many ways. I would like to do this more in public, but it’s it’s a lot harder because people don’t dare to speak up.

Maciej Nowak [00:06:33]:
Mhmm. Yep. And I think rightly so. If they are very tightly coupled with, with the organization technology and, you know, their livelihood depends on attending court comes, for example. Right? So it’s like there is, you know, it’s a position of power where, you can do whatever you want with the contributing members for okay. Not everything you want, but you can make their life extremely more hard, for example.

Joost de Valk [00:07:01]:
Yes. Yeah. There you can.

Maciej Nowak [00:07:04]:
Alright. Now we can move to nicer things. So, I think you’ve been very busy recently. Like, I think I see you’ve been busy recently building, new product. So you can still sit still. There is a media capital, but then there is, also your, a new product you are building, for WordPress. Can you tell us a little bit more about the product? You know, probably you’ve been asked about this, but, you know, in a nutshell, what what is it, and why have you decided to build it?

Joost de Valk [00:07:39]:
So, the product is called Progress Planner. The the idea of the product is that it’s hard to maintain a website well and that a lot of people forget both the basic setup tasks and the, well, the menial tasks of maintenance. So we we needed to figure out a way to make that a bit more fun and also a way to keep you working on your website. Because what we see happen a lot is that people build a website and then spend a lot of time making it better in the beginning. And as they do that, they they start to, well, work less and less on their site and their site starts to deteriorate. And then four years in, they actually need to build a new website because it’s also out of date. And we want to sort of prevent that and, and help people do better. So do better in terms of keeping their plugins up to date and things like that, but also do better in in terms of keeping their about page and their contact page up to date and giving them reminders to do that.

Joost de Valk [00:08:57]:
And well, this it’s funny if you’ve if you’ve been in this space as long as I have, then you you can come up with long lists of things that people forget and do wrong in their WordPress site. And that we if we can tell them and figure out a way to to give them nudges to do those things better, everyone has a better website. So that’s what Progres Planner is about. It’s very much a it takes a lot of learnings from Duolingo in terms of gamifying how you, how you do your things and and and gives you badges to to keep stay active on your site. And, and, well, with that, we try to help you build a better website in in many ways, which includes SEO, but also a lot of other things. Like, how do you have you removed all this sample content that WordPress comes with, for instance? If you look on Google and you you search for the slug of the sample page that ships with WordPress, you’ll see that loads and loads and loads of companies still have that sample page on their website. And there’s a whole lot of things like that that would be better if they were removed and fixed.

Maciej Nowak [00:10:13]:
Mhmm. And I just wanted to comment on the fact that it looks like a sparring part maybe not a sparring partner, but like a personal trainer who keeps you motivated or tells you what to do to stay in shape, not get better shape maybe, you know, not as much. But

Joost de Valk [00:10:32]:
Well, let’s try to even get you in better shape. I’ve kinda like that analogy. I train with a personal trainer three times a week and I have for the last nine years, so I know how this how important that can be. So, yeah. No. I do like that analogy. And it is a bit like that where it tries to be that buddy that you help. And and that helps you well, stay on touch of things because let’s be honest, most people that, have a website are not like you or me.

Joost de Valk [00:11:14]:
They don’t want to maintain a website. The website is a thing that they need to do on the side of of all their other stuff. So a bit of reminding every every week that they need maybe should you do one or two small things on their site to keep it going well, is probably very welcome.

Maciej Nowak [00:11:34]:
Mhmm. And since this is a new product, how do you find the, you know, managing the cold start problem? Because, you know, you have to launch a new product. How do we go about this?

Joost de Valk [00:11:48]:
It’s hard. And it’s harder than it’s a lot harder than it was. So let’s go back to when I launched Yoast SEO. This was now fifteen years ago almost when I started, started coding on that. At that point in time, there were a lot less plugins. The market was a lot less crowded, but also the the types of users were a lot more users that looked like me, that that were relatively technical, could install a plugin themselves, figure out what to do, etcetera. So Yoast SEO was built very much with people like that in mind. And, over time, we slowly progressed that, as my wife, Marika, became into the company more.

Joost de Valk [00:12:43]:
And we started building more for what I’d now call average users. And now you start a new WordPress site and you’re thrown into a thing, and the and it’s actually hard. There’s 50,000 plug ins out there. And, I mean, like, 12,000 of them are maintained, but you can’t even really diagnose very well without knowing what you’re doing, which ones are well maintained and which ones are not. So standing out in that market is a lot harder. And with Yoast SEO, we built an SEO plugin, which people already had an idea of what that concept was. They were searching for something that would help them with SEO and they knew that. And with progress planner, we’ve got one more problem, which is that people don’t even know that they need this solution.

Joost de Valk [00:13:43]:
So the cold start becomes a bit harder. So you need to talk about the topics that they run into and then work from there to what your solution to that is, which is well, it’s a bit more work. It takes a bit more time. Luckily, we have that time, and and we can afford to not make much money on this for a while, and still build it with the team, which I’m really enjoying.

Maciej Nowak [00:14:10]:
Mhmm. Yeah. That’s super interesting because, this product being new and the category is not very you know, it’s a new category, I would say. Right? So not only you have to launch a product, but also create the category and educate the consumers about the category. And, that’s a tough, I would say, category because the gains from the plugins, the the this solution are not obvious. It’s like your website will be less bad if you do this. Right? So it would won’t get it won’t it won’t deteriorate. You will be in shape.

Maciej Nowak [00:14:47]:
Would you say, I’m somehow right or I to tell you wrong? No.

Joost de Valk [00:14:52]:
I think you’re right. I think it’s it is a bit of a harder marketing story. At the same time, I think it’s very worth it. So, one of my colleagues at Progress Planner, Jono Alderson, he he was with us at Yoast before too. We’ve been working together for a long time. He just did this awesome presentation a while ago in which he was talking about making your website 1% better every day and what the compound effects of what, that would be. And I don’t think many people realize what the effect is of just doing a little every day.

Maciej Nowak [00:15:29]:
It’s just On everything. Right?

Joost de Valk [00:15:32]:
On everything. And and it really improves everything, which is how Duolingo helps you learn a language. It’s how we try to help you make your website slightly better. And the funny thing is that I it’s not as popular a story, I think, as installing an SEO plug in, and I’m thinking magically you will start ranking better, which is not how it works. But for some reason, a lot of people thought that was how it works. And I think that what we’re trying to do now is going beyond that and actually getting people to put in the work on their website that they need to put in to have a good website. Site. Especially in an age of AI where creating content is two seconds work for most things, and none of that stands out anymore.

Joost de Valk [00:16:22]:
So you you have to stand out by actually providing the right information at the right time, being genuinely helpful in answering the questions that your that your, visitors have. And that also means having a website that’s not breaking and not annoying. It’s we recently ran our first challenge, which we run for our pro customers where we did a broken links challenge. And on all of our own websites, literally, our the my website, joest.blog, Jono’s website, Marika’s website, we had broken links. And we think we’re good at this stuff. Right? We we’re supposed to be SEO experts, but we didn’t have one or two broken links. We all had in the dozens. Because these things happen and because nobody cleans them up.

Joost de Valk [00:17:15]:
But cleaning them up actually does make things better. So I think that that is what what we’re trying to tell everyone. Like, okay, there’s there’s a lot of these things and we’ll guide you through them year by year on, like, which things on your website can you fix and should you fix. Just to have a better website overall all the time. And yes, that’s a bit of work. I would I used to say this about SEO. SEO stands not for search engine optimization, which is a weird term anyway if you think about it because you’re not optimizing the search engine, but for seriously effortful optimization. It’s a lot of work to do this well.

Joost de Valk [00:18:01]:
It’s a lot of work to build a good website. But if you’re not willing to put in that work, then why is the website there in the first place?

Maciej Nowak [00:18:09]:
Very good question. Do we need websites these days when you have so many, like, the individuals can become a brand and they can distribute their products?

Joost de Valk [00:18:25]:
I think you still need a website, but you need to think about why it exists and and what it is about. So if you are a company, then your website should be the best source of to learn about your company. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t have to do it anywhere else. Like, if you’re if you’re a a bakery, then, yes, I want you to have a website and and give me the the basic things that I want to know about your bakery from your website. But I also want you to update Google Maps and make sure that your opening hours are correct. Because otherwise, I’ll be in front of a locked door, and I hate I hate doing that. So yes. You need a website.

Joost de Valk [00:19:16]:
I don’t necessarily think that you need to put out a thousand pieces of content a year that are not good. I would much rather have you write a couple of good pieces of content that actually help people or that actually answer questions that people have. And I one of the things that we also tell you is to go through your old posts and update them, which is like, things that on a new site maybe don’t make the the most sense. But on many other types of sites, it makes sense to go back into your how to articles and figure out if they’re still correct. Because, otherwise, someone ends up in your how to article from 2015 and goes, like, this is not correct anymore, and goes back to the search results.

Maciej Nowak [00:20:10]:
For tools, especially, like, if you have a if you are SaaS and the description isn’t accurate because the interface has changed. Like, it’s a particular use case where you have a SaaS website with a lot of how tos, right, or or guides how to do something, and then the interface differ from your experience. You’re stuck because you were looking for help, so you don’t know how to do this. And then you have the added complication of matching the UI from the guide to to what you’re using.

Joost de Valk [00:20:45]:
Yeah. And it’s I think it goes for SaaS tools, but for pretty much anyone who changes their software or or or their things that they have to update their sites. As a developer myself, one of the things that annoys me most is if people have changed their interfaces and their code and not actually changed their developer documentation. There’s a whole lot of these things that happen. People change opening hours every day. Like, literally every store in the world changes opening hours. And almost every store in the world forgets to update their opening hours in Google Maps in the first week. And then someone complains about it, and they go and do it.

Joost de Valk [00:21:23]:
I think that goes for a lot of these things. The amount of times that I filled out a contact form for the contact form not to work or, or the contact details on a page not to be correct. These are pretty simple things to keep correct and to keep working, but you have to be reminded of them. You have to actually check them every once in a while because stuff breaks over time. I think that’s broken links are probably the best example of that. We want links to be permalinks and to be existing on the web forever, but they’re not. On Marika’s side, the thing that actually broke, she has, like, seven scientific publications. And the link the the links that broke were the links to her scientific publications.

Joost de Valk [00:22:10]:
And I it drives me absolutely mad, but even those universities just changed the links.

Maciej Nowak [00:22:17]:
You had to find out what are the new links and update them.

Joost de Valk [00:22:21]:
Yes. And it’s I mean, they’re still all online. It’s not like it’s impossible to find them. But why would people who visit your website take that trouble? So, yeah, I think I think you have to be realistic and say, Okay, if we want that sort of thing to, if we want people to read that and find that interesting and want to respond to that or do things based on that, then it has to be of good quality.

Maciej Nowak [00:22:54]:
Mhmm. Right. And can we get back a little bit to starting that, that product? It’s so easy now to build something. And then there like, Twitter’s literally littered with people building something in three, four, five hours. Obviously, how it works is different story, but the you can do something with a couple of prompts. The the promise is there. Now do you think this is the case that you can build something so easily, but said so much harder than before?

Joost de Valk [00:23:25]:
Yes. Okay. Yeah.

Maciej Nowak [00:23:27]:
And I

Joost de Valk [00:23:27]:
I and I do think that the two are related. Developing has become so much faster. I, literally, this morning before we started recording, I had an an idea last night about how to refactor some of the code in our plug in. It took me thirty minutes to redo an entire refactor in our plug in to fix all sorts of, of issues because doing that in cursor just is so much easier than than it used to be in the past. And I’m literally literally tabbing through changes and and just doing the first one. And then it’s, it understands what I want to do. And it, and it go, and it’s like tap, tap, tap, tap, and it, and it just does it everywhere. And building new stuff is, is super easy too.

Joost de Valk [00:24:24]:
So your product actually has to provide value. And I think that, a part of that value in the past used to be in automating things. And now it has to be automating things and providing knowledge on top of that or actually adding value on top of the automation, which is a bit harder. So you need to actually be capable of doing something to, and doing it well to make money on the web. I think it does make the whole maker industry online a bit harder for a lot of people because you have to dive deep on a topic and know automation, and then you can still provide real value. And I also think that you can still provide still make real good money from it. But just looking for a niche that you don’t know anything about, and then starting to build will probably not result in the best results anymore because someone in that niche who is not a developer, but is smart and can use a bit of AI can, can develop and they have all the knowledge that they need to, to actually do something meaningful.

Maciej Nowak [00:25:37]:
You you mentioned that the the the expertise is so much more value valuable because you can catch up with decoding so much easier. I’m thinking about the distribution. There’s that saying that, you know, a good product will, prevail, but I am not so sure if not the the the best distribution. That’s why people go to TikTok, for example, to to launch their, you know, apps and so on Because there is there are there are hundreds of similar apps, but you win with the distribution. But, you know, that’s a question. I’m that’s my hand.

Joost de Valk [00:26:13]:
Yeah. No. I agree. There was this thought in the early days of the web, if you build it, they will come. Because, well, the web was slightly different. It was not as crowded, and peep and it was relatively easy to get picked up as something that was new and meaningful. Now when you build something, there’s very often like 15 competitors immediately for what you’re doing. So you have to actually stand out by doing it better.

Joost de Valk [00:26:51]:
And I think it was always about distribution and about reach. A lot of it was about talking to more people than just your inner circle. So as much as I love WordCamps, for instance, I think we got more traction with Yoast from the fact that I was speaking on SEO conferences.

Maciej Nowak [00:27:21]:
Where are your customers? Because these these people will decide on the spend on given product that will help them their work.

Joost de Valk [00:27:29]:
Exactly. And and it and it, I was actually podcasting way back in the day. I started, the WordPress podcast on Webmaster Radio in 02/2009. And, that was on Webmaster Radio was an SEO and digital marketing podcasting network. And people heard about WordPress for the first time on the on the podcast as well and started using it because it was good for SEO. And I think that, a lot of what we do in the WordPress world in the last years has been watching internally. And we need to look out a bit more and I need to figure out, like, hey, when we’re building products, who are we talking to and how are we reaching those people? Because I do think that the WordPress community that we see as the WordPress community, the people attending the word word camps is only a tiny sliver of of the actual WordPress community. And, you reach those other people in different ways.

Joost de Valk [00:28:40]:
And that’s become harder simply because there are, many more products competing for the same attention.

Maciej Nowak [00:28:48]:
Mhmm. That that’s interesting what you said about broader community that is not present on the word comes. But would you say these are still developers, you know, agency people, and and so on who are just not present on on that conference? Or would you say the group is much broader because you would include, for example, marketing people who are the consumers, who are using WordPress, who build their businesses also business websites on top of WordPress. And by definition, this way, end users. Right? So and and they But

Joost de Valk [00:29:28]:
I think all of them go to WordCamps. So marketers, end users, etcetera. It’s just that the people that go to WordCamps are a tiny percentage of the overall number of users of WordPress, which is probably always gonna be true. Right? There’s no chance in hell that we’re gonna have a 250,000 people WordCamp Europe at any point in time. It’s just impossible. Dysynx don’t work like that, which is so it’s fine. It’s just that you have to realize that the tiny community that we see there, which isn’t tiny when it’s thousands of people, it’s still it’s still a big group of people, but it’s still a relatively small group of people compared to the overall usage of WordPress. And a lot of those people we’re not reaching through talking at a WordCamp.

Joost de Valk [00:30:19]:
We would probably reach them better to when we speak somewhere else. So in the past, for for us, that used to be affiliate and SEO conferences where we reached a lot of the people that started installing Yoast SEO in the beginning. And now, well, we we have to think about that, that again and have to look at a new avenues of of doing that. So one of the things that, some companies have done quite successfully is is just talking to hosts. They get the new, customers in. They can actually promote new things to their customers and, if it’s beneficial to them. So it’s definitely something that we are, talking about. And there so you have to look at, like, where is the where does the power actually lie? Where does the breach actually exist? Where do where can you find those people? And in the past, that also used to be Twitter, for instance.

Joost de Valk [00:31:15]:
But that’s also a lot harder because a) we’ve spread out across TikTok, Twitter, Blue Sky, and all these different networks. So there’s no longer one or two networks where you can reach everyone easily. And also there, it’s a lot more crowded. So there’s a lot more

Maciej Nowak [00:31:32]:
You you haven’t mentioned LinkedIn. And is by omission or by, you know, coincidence? Or

Joost de Valk [00:31:39]:
No. I actually do use LinkedIn a lot. I probably use LinkedIn more than the other networks. I hate it when people use LinkedIn to promote their product because I do think that’s more of a business relations network than it is. But, yeah, I do think that LinkedIn is very useful. And I but I also think that this is exactly the problem. Right? So LinkedIn x or Twitter or whatever you wanna call it. Blue Sky, TikTok, Facebook for if you’re if you’re targeting older people.

Joost de Valk [00:32:18]:
Like, all these things still exist, but they are harder to get your message across on.

Maciej Nowak [00:32:29]:
So I’m also curious about what you mentioned that you have time. You you have fun building. Don’t get this question, like, you know, aggressive or intrusive, but could it be like, a count a counterproductive approach maybe where you think you have time and and and fun and not push for sales? I don’t know what’s your strategy, but if you maybe drag or not push certain.

Joost de Valk [00:33:05]:
It is definitely a problem. Yeah. I will say that if you’re, if you need to make money faster, sorry, you’ll probably get to, to some better results. So there’s the existential angst that, that an entrepreneur needs to some extent, I guess, is lacking. I do think that it took us a while, but we are now at the point where we are replacing that existential angst with actual, like, being really, really happy about what we’re building and and being really enthusiastic about the product. But the funny thing is, to a large degree, making money has not been my driving motivation for quite some time anymore. I just want to build a better web, and and I think that we can help in that. And that’s really that sounds really big.

Joost de Valk [00:34:22]:
Right? But it is like when when you’ve built software like Yoast, where, like, six to 8% of the web is using your software, you’re you actually start having a real impact on on how the web works and what you can do. And I think we can do that again. And I think we we can once again, help people build better websites. And whether we make tons of money in that process is not really the most interesting thing to me.

Maciej Nowak [00:34:54]:
Mhmm. Okay. And, you mentioned I also want to touch up on the SEO part. I can’t just not do this. And I’m curious, you know, with your perspective, you know, starting so early in the SEO, you know, any kind of SEO work. With this, I’m leading to the space for SEOs changing as well as fast, probably, as the tools are and the technology is changing. So I’m curious to know what what’s your take looking on on the SEO from that helicopter view, from that, you know, with that huge perspective you have?

Joost de Valk [00:35:37]:
Because of AI, there is a ton of content coming on the web that looks relatively okay even when it’s not real real substance to it. It looks like you you’ve really spent a long time writing something. I think that reasonably good content is no longer good enough. You actually have to stand out. And at the same time, for a lot of websites, it really means you just have to provide the value, the value that people are looking for. So if you are a architect, then what you should be talking about is who you are, what makes you different, what makes you different in your projects, and and and show some of your projects. Because that’s what people want to know when they when they’re looking for an architect. And for an SEO, that is weird.

Joost de Valk [00:36:42]:
Right? Because we used to have, like, all these content strategies where we’d create tons of content to to get people to to rank higher. That’s no longer a way within which to differentiate yourself because everybody can do that. And in a lot of topics, I think we can just say to some degree that the web is full. Like, there’s enough bullshit content about a whole lot of topics. So what you need to figure out is what makes you different and what makes it so that search engines and AI, tools will actually talk about you. And that is, funnily enough, back to old school marketing. What makes you stand out? Why are you important? Branding becomes so much more important again. And it’s like you are on the market and there’s you’re, you’re walking around on a very large market, which stalls do you go to? What makes that difference? It’s no different with this.

Joost de Valk [00:38:01]:
And there’s no longer any any cheap hacks, I think. I I think that a lot of people that learned SEO in the last decade learned SEO by looking at a whole lot of tools like the ahrefs, the Mozes, etcetera of this world. And while those tools can be helpful in some ways, they won’t help you provide an actual marketing strategy. And, funnily enough, I have not changed my SEO tactics all that much over the last fifteen years because I’ve always been very holistic about about these things. I think that good SEO should be an integration of good content, good branding, good PR, and these things should work together. And I think that becomes even more important now, because if you want to show up in an AI overview, then people will need to know about your brand. You’ll need to actually have people remember you. So all of it will basically comes back to the same thing.

Joost de Valk [00:39:20]:
At the same time, building a technically solid website is cheaper and easier than it ever was, but most people still feel at it. So I do still think that it that it takes that that part of building a website is actually important. And that for a lot of things, especially if you have larger websites, technical SEO is actually still a very important expertise because you have to talk to people about why is this not getting crawled? Why, why do you have these errors? What is happening here? You have to be able to diagnose that. And funnily enough, I don’t think a whole lot of the people that have done SEO in the last decade actually know a lot know how to fix a lot of these issues.

Maciej Nowak [00:40:16]:
Mhmm. How about stuff that is like, you know, backlinks, domain author authority, things like this. Where where is it is it still relevant to, I don’t know, gather rulings, you know, pointing to your website? Or it’s like, you know, 10% or 5%?

Joost de Valk [00:40:43]:
I don’t think you can talk about it in that sense. It depends very much on who you are, what you do. There’s no one size fits all rule. I think that backlinks are if you do it well, backlinks are the result of people talking about you, which is very needed. So I’m not gonna say that you don’t need links. Of course, you need links. But you shouldn’t be chasing the links. You should be chasing the fact that people are talking about you.

Joost de Valk [00:41:14]:
And, and linking to you. And whether they actually link to you or just talk about your brand is becoming less and less relevant, I think. I think that the bigger search engines and all AIs are smart enough to combine these things just if they recognize your name and the context, and and they will know what what is being talked about most of the time. That doesn’t mean that you have to have a brand that is recognizable as such. But so I I think that domain authority and all those terms don’t really mean anything. And at the same time, they are a quantification of something that is very real, which is people talking about your brand. People searching for your brand. People linking to you because they thought you were cool or because they thought you were awful.

Joost de Valk [00:42:22]:
And I think that’s always been important. And in the past, we when I started doing SEO and I’m as you can see, I’m old. We could still look at page rank and we could buy links and we could say, Hey, we’ve gotten this to a PR eight. And even then, you could rank for a whole lot of things. But if the traffic wasn’t relevant to you, then it didn’t help you much.

Maciej Nowak [00:42:56]:
Mhmm.

Maciej Nowak [00:42:58]:
That’s super interesting because let’s assume you are building a new website. You you you are starting a business. You you you created your, website for your product, and it has, you know, a new domain. It has zero reputation. Again, a cold start problem not for a product, but for a website. What can you do about this? You you start from zero. Right?

Joost de Valk [00:43:23]:
Well, do so. Yeah. You start from zero. So you you say you do something meaningful. You build a website. You do, you come up with, with the content that needs to be on there because you probably built that website for something. You built it because you have something to say or something to sell or and then you do that bit really well. And you do that not just on your own website, but on all these outposts out there.

Joost de Valk [00:43:51]:
And you talk about it and you link people back to to what you’re doing. You provide them with real value. It’s no different than it has been to launch a product in the last two hundred years in many ways. It’s just now the market is a bit more crowded. And so in the beginning, there were 50 stalls and now there are 20,000. And you have to stand out. And so you have to be creative about your marketing. And I think that is in many ways, which you have to be in in many of the things that we do now that AI helps us do all the menial tasks very quickly.

Joost de Valk [00:44:31]:
The creativity was becoming really important again.

Maciej Nowak [00:44:35]:
Mhmm. I saw a man, a couple of days ago. There is a old grandfather with his grandson, and he’s on on sitting on his lap, and and the grandfather is saying, oh, but no, Johnny. Don’t use these apps. Take these apps that, your grandfather coded with real hands, not the stuff you have now, all code generated and stuff. Like, I can’t convey the how funny was it for me, but it was spot on that some stuff is being replaced by, you know, some jobs or tasks, meal tasks, but it’s being replaced, like, by AI. And this, at one hand, you know, eradicates a lot of different jobs. At the other hand, provides space for, you know, faster speed.

Maciej Nowak [00:45:33]:
You know? It allows you to run at faster pace. So a lot of more stuff is going to to happen. But with that, I wanted to refer to the to to what you said that the creativity is again becoming key. We I think we had that short period where everyone was just blinded by what can be done with, with ChatGTP, I think, which would write you a song. And then everyone was, me included, so hyped about that funny song about WordPress or SEO or whatever you could you still can do whatever you want, but people tend to learn the style of AI, and the creativity is not so present, I would say. And then it’s back to what you can do different than what will get recycled through AI tool.

Joost de Valk [00:46:28]:
Yeah. I agree. I think that standing out in this thing is harder. We also start getting better to a degree about recognizing AI images. And not all of them, but there’s definitely styles that you recognize as, hey, this has been built by AI, which also means that it’s not that good yet. What is very fundamental about how AI works is that it might put something that it has found in one, part of the web and apply it to something else. So there might be some creativity in how it applies things. It is seen somewhere on something new.

Joost de Valk [00:47:20]:
But actual creativity is not something that we can expect from AI yet. And, I think that that is that people underestimate what that means. That that actually being able to think about something coherently and and and over a longer period of time is exactly what gives us an advantage and what allows us to do a lot of things. And at the same time, AI can make us much more productive. So I love it, but I don’t think it should be used for everything. And in general, using it for writing leads to pretty bad results for a lot of different things. And, yeah, I just feel that that is not really changing. It’s not AI is not becoming more creative in the new things I’ve seen.

Joost de Valk [00:48:27]:
It’s getting better at answering questions and thinking about things that have already been done. But I think that for real marketing, you still need to have creative thoughts and a creative thought process.

Maciej Nowak [00:48:46]:
I’m curious. What do you expect from, let’s say, near future in terms of, like, may maybe think of it as predictions. You know? What can you expect, to get from, you know, all of that race? Do you have any thoughts, predictions, expectations towards, you know, short period of time and maybe a little bit longer?

Joost de Valk [00:49:10]:
I do think AI will get much better. I think in the relatively short term, we’ll probably run into a limit of how much power they can get into a data center. So to to calculate larger models, until we figure out how to split the the the whole calculation of a new model across different data centers. So I think they they will get better. I will probably also hit a wall at some point and then and might and then it might suddenly take like two or three years to get across that wall again because we we need to do something something else. This this will progress. It will progress fast because I think everyone realizes the power in this. And it will probably start doing more and more of those menial tasks that we think about.

Joost de Valk [00:50:18]:
And over time it might even take more tasks than we thought. I think one of the things that has come out of this, which I think is hilarious to a degree, is that we, carpenters and, electricians and all those people, they are not being replaced by AI anytime soon. One of the biggest limits on how fast we can grow AI is how fast we can build data centers, and it’s not because we can’t we can’t get the chips. The biggest problem is that we can’t get the people to actually put up the data centers themselves.

Maciej Nowak [00:50:57]:
I thought that they were the chips.

Joost de Valk [00:50:59]:
No. The chips are are part of a problem, but the bigger problem is actually building the data centers and getting the power into those data centers. And I just look at that and go like, okay, it’s in a way, it’s funny. And I think developers were like the most sought after type of person for a while and that will decrease a bit because we will be able to do more work with less developers. And we’ll start to value other work more again until we figure out a way to automate more of that too. I think that is it’s basically a constant change. I do think that this is very diff very different yet very similar to an industrial revolution, where suddenly how we do things changed a lot.

Maciej Nowak [00:52:02]:
Mhmm.

Joost de Valk [00:52:02]:
And it makes sense to to study that history and and look at what happened then and and, well, it led to quite a bit of unrest, but it also led to much higher prosperity. And I think this will do that too.

Maciej Nowak [00:52:17]:
Mhmm. And building on top of that, you know, that, the fact that you can build so much easier, do you think that we might be facing a future and and this is not in a bad context, but, do you think that we might be facing a future where people will craft their own applications for their particular use cases the same way as people are cooking food, you know, for the dinner right now? Your grandmother has this style of, you know, soup. You might have different style of the soup, but, you know, it’s the soup, but it tastes different. It is the same soup. Instead of buying a frozen pizza, for example, mass produced, like, buying a SaaS service that is mass, for a mass customer fit for all?

Joost de Valk [00:53:06]:
Yeah. I think so. I think we we already see this to some degree. It’s much easier again to build the simple tools you need to do specific things in your company yourself. And now that’s just restricted to the developers and the people that, that know how to do that quickly. But I think that will become more widespread. And I do also think that open source has a very important role to play in that because it actually does allow for more of that faster. So so, yes, I do think that people will will start making things their own more and and composability or how however you want to call that is is something that that people will look for.

Joost de Valk [00:54:03]:
Like, can I mold this to my specific needs well? And I think that’s fine. I mean, it means that you can you get to match your software to how you work a bit better instead of have forcing, having software force you into a certain way of working.

Maciej Nowak [00:54:27]:
Yes. Thank you very much for, jumping to to our podcast together. Thank you very much for all of the the answers, and, it was pleasure to to have a chat with you.

Joost de Valk [00:54:40]:
Likewise. And, I hope to do it again at some point and then and then find us ourselves in better connections between the two of us.

Maciej Nowak [00:54:47]:
Yeah. Yeah. So certainly. And by the way, we can then review what happened, during that, you know, that period, you know, what, which of your, let’s say, predictions, materialized?

Joost de Valk [00:55:00]:
I we’ll see. I hope that I’ll be very right, but I probably won’t be.

Maciej Nowak [00:55:06]:
We never know. We never know. Alright. Thank you very much, and take care.

Lector [00:55:12]:
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