382 – Alex Moss Talks Yoast, entrepreneurship, and SEO trends

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast.

You've reached episode number 382 entitled Alex Moss talks Yoast, entrepreneurship and SEO trends. It was published on Thursday, the 25th of July, 2024.

My name's Nathan Wrigley, and we'll get to the chat with Alex in a few short moments, but as always, here's a short bit of housekeeping. If you like what we're doing at WP Builds, head over to WP Builds.com forward slash subscribe. Over there you're going to find all of the places that we post things. So it's Twitter and YouTube and so on. Why not subscribe on those channels, but also subscribe to our newsletter. If you do, we'll send you two emails a week. One when we've done the this week and WordPress show, which is live on a Monday, we'll repackage that as a podcast. But also every Thursday for the regular podcast. What you're listening to now. WP Builds.com forward slash subscribe. Give us your email and we have a no spam guarantee.

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Okay, what have we got for you today? Well, I am joined today by Alex Moss. You're going to hear a conversation which spans all sorts of different subjects today.

Currently Alex Moss is working at Yoast. He discusses his multifaceted career from a self-taught PHP developer in 2011, to the principal SEO at Yoast now.

The conversation spans his co-founding of an agency, involvement in the NFT market, and views on emerging digital trends. He also highlights potential practical uses of NFTs beyond speculation. Collaboration between marketing and development teams. And advancements at Yoast post acquisition by Newfold Digital.

Key topics include the future of SEO, amidst AI and privacy challenges. Google's dominance. The evolution of search engines, and the balancing act of offering premium and free services at Yoast.

We certainly do cover a lot of ground. And I hope. That you enjoy it.

I am joined on the podcast today by Alex Moss. Hello Alex.

[00:04:29] Alex Moss: Hello there. How we doing?

[00:04:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Good. Thank you. Alex and I met in Asia at Word Camp Asia. That's right, isn't it? We hadn't met prior to that.

[00:04:37] Alex Moss: No, not in real life. Like we've known of each other's existence in the WordPress community, but, and even though we don't live that far away, no. It takes us flying for at least 15 hours.

[00:04:50] Nathan Wrigley: right. You have to go

[00:04:50] Alex Moss: other in real life, right?

[00:04:52] Nathan Wrigley: of the planet to meet each other. Yeah. Alex, you are based out of Manchester? I'm based in Scarborough in UK terms. That's pretty close. what are we like? Probably 60 miles or something. I. But, as we were saying, the uk, even though in American terms getting across the UK is a, is, trivial in terms of driving time, it's still big enough that, it's a big ordeal going from where I live to where you live.

[00:05:17] Alex Moss: We like the moaning, don't.

[00:05:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, everything's hard. Alex though, is on the podcast today, we're gonna talk about him, his past, his relationship with WordPress, the fact that he's been working with Yost in the more recent past as well. So we'll talk a little bit about that. Do you wanna just give us your little potted bio?

not necessarily revealing everything, 'cause it'd be part of the conversation, I think to reveal those bits and pieces. But just tell us a little bit about you and your relationship with WordPress,

[00:05:45] Alex Moss: Sure. I'm al, hello. I am an SEO, from background, I started out in SEO work for agencies and in-house. but I also knew PHP development and through that naturally led myself to WordPress as the. Least worst CMS out there at the time, I think in 2011. so that was my first d into WordPress and since then, continued to work for agencies and then ended up owning my own agency, that did everything organic and paid and integrated marketing agency, and also did WordPress.

Design and development. and as well as that in the back, I also developed some plugins and, a framework, at the time, which is, which is interesting. That's sometimes that I even did that.

[00:06:33] Nathan Wrigley: done a lot, haven't you? That's really amazing. How did you end up getting fascinated by? SEO then, because honestly, if I rewind my life a million times, I'm never gonna be an SEO person. There was just, it just never just came out of the woodwork as something that I wanted to do.

I was much more interested in, creating the front end of the website and fiddling with graphics and things like that. So how did you get curious about SEO.

[00:07:01] Alex Moss: I was the IT guy in a, company because that, if you know how to make a website or build your own computer, you're just putting the, you work in it. It still happens now to me at the moment, but at the time I, I just thought, I can build websites and I understand computers. That's just working it.

And I ended up working in, as an admin. For some company, that does network, solutions, actual hardware and Microsoft Exchange, and they had a sister company that was a parental control. Software app at the time, this was before smartphones and they had an online marketing, position. And I'd never thought about marketing, but the way in which they described it, which was essentially they needed an SEO, an IT person, someone to look after the website.

I knew how to do that. 'cause in universities I made my own websites. MPHP and HMLI just knew how to create websites as a teenager, so I just did it for them and. I knew about websites and I understood how they worked. By the time I was 19, well. Someone just said, do you know anything about SEO?

And I went, no. This was in the job. And they went, we'll pay you to do a one day course. And they paid me to do a one day course and say, let's see what you understand about it. And at the end of the day, I got a course by SEO Optimize, who, was owned by Kev Gibbons, who now owns re-sign. He's still a guy in SEO, has his own conference and everything.

And at the end of the day, I, I, understood everything that they told me in the training session, but very well, I didn't have any questions. I was like, this is actually quite interesting. 'cause it's a, it's like a cross between marketing. It's not dev. It's not marketing, it's kind. But you need to know both to, understand what you need to do to a website structure as well as have an impact on users.

And that's how I got into it. I just got interested and started reading loads of stuff. and I didn't realize that even before that I was doing SEO as a 16-year-old, I had a South Park fan website. and, I, was getting a thousand hits a day. 'cause that was the only metric, getting a thousand hits a day at the beginning.

And then I realized I could rank for like condoms or fake Nike trainers and Viagra, right? Because this was before Google did anything sophisticated and I was literally ranking for random. Irrelevant things and got loads of hits. And as such, I was doing, I was being an affiliate on the website that paid me by the impression, not by the click.

So I was able to have a network of sites. I built a network of sites all based around this. And it was like an SEOI didn't even know I was doing it. Didn't even know what SEO was at that as a term at that point, but I was doing it. And then when I started understanding everything, I realized. I've been doing those things and that's where it ended up.

I just went down the tech route.

[00:09:55] Nathan Wrigley: It feels like you were playing a bit of cat and mouse back in the early days. You were just tinkering with the code and success would result, and so you tinker a bit more and. Maybe a bit more success, comes as a result. Do you know, that's fascinating, the way you described that.

I genuinely never thought about it as a kind of confluence of marketing and tech, but that's exactly what it isn't it? If you are, if you're into marketing and obviously turning a, business which is not successful into a business which is successful, there's millions of ways that you can do that.

You can. Paid TV ads or you could put something on the radio or you could appear on a podcast or whatever it may be. But then if you've got the technical background and you understand the things that the search engine is looking for, you can have your cake and eat it. So that's a really interesting way of describing it.

Is it still like that? 'cause it feels like the 16-year-old, you could probably get a result by just tinkering, but it feels like the. However old you are, you, it's definitely a much more mature industry now where I would imagine there's a lot more, hard work required to get the same result.

[00:11:05] Alex Moss: Yeah, there's a lot wider skillset now. So back in the day it was just SEO, but that was before social. Was social, right? I, was working in it just as Facebook came, I had Facebook when I was a student, so you could only join us at ac uk. And I had a friend who was in Berkeley University at the time, who was one of the first three universities to get Facebook.

So he was showing at me and that wasn't anything. and that was part of SEO. Until it became its own, it had to grow into its own thing. Like I remember working, I worked in TV before I got into SEO full-time, and I worked in ITV and I set up the Facebook page for ITV because, not because.

[00:11:52] Nathan Wrigley: to find.

[00:11:52] Alex Moss: Yeah, yeah.

And not because no one knew how to do it. It's 'cause no one else had an account where you could do it because I had this legacy account, and it was very weird how no one knew. So I basically set up social profiles for a TV station and now there's teams of people that just work on specific shows and that's how much it's grown.

They didn't know. And yes, it is still half marketing, half dev. Or a bit of a sue, depending on what kind of skills you have. But it's also a struggle because. Like, I have experienced, sometimes the devs don't consider you a dev and the marketers don't consider you a marketer. Neither of them want to deal with you because they have a wider agenda of inside marketing or in like, why would someone in marketing need to deal or know about canonization?

Why would a developer. Care about what canonical is. The answer is they really should, as an example. But that I was working in it where they were like, canonical what? 'cause it was just intro. I remember it getting introduced and being in car craft and no one knew what the hell it was and I was trying to explain what it was and that it about content and stuff.

And it was just going over a Deb's head. Marketing were like this, gotta do with me. So it's a struggle if you're in-house sometimes, but then it makes you learn of how to deal with both. With both departments and get a buy-in.

[00:13:18] Nathan Wrigley: So you've had, it from the description that you gave. You've obviously done quite a lot, both in the marketing and in the sort of tech side of things. I think you mentioned that you'd built a plugin and various other things. Just before we hit record, we talked about the fact that this might be quite an interesting thing to talk about.

So just lay out the groundwork of what you have done in the past and it'll give us a much broader idea of the kind of things that you've been into.

[00:13:43] Alex Moss: Sure. So in the world of WordPress, I dis, when I discovered WordPress, it was finally something that could, adapt to an SEO. Wanting to do certain things. So I was working with LER and Drupal and all, and a few other CMSs at the time, and none of them were playing ball at all. And whilst WordPress didn't play ball perfectly, if you were good enough, you could make it play ball if you wanted to as a, technical aspect.

So I started, that was nice. And knowing PHP and SQL already. that was great. So I knew how to build a plugin or a theme or change things in a theme, and then I just learned more and I was like, everything I'm learning is actually really constructive towards what I want to do. Scalability or what have you, or customization within a website, which I still believe I.

If you're looking for a website, it's still one of the most customizable CMSs out there, and expandable ones. So I like the fu, the future proofness. I like the open source of everything. So I thought I'd make my own plugins to try and solve a few problems. So the first one was I wanted to build an SEO plugin, but then some guy called Yost was already way ahead of him.

[00:14:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:14:54] Alex Moss: I was, I'm not dealing with, I'm not dealing with him. He is, he's an authority. He's, he's already way ahead of me and always

[00:15:02] Nathan Wrigley: you were considering an SEO plugin, a similar, obviously you've said that he beat you to the, punch there, but a, similar time, All those years ago. Interesting.

[00:15:11] Alex Moss: Yeah. no. it was around 2010 or something and I think he got off and he was as an SEO though he wasn't, I dunno what his name was like back then in the WordPress world, but in the SEO world, he was already established. He was already an authority that had come from good SEO background, and knew he knew his shit and all the peers around him had also.

We're very high up in the world of SEO and I think he used to work eBay at some point, or, he is been long time friends with someone who was eBay and then worked at Airbnb and is part of this, this crew who've always been there in, Europe doing that thing. So I thought, he's got more resource.

He, is, got more developers behind him. I'm just one guy. I'm never gonna make the effort 'cause I'm running an agency as well. So I just made small ones that just. Did a job, right? So the first one I made was Facebook comments, and you remember, you can just comment underneath instead of the native WordPress one.

Some people didn't want that. They wanted Facebook comments, which was just essentially an iframe and embed.

that was it. So I just removed comments and then replace 'em with this comment. And that was it. It was so simple. Only a few options. And then I made EU cookie law before GDPR existed, and that was just a yes or no, and then if you, or more info on terms.

And that's all it did. It didn't do anything with cookies. and those were my main two. I made a few others, but none of them were as successful as those two. They were always free, but then I sold them. To two different parties at two different times. I didn't sell Facebook comments to Facebook.

[00:16:50] Nathan Wrigley: Ha

[00:16:50] Alex Moss: it was another one.

It was, another company,

[00:16:53] Nathan Wrigley: have retired.

[00:16:54] Alex Moss: Exactly. But weirdly enough, after they were purchased, neither of the purchasers did anything with the plugins. They let them die to the point where I didn't even get removed as the author, and I was getting those deprecation emails and I was emailing my purchasers going.

Do you wanna do? Can I take it back

[00:17:15] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Yeah.

[00:17:16] Alex Moss: with it? And they're like, no, we're just gonna let it die.

[00:17:20] Nathan Wrigley: with your name. With your name in the plugin code still,

[00:17:24] Alex Moss: exactly. Which is a bit, it's a bit unfortunate, but what, whatever, I, took the money so I can't complain.

[00:17:30] Nathan Wrigley: but then you also did your, you built an agency up as well, you said?

[00:17:34] Alex Moss: Yes, I built an agency, which was based on just me knowing WordPress and my way around it. So got people with WordPress sites on board and, hired a dev and the designer, and just grew it from there. And we've always stayed small. and, we haven't had this massive dev team, but like our team have always been really well-oiled machine, very good at process and very good at doing.

The very simple sites very quickly, but also quite complex stuff. So our backend dev made his own API, through Laravel and then pushed everything through into a WordPress MVP. and it is very good. It's like a tire version of Compare Super, compare the market. But in that they're, dealing with a database of over 600,000 rows.

And, the.

[00:18:22] Nathan Wrigley: Wow.

[00:18:24] Alex Moss: So doing those things are like, they're not like, they're not like IPO companies, right? But it is nice and interesting to have those very customized projects. So we've been doing them and during that time I made my own framework as well. it was called Pdig, for anyone who's old school and may have remembered, but it was a framework that was essentially a vanilla canvas.

that had bootstrap. It was the front end was just bootstrap. The back end was no bloat. Everything was SEO friendly or integrated with Yost, that kind of thing. And, and I didn't really sell it in the end. I did pitch it to a couple of people, but some I was, again, I wasn't like, I was too engrossed with the agency side and I should have pushed it more.

Could have been elegant. Who knew?

[00:19:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Elegant as in elegant themes, or elegant as in, yeah. Yeah. Oh, what could have been? What could have

[00:19:21] Alex Moss: that doesn't matter, but it showed my interest in products. And even though my background is, my professional background is mainly from a service side of owning an agency, I've always liked products, which kind of led me towards Yost.

[00:19:36] Nathan Wrigley: Did you, sound as if you are talking in the, present tense about your agency. Is that still going? Are you having that? Yeah. So the work at Yost is something you are full-time there, or are you part-time there or?

[00:19:49] Alex Moss: I am full-time there, but on top of being full-time, I also do some work at, outside office hours of some tech stuff. but because my agency, is with my wife, co-founded it with me and yeah, and to be fair, she's always been the boss anyway. I, she was always the boss. I was just some tech guy who just knew some stuff and got involved when I needed to.

And I'm good at, business development and I've got the authority and everything, but the day to day I can do an audit, a tech audit at two in the morning if I really want to. I don't, need to be forward facing anymore. So I just thought, if I do it less, let's see what happens to the company.

And it's, it felt like it. They didn't need me. And actually I had a break in the middle to deal with, NFT Marketing. Which is a

[00:20:36] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that, yeah. what could possibly go wrong?

[00:20:42] Alex Moss: That's, another podcast. But in short, I, me and Anna and another couple of people opened an NFT Marketing Agency. we ended up actually being really successful in the, in the wild west of the NFT world. Worked with people like Boss Logic, jar Rule. Who else? There's just random, story, like big brands as well.

life Magazine, we just, we work with loads of random different people. and it was, a funny ride, but then, the Wild West was stopping. I've always, I'm a marketer, not a Web3 guy. and more on the marketer, although I believe in Web3. Crypto, probably paid a part in the downfall of the NFT audience,

[00:21:28] Nathan Wrigley: NFT thing. Can we draw a line onto that, do you think? Realistically speaking, for the majority of us, it's, not something, I remember if we were to go back, oh, I don't know, maybe three years or something, if you were to look in any tech publication or listen to any podcast that was even adjacent to technology, the word NFT or the acronym NFT, would come out, multiple times almost in every sentence.

And now it's complete. it's just nothing. It's deadly silent. Is that because it's gone away? does anybody even carry on talking about that anymore?

[00:22:03] Alex Moss: It was an echo chamber that got outta a chamber for a very short time. And unfortunately the crypto, it was the mix of crypto and NFTs, and also the metaverse coming in as a separate thing got all mixed up and tangled. Weirdly, I think, and the ecosystem got so excited that everything was gonna happen.

But I was cynical again as a brand marketer who's seen a lot more in the search world thing. I was thinking about things like Google Glass. I was thinking about how people said that voice search was gonna overtake mobile searching when Alexa first came out. None of those things happened. And I was watching this happen with NFTs, and I'm like the technology of NFTs.

Won't go away. It will be useful. And in 10 years I do think it will be used in a more normal way, but it will be disconnected from crypto once that happens. That's what people didn't get. And the things of bored apes was, it was one big crypto FOMO whirlwind that the A larger ecosystem got involved with, and that's why Justin Bieber spent a million dollars on one and sold it for 8,000.

[00:23:13] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, good grief. It sound, it, looking back, it does seem like some sort of pyramid scheme and also the, utility of it wasn't really the point. The point was to get rich off, I don't know, little animated gifs or something like that, that you could sell. Whereas it does feel like you said, the underlying, the underpinnings, the technology that lies behind it.

Could be really useful in all sorts of ways, but not in ways which are gonna make you a millionaire overnight, but just something that may, I don't know, maybe stamp a legal document to prove that it existed at this moment in time, or that yours is the original version, or something like that, which, is probably worth pennies but is actually really useful.

[00:23:56] Alex Moss: Yeah, I mean I did a talk on, I think it was a world, I think, about brand marketing and NFTs, and I think people got the wrong idea and they thought of it too much. playing cards and, Pokemon cards, the collectibles and things like that, that, it's not about that. It's about proof, authenticity, and brand loyalty, right?

So things like, I, I used to collect art, I still collect art, but I collect physical art. proof of purchase relies on Gmail being up,

[00:24:28] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah. Yeah, it's

[00:24:29] Alex Moss: things like that.

[00:24:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:24:32] Alex Moss: NFTs is the certificate. So what would be great is if I walked into an art gallery, saw something on the wall, and I purchased it with money, but I also got the NFT.

My utility is the certificate, and now I've got it coupled with the physical. That's also should be dealt with in legal form because it's immutable on the blockchain. And, because of that you can do things like you say, legal documents, leases, the signatures, things like that. Transfer of ownership.

[00:25:01] Nathan Wrigley: That's where it's always felt like the U. That always felt like the most useful case was just PR proving that something happened at a certain moment. Oh, I don't know, like for example, that you, published a blog post and that it was written with these exact words on this exact date, and that version that you are touting over in the media is, has been doctored and I can prove.

That it's been doctored because I've got the original and I absolutely know that this is the original, that kind of thing. Oh, that's really interesting though. What? Sorry, I completely derailed you there, but that was really interesting, the thread that runs through your

[00:25:36] Alex Moss: No, it comes back, to WordPress. It comes back to WordPress because what you just said then there is a plugin to that, I believe, called Web3 Press. They were at WordPress, WordCamp Asia. a stall. I'm sure that's what you, and you buy it. You can buy a post

so you get a post that's.

It get, it gets put on the blockchain as an NFT, which then you can prove what the words were at that point in time. and yeah, that, that's true. And it, and also for brand loyalty. Think of a Tesco Club card. You've got a club card, I've got a club card, they're both free. But the more I spend in Tesco, the more I'm rewarded.

I get more off my petrol, I get, 10% off beer 'cause I drink too much beer, that kind of thing. And then that as a digital version of that, that is, and then I could sell my club card to you if it's actually quite valuable. It has a lot of deals on that loyalty thing. Things like, air Miles as an NFT.

[00:26:34] Nathan Wrigley: Oh

[00:26:35] Alex Moss: You can think about it like that. That's, when it gets interesting and I'm sure, do you know what you should get Dave Lockey on here? He'll, talk for

[00:26:44] Nathan Wrigley: I have actually spoken to Dave Lockey, on, a different podcast. I do, the WP Tavern podcast, and we had Dave Lockey. he just started at Automatic, so I think he was finding his feet there at that time. But the way you've just described it is really interesting to me. I'm so sorry, dear listener, that we've really gone off on a tangent here, but this is quite fun.

I, didn't really see it as. I thought more of it as a, okay, here's proof of a thing. Not really a transferrable thing. Just this is mine. There it is. But no, the idea that you could put value into it and then sell it, I guess that's what got out of control is the whole value. Thing. And so this picture of a monkey went from being a picture of a monkey to being worth a million dollars.

That's unrealistic, unsustainable pyramid nonsense. Whereas if it was just something in the real world, like a Tesco Club card or an Air Mile scheme, and you could sell the value held in that NFT onwards. Okay, that makes a lot of sense. Oh, I like that. That's interesting. Okay. I'm sorry. You're gonna have to.

[00:27:49] Alex Moss: no. Think about it from a clothing brand. Gucci, which have delved into this before, they could give out a thousand NFTs, right? And if you owned an NFT Web3 is the act of logging in. So web one's username and password. Web two is social, like signing in through Twitter or X whatever. And Web3 is signing through your digital wallet, right?

And if you have the Gucci, NFT. They'll give away a thousand to a thousand random people or what, however they want to do it. I can get 10% off everything, Gucci if I log in through the wallet, so they're gating it. Or I could get a new Gucci product that no one else can get unless I'm logged in with the NFT.

[00:28:27] Nathan Wrigley: Ah, okay. So it's like a, it's a passport as

[00:28:31] Alex Moss: what you can do.

[00:28:31] Nathan Wrigley: else.

[00:28:34] Alex Moss: Yes. Just like you can do that with a username, right? You can say, if you wanted to give me 20% off a product and you know my usernames Alex Moss, then you can do that. Normally that's quite easy to do in WordPress, right? But if you do it in Web3, you can connect specific wallets.

Maybe you can, if you are, again, Gucci can say, you know what, 20% off For anyone who owns a bored ape. That's the utility of owning the ape. 'cause then you log in with your wallet, it'll have the A in, it'll have the Gucci thing in. So you'll be able to get that product at 20% less because you've got those two NFTs.

And that is where things will go in the longer term. So Gucci and other brands like that did do stuff like that.

[00:29:16] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so may, maybe it's not a stalled enterprise. maybe that whole pyramid apes, by the way, the, idea of finding an ape in my wallet is pretty terrifying. But, the, the idea that it'll be able to be a store of something that is that, okay, so you've talked about WordPress and, you log with the username and password, but you're bound within in the confines of WordPress.

This. This unshackle you from the word pressy bit. Your NFT could allow access to all sorts of things all over the internet. It's far less, less confined, if Anyway, I am so sorry. We've totally derailed you there. but fascinating. Maybe this podcast is just gonna be about NFTs, but let's just go back to, you a little bit and you were.

You were talking before I derailed you about your, agencies and the work that you've done with, building up SEO plugins and all that kind of stuff. It strikes me that a lot of the stuff that you've done is working for yourself and figuring out your own path. So why have you finally landed with Yost as an employee?

is that like atypical for you to be an employee? Is there a reason that you've decided to. be less of an entrepreneur, if you like, and more of an employee.

[00:30:36] Alex Moss: Maybe there's a few things I never wanted to. Be an entrepreneur. I won't describe myself as one, but I guess, I am. I am someone who's done stuff by myself. probably not by myself. My wife definitely pushed me to do things and pulled me to do things with her. so she definitely leads in that way.

but. The, other thing was, I'd, been doing it for 10 years longer. it's a lot of work. It's a lot of pressure. The pressure doesn't reduce over time. it's not the good old days where the boss is always playing golf and stuff with one of the big clients, it does work like that, but in large companies, not in a small.

Boutique agency. so I thought, I'm done with that. And also client work is different with SEO, even though they pay you every month, you still have to talk them into the fact that you should be worth. Paying you even from like month two. Like why is this important? And you don't say that to an accountant at everything they do.

But it seems to be something that they do in SEOI find build, WordPress, build is much from my experience, much nicer of an experience. what's the scope of work? Let's implement the scope of work. You complete the scope of work and you wave goodbye and then you get another client to do the same

thing. and then there was the plugin aspect and the WordPress aspects of things. And I just liked, I liked the building element, but I knew I couldn't do it by myself. I knew I'm not clever enough. That there aren't much better devs out there that are much better than me. 'cause I didn't have a formal education development.

I just opened the PHP manual in 2002. It was just one file that, I dunno what extension it was, but I had to download some like manual software just to open it. And that's what I used a notepad. It was before color coded. Stuff, the nice things of sublime and things like that, that didn't exist. It was, there wasn't dark theme.

I was one color, black and white. That was it. And so I was way behind. I'm old fashioned, but I had ideas and I thought, I understand Yost. I'm an SEO. So I understand why everything is important. I know that inside SEOI no longer have to talk people into. Saying that SE o's important because it's the product.

So that, that was, that saved a lot of time and effort and and there my opinions respected a lot more than a client who, who has their own business and they just think you're just some random consultant. And they, and I thought, I can do, I think I can do much more on a bigger scale. And if I worked on a product, I think I could do that, not only with improving a product for best practice in SEO anyway, but actually helping the product evolve.

it, because it still can, right? A product can always evolve. and as Yos goes into its next chapter, of its business life, there's different things that will happen in the next few years, that will probably not change the product at all, but it all expand the way in which some things are done, as our jobs get harder as well.

[00:33:41] Nathan Wrigley: I always found selling the SEO as a service, the most difficult thing because like you say, if you sell 'em, let's say a five page brochure website, I'll do it in a couple of days and there it is. Boom. You can see it, that was blank. And now it's done. Whereas SEO was much more ephemeral.

we've gotta do this research, which they've gotta be a part of, and they probably find it fairly uninteresting 'cause they've got bathrooms to sell or they're a lawyer and they've got clients to, to meet and all of that kind of stuff. And then. Proving that what you did was actually having an impact in some sort of report, where you could categorically say, look, we definitely have had an impact.

This was really easy, money. It was worth spending the money on. I always found that incredibly difficult. and I never had the, the time really to pour into it to become. An expert. So I was always on the periphery of kind of knowing enough to be dangerous, but not enough to be effective. And, and it made that sort of thing really hard.

Okay. So you've been at Yost since when, how, when did you begin?

[00:34:46] Alex Moss: So I think I've been here about nine months now.

[00:34:50] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And, what is your, what's your job title? What is your role over there?

[00:34:54] Alex Moss: I am principal, SEO. There's two of us. There's me and there's Carolyn Shelby, who's based in Chicago. we, as our job, we kind of intertwine between all the different departments. As I was explaining before your marketing, are you, development and the answer to being an SEO inside. A company like this is that you are everywhere, or at least I am.

I'm probably weirdly the most u uniquely place person 'cause I'm in product. But I definitely have a big input into marketing, into things that leadership do. product development. The, looking after the site in general, them being part of the face of the brand as well. So every month I do the SEO, update by Yos with myself and Carolyn do that.

So curating that, which we do by ourselves, and of course we know everything that's going on each month. So there's a lot of things that we do, in and out the business that, that, and integrations, things like that. Partnerships and, innovation with growth, things to do with ai. So every, everything, a bit of everything.

[00:36:00] Nathan Wrigley: really is a bit of everything, isn't it? That's fascinating. What a nice title though. What working for a an SEO company. What's your title? principal. SEO sounds kind of James Bond. It's you're at the apex. It's really quite, it's quite a nice title that, so okay, let's get stuck into the sort of the job that you do over at Yost and all of the different things that are happening there now.

If you've begun your work in November last year, you. Therefore have not worked there. Although from something that you said previously, you have worked with Yost, the person, not the company before, but you've not worked with the, co-founders. Marika and Yost, the person. you've worked since it was. T acquired by, do you want to tell us a little bit about who your parent company are and maybe how that's affected things?

There's gonna be a load of people listening to this who are, Yost users, Yost subscribers, and I think they'd be quite interested to know what the state of affairs is with the ownership of that brand.

[00:37:02] Alex Moss: Yeah, sure. Yost, and Marika sold the company, to New Fold Digital. that was about three years ago. I came in after Yost and Marika had departed. So I don't know the intricacies of what happened in that little window, but by the time I came in, there was quite a bit of a leadership shift.

Yost and Marie had exited. So at the moment there's, I think one, one person who was on leadership. I. That's still there now. that, that's Chaya. and then there's other people who were obviously there during s and Marika being there, but maybe not in part of the leadership team. So there's a few people who do different things.

You've got, Kimberly, who's the general manager. You've got Chaya, you've got Will, Nico, director products, ko, tacho, is, Head of Community and you've got Cher, in Legal and Flory who's the director of marketing. So it's quite, quite a people. And in that, when, I don't know, the intricacies of the actual acquisition and what, was the plan at the very beginning, but the growth of Yost has always been an interest, not just in numbers, because there's a hell of a lot of people on free.

There's 13.5 million active

[00:38:19] Nathan Wrigley: 13.5 million.

[00:38:22] Alex Moss: know.

[00:38:25] Nathan Wrigley: Sorry, carry on. That's just eye watering.

[00:38:27] Alex Moss: It's mental. It's, mental, but not that they're free users, right? So there's nowhere near as many as that premium users. one of new folds thing is to get as many people on premium as possible. Upgraded that, that of course is, one of the goals. So as we do that, we'll be creating more premium features in the years to come.

of course we'll be still putting things out in free. but we'll also be developing premium stuff that bit more. we're also. In that time expanded into Shopify. so we're not just WordPress as a brand anymore, but it's how we're known, right? That it's always been WordPress until a couple of years ago and it's over 10 years old, this company.

it's only a small portion, but it's something we're growing into.

[00:39:15] Nathan Wrigley: The, Shopify thing, were you saying that's the, a small portion? So does WordPress still dominate the sort of core focus of yos the business or. Is there, I don't know. how is that divided up? Do you have a, Shopify team of people who are just working on Shopify and then you got the, WordPress side of things?

Or do you all just cross pollinate? It's all, one big thing,

[00:39:36] Alex Moss: There's a little cross pollination because things like outputting, SEO best practice, obviously there's, that's gotta be in parallel. But the way in which, the technical development stack is that there's definitely people who are on Shopify. but the guy who's on Shopify was on WordPress, so understands both, which is very good.

But we as we'll be expanding a bit more with, Shopify stuff. There'll be another dedicated Shopify, so they're not the same people. there'll be a WordPress dev and there'll be a Shopify Dev, for example, just like an agency will be specialized in that one CMS. There's definitely parallels. And when it comes to product features, you've gotta think, does it work for both?

And if it doesn't work for one, what's what happens? so that, those are the things. We generally do, here, but also having continuity between both of them. So a feature that's in WordPress will probably come first and make sure, so not, that they're beta testers, but that will be done quickly.

It's a bigger team. it's a bigger focus and a bigger customer base. And then. look, it's a good testing ground as well. 'cause you can have a feature, it hasn't happened that I know of yet, that, is pants for word, for Shopify users, but great for WordPress

users the other way round.

[00:40:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. it makes sense to cater for your bigger market, more thoroughly, if And, obviously if you can ship that and it works out, then you can port it over to the other side of things as well. You mentioned ai, right? And I have this intuition. I still do actually, to some extent.

The AI is gonna make SEO. Okay. From the creation of the SEO. So if you're inside the Yost plugin, obviously I've got all these boxes that I need to fill out and text needs to go here, and images need to go there. The creation of that with AI is made much more straightforward. You can press a button and the AI can read through your article and summarize it, and then you can go back and inspect it.

And all of that's brilliant. But I do wonder about the flip side of that, where the, whole landscape is just. Flooded by AI generated content, which is made for nobody really. It's just an AI spat it out and somebody has a blog and they thought, let's just put, 15 of that, 15 of these 10,000 word articles out a day because we can, 'cause we just have to click a button.

And I wondered what the impact. Of AI was on the consumption of search engine results and the therefore the difficulty in rising organically to the top. So I know that's a bit of a broad question, and I've loaded it as if it's a negative thing, but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe AI is all positive from, the Yost, the Yost company side of things.

So I'm just gonna throw that at you and see what you make of it.

[00:42:18] Alex Moss: So many contexts. There's so many contexts because first of all, Google have a fight with ai, that they, their whole, not their whole, but like a big core business for them is ads, right? without the ads, Google won't be who they are today and may not be something they are in the future. ERPs as in a search engine result page.

If they're going more ai, they're going more for this SGE experience, which we are going to assume is going to be announced to be going everywhere during Google io, which I think is in the next few weeks. we'll have a different experience as a searcher. It's actually going to evolve. It's not the 10 links anymore that's gonna go away and.

And in the years to come and it's going to give you a different experience with that. That's a threat for Google because there's less time for ads, but it's also a threat for SEOs 'cause there's less real estate for SEOs. But, I was at SMX Munich at SEO conference, a couple of months ago. Marcus Tober, who's the head of partnerships at SEMrush, he said that he made a good point.

SEO is actually gonna become more valuable, right? Because if you look at the search engine results page over time with SGE, you've got a bit of AI content here, you've got ads here, you've got two two SEO blue links here, and then some ads, and then a bit of SGE that's gone from 10 to two. So being there is even more valuable.

In fact, it's five times more valuable, more because of CTR, 'cause you're only dealing with two. But also SEO's still important to get into ai. SG into the actual result. And whilst it's annoying to have result, zero position zero as in you get the answer without having to actually move forward into a website, that's gonna be hard for publishers, but it's going to be an opportunity for truly unique, helpful content to get cited.

and from an AI context of the user, you're thinking just chat GPT now. This is, that's, gonna be old hat in a couple of years, right? Or that, conversational chat bot kind of behavior, that's gonna mold things like perplexity ai, where it's basically like chat GPT, but not the way in which it gives the results.

It gives the results like search engine, and structured data forms. A lot of what it's doing, it's using citations. It's bringing out factual stuff. So it's good for academic. Researched. If you wanted to know about some war, it would give you all of these things rather than, a block of text just saying, here's what happened in the war and here's like paragraph 57.

It's not good to ingest perplexity. is I think an evolved version of chat GPT. It's quite cool. Check it out.

[00:45:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

[00:45:02] Alex Moss: But it gives you citations, which of course needs to be cited from somewhere. and that means that you have to have content that's citable, which is where SEO works again. and things like schema and structured data are gonna play a big part in how AI understands what content and, entities are.

[00:45:21] Nathan Wrigley: It is interesting because for the longest time, more or less since Google, came around as a company, I've gone there with the expectation of seeing not answers, but possible sources of answers. So I'll, I don't know, I wanna know what the weather is. So I'll type that into Google and typically it would gimme some links.

Obviously now we're more and more straying into the hit. Google will provide you with the answer. But if I want a plumber in my local area, I know it's not gonna list out the plumbers directly for me necessarily. It might gimme a bunch of websites. And I, again, I know that's changed over time, but I do wonder if the future of search is more about, here's a question, give me an answer.

Give me the answer. Sir, that I, can just react to. And like you said, with perplexity, that's more the way it's going. It's curating a bunch of different things, mashing it all together and citing things. But I presume Google can't be in business. If they don't provide value to the people, putting the webpages up as well because everybody will just say, no robots do text.

Go away Google. 'cause you don't give me anything in return. I don't need to be on your search engine page. There'll be some sort, sort of revolution, if So I guess the search engines have to work out a way where they surface information, but in a way which just doesn't betray the people, creating the content so that they never get visits to their site.

[00:46:47] Alex Moss: Yeah. It, depends on, it depends. Is a great answer. For any SEO, but it does depend on the context. yes, that's very true to news outlets. Of course, if I was a news publisher, of course I would want to be cited. How dare you not. But, if I'm like some SEO consultant in Manchester and AI just uses me as a name but doesn't cite me, I don't care, right?

Because I got cited and they probably got my name from doing some SEO somewhere to pull out the information to provide that name in the first place. so I would say definitely. it's, it will depend on the kind of thing, and I think that's what Google's gonna have a really hard time tackling every single scenario, right?

Because there's infinite.

[00:47:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:47:34] Alex Moss: on, what, a SERP could be to use and even use your plumber before, and you say, oh, at the moment it doesn't do, it doesn't give me an SGE. It'll give me that map listing, and you do your own research, that kind of thing. And, I would repeat my, I would reply by going, you said at the moment.

in the future, you'll want a plumber in, in wherever you are, plumber, near me. And actually it'll know your preferences. It knows what you like to look for in a plumber. Like I know that I need to see at least five good reviews. They don't have to be five star, but I'm gonna read them like that thing.

And then over time, AI technology will know and connect with my profile. Understand that's what I like. And just in the future. Serve that to me. But I did have a conversation with John o, Alderson, who was, the, person before me. I replaced John O in Yost, and I was a guest on Yost last year.

And we were talking about SG then, and I said, but. If I want to research spaghetti bolognese, if I want a spaghetti bolognese recipe, I don't personally think that the answer it gives you is the correct answer because there is no correct answer. It's interpretive and that, and me as a person will always want it different interpretation.

So I'm gonna want to read about five, see what the commonality is, see what other people have thought of each one. Should you put carrots in it? That kind of, those random

[00:49:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:49:02] Alex Moss: you as humanist. Still should explore.

[00:49:05] Nathan Wrigley: I wonder if in the future also the. Like Google will be the destination. And obviously, if you're an SEO company at the minute, Google is the game. It's really the only horse in the race. But my intuition is that a lot of people are for a variety of reasons. It may be, that you've got concerns about privacy or data collection or whatever.

You may have moved to rivals, I don't know, doc, go. I ended up spending a little bit of time working. There was a search engine that I paid for a little while called Nivo. It It went, it went under, not too long after it started, there's a bunch of other rivals, brave are about to go into the, that, that market.

I think they're still in beta or something like that. but also the ais themselves are quite, a lot of my friends, particularly developers who want to get an answer and a very specific answer to a coding problem. they've just. Bit bend, Google altogether, and they're now using an ai, whether it's chat, GPT or a bunch of, there's loads isn't there now.

There's absolutely loads of them. Whether Google will even be the thing that it is, it's obviously built up this amazing, suite of products. It's not just search, I think of document documents and, music. You can get YouTube and all of that. There's a lot going on with Google, but I do wonder if.

Search business, which is the core of everything that they do. I do wonder if everybody's gonna be going and googling things in the future.

[00:50:36] Alex Moss: yeah, I think they will personally because like you say, the suite is so vast and it's intertwined with daily life. They've got Android as an os, so they'll never let search experience go. The search engine will change the search ex, it's more about search experience. It's, from. I want a pair of shoes all the way to getting them in your hands.

There's so much of a. In decision making, the search experience, doing your research and all of those things. It's not just about ranking for the 10 links. Once you, get that click, then there's a whole other battle of UX and crow conversion rate optimization. There's so much of a journey. Even things like entering a phone number right on the last spot and stop a sale from happening, and all of those things will still go back to that part of the experience, but.

To answer your question, it will change. The search experience will change, but Google will adapt things like their relationship with Reddit, I think is really interesting. People ask why. Why did they do that? Why? Why Reddit? And my answer is it's perfect, right? If you want an AI to understand the idiosyncrasies and randomness of the human species, Reddit is actually your best place to understand how.

[00:51:55] Nathan Wrigley: a lot.

[00:51:56] Alex Moss: You can be, right? So it's weird. It's tell me the worst in everyone. From the best source possible. And I actually think Reddit is great for that, right? So, it's good on learning and machine learning humans, right? It's the best resource. So I do think they're doing something there, but it's all about human firsthand experience.

They did mention it last year and they've har on about it, so, things like. EE 80, which I dunno how much the WordPress world knows about that. That's about expertise, experience, authority, and trust. and when you do that's connecting all of the dots of who I am as an entity. Alex Moss, who am I?

There's a few Alex Moss out there. There's an Alex Moss, the jeweler who makes jewelry for all of the rappers like Drake and Tyler, the creator. And there's another random Alex Moss who keeps on, who keeps like booking storage under my email address. I dunno why, but I need to understand who's me and that authority will have weight on websites.

and as soon as that happens, that's, that's a benefit that will also go back into AI and the way in which we interact people to people

[00:53:05] Nathan Wrigley: one of the things that I find really interesting is Google's foray to become, like from end to end. So a, good example was I was searching for a flight the other day and. in my previous, if I were to go back five years ago, I would look for a flight and I would expect Google to give me a, bunch of websites where I could go and explore the timetables.

And of course, now Google's just sucking up all that data there. They've, there's flights.google.com where they'll show you a price chart of, which flights are cheaper, which days, and if you adjust it by a few hours, you might be able to get something a little bit cheaper. And then the link.

That you click after you've gone through and you're still on Google, you click the link and you are at the buy button. the website's checkout for, the airline in question. So Google have done all the hard work consuming the timetable. They've, they found you the best fare, they haven't done all the seats and everything, but that you go, you skip all of that nonsense in, on the flight, site, and you just get to the buy now bit and you gotta fill in your name and blah, blah, blah.

But I see that's a real opportunity for Google. imagine that you're searching for, like you said, jewelry or something like that. You could search for it all online and you basically end up at the cart and Google pass all that information over to the vendor. And, in that way they maintain their relevance.

They're not, there's no links, there's no list of links. It's just, you're searching for products. And I would imagine that a lot of, that'd be baked into Android as well. So I, share your optimism. I think Google have got a bunch of incredibly smart engineers and it won't be. Just this one size fits all fairly boring to look at search page.

It'll be a whole hodgepodge of different things. Some of which are things that you can see, you can just time save by going through Google. 'cause they got the chops to do it. Ah, that's interesting. I. Yeah, I think probably at 52 minutes. Alex, we've probably, where, does the time go?

we've probably said what we need to say. I did actually have a few more questions about the yo side of things, but I think at 52 minutes we should probably save it for part two, of the Alex Moss experience. So before we knock it on the head, that's a UK expression. Before we knock it on the head, is there anything you want to just throw in before we press stop?

[00:55:31] Alex Moss: No, actually I'm enjoying the new, I'm enjoying all the new WordPress stuff on the next 20 years. To be fair, I'm excited for the next 20 years. I want to stay above 40.

[00:55:45] Nathan Wrigley: I think the, the prospects for WordPress are incredibly bright at the moment. I know that a lot of people are talking about the fact that this 43% has plateaued a little bit, but I have every reason to believe that it's probably gonna go up. There's a lot of nice stuff like concurrent editing coming inside a WordPress, and, I think the future's bright.

I really do. Okay. If that's the case and you have nothing else to add, I'm sure you do have things to add, but I've cut you off. we'll end it there. But, Alex, just tell us where can we find you, online? Where do you hang out? What are your social networks or your email address or whatever you want to surrender?

[00:56:21] Alex Moss: I'm mainly on X if you want to communicate with me, which is twitter.com, not x.com/uh, Alex Moss, who whenever they deal with that migration, which is something we could chat about on the next one that we,

[00:56:33] Nathan Wrigley: right. Yeah. We'll do it again.

[00:56:35] Alex Moss: that went, woo,

[00:56:35] Nathan Wrigley: You should, you should, by the way, sell that Twitter handle to the guy that sells all the bling jewelry. You could make a fortune.

[00:56:44] Alex Moss: Doesn't need.

[00:56:45] Nathan Wrigley: He doesn't need that Twitter handle. Oh, yeah. Alex, an absolute pleasure, love chatting to you and no doubt. We'll do it again soon. Take it easy. Thanks for chatting to me today.

Well, I hope that you enjoyed that. Very nice chatting to Alex Moss today. If you've got any comments on that, if you've got any thoughts or opinions, head over to WP Builds.com. Search for episode number 382 and use the fine WordPress commenting system that we've got over there.

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