From SEO to Site Builders and the Shifting Tech Landscape in Ecommerce

Justin:
Well, hey Alex, we haven’t met before. I am Justin, tell me a little bit about yourself.

Alex:
Yeah, I’m al, my name’s Alex Moss. I’m from Manchester in the uk. I’m an owner of an agency called Fire Cask, but mainly I’m principal, SEO at Yoast, which if you haven’t heard of Yoast and some people may not have is the largest WordPress SEO plugin out there with 13 and a half million downloads. And how about yourself?

Justin:
Yeah, so my name’s Justin Santon and I started a WordPress agency back in 2005, so it’s been a little while now. And we’ve been involved in E-commerce, really open source e-commerce since then, starting with OS Commerce for anybody who remembers that and into WP E-Commerce. I was a lead developer for that for a few years before WooCommerce came along and then started some core contribution to that back in 20 12, 20 11, and have been kind of involved in the E-commerce space forever. Really.

Alex:
Wow. See, that’s funny because I’m not from an e-commerce background per se. I’ve come from a marketing and an SEO background. But with SEO I came into WordPress as the best CMS option out there to actually do what I wanted to do and it had good extensions like Yoast and other things out there. Funnily enough, I was going to say my journey through WordPress e-commerce was through the plugin that I just find out that you are lead dev of. So that I actually found prior to Woo and I was working with that and then I moved to Woo at some point. But it’d be interesting to know what happened with yours. You would lead dev, is it still around if it’s,

Justin:
Yeah, yeah. What a journey that plugin was. So that plugin, WPeCommerce started in New Zealand by a guy called Tom, or not Tom, he was another developer, Dan Millward in 2000, I want to say 2006. And so I, from about 2005 to 2009 or so, I was doing a lot of custom bespoke e-commerce with OS commerce with some custom builds and things like that. And then I was really enjoying WordPress and those types of things and wanted to find some sort of confluence between WordPress and e-commerce. And so of course the only option at that time was WP eCommerce. So reached out to Dan and the team down in New Zealand, they were like, Hey, you want to help develop this? And I said, sure. And sort of began that journey from contributing to releases to getting commit access to helping lead development. So that was probably 2009 to 2012 or so, spent three or four years with the team kind of building it out.

I’m taking the whole, it goes from 1.0 2.0 around to 3.5 to 3.9 stages. That was three or four years there. That’s when I was really involved. And so Gary and Jeff and Tom and Mihi, and there’s a whole team of devs at that point kind of helping build it out. And it is remarkable to look back at that time and to see how many decision, how crazy it was to build an e-commerce plugin for WordPress in 2006. And even in 2010 and 2012, it was always kind of a crazy idea and to see how many decisions that were made that far back that were actually pretty good. You look at some of the decisions that WooCommerce over the years has had to move away from using custom post types for different storage models and things like that. And it’s like maybe that wasn’t the best idea.

They were sort of building away from that in the beginning back then. And so there were some really interesting and cool decisions made around e-commerce back then. And I remember for anybody who still uses Skype, I’m so sorry, but I remember Skype conversations back in 2012 when WooCommerce was just barely a thing. I think it had just launched maybe, and this was back, if you remember before the Jigo Shop fork, Pete Mall, who was a core contributor to WordPress, had worked with WooThemes to sort of build a rudimentary e-commerce plugin with WooThemes before WooCommerce. And that sort of built some sort of like, Hey, we need to do this sensibility. And I remember having a Skype conversation with Dan saying, man, we got to watch this. This is going to be interesting. And both of us were like, yeah, maybe we’ll see whatever. And then about 2013 we’re like, yeah, the writing, the writings kind of on the wall here. And so over the years, WP eCommerce was sort of in some ways a spiritual predecessor to WooCommerce and things like that. And it still has four or 5,000 shops using it. Not anything significant, but it’s sort of languished by the wayside next to the behemoth that is WooCommerce. So that’s even at an agency level since probably 2015 or so. That’s really where our focus has been on WooCommerce. You just got to be where the market is, right?

Alex:
Yeah, yeah, definitely. And well, let’s talk about Shopify quickly, right? We’ve got another CMS, it’s growing and growing, and how has it affected you? Has it actually become an opportunity? Have you gone into Shopify or have you stayed with WordPress and just that CMS?

Justin:
Yeah, no, that’s really interesting. We have done a little bit of Shopify development sometimes like an enterprise client, they’ll have their CMS and WordPress and they’ll want to do their e-commerce and Shopify, and they want a cohesive experience that feels like, hey, it’s all one system, but the CMS portion of Shopify is not great. And the e-commerce portions of WordPress for whatever reason, they don’t prefer to Shopify. So we’ve done a fair bit of that type of thing. And I would say the interesting thing about the Shopify market is anytime we talk to customers who want custom development in Shopify, it’s an easier sell to sell a premium budget in Shopify than it is in WordPress. I found why that is exactly, I don’t know, but it is interesting. So we’ve done a fair bit, but it’s not something that we really focus on as an agency. How about you?

Alex:
Shopify is obviously something we’ve gone into, but I didn’t want to start going into a completely different skillset, a completely different stack where something like maybe PrestaShop would be a better fit with PHP and SQL. We did a bit of Magento, but from an SEO’s perspective, actually our devs, it was a nightmare to begin with. Then there was the whole Magento version one to two, which wasn’t just WordPress five to six or something like that where you could just hit up eight. It was a whole new thing. And the premium charges is something I then related to on Magento where you can’t get to Magento site for the prices of Shopify or WordPress or what have you, even if you customize it. And it’s interesting that Adobe bought that and just led onto the enterprise section.

And WordPress are very much your SMBs, even though you can still have enterprise, of course, it seems that it’s there for the more affordable option, which of course drives more power in the future, in my opinion. It’s got a bigger impact even to the point where you say there’s still only a few thousand shops working on WordPress, that’s still a few thousand shops that are turning over because of something that you built years and years ago. It’s just one of those interesting things when it comes to open source that is a bit more special than a SaaS model of CMS.

Justin:
Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah. I mean I would say the sort of relationship between Magento and WooCommerce is very akin to Drupal and WordPress. Drupal is even migrating between seven and eight or eight and nine is it’s a six figure project just to do a migration where WordPress is a one click thing that just about anybody can do with a really high level of trust. So yeah, we did a little bit of Magento way back in the day, but we prefer not to.

Alex:
Well, I know that from my experience, I’ve not just been a dev, I’m more of an SEO than a dev. I mean, it’s good that looking at choosing something that’s SEO friendly may come to the detriment of feature sets in a plugin that may be out there. So it’s always interesting the way in which each CMS tackles, SEO as well, even from an e-commerce point of view, where you’ve got things like Google Merchant Center pulling in, you’ve got Schema, you’ve even got recent stuff like product variants that are now getting supported by Google. It’s interesting to think because you won’t be from an SEO background, you’ll be probably more of a development background. What do you think of the search experience in general? You’ve got things like merchant, which tie into Google, you’ve got AI taking over with search generative experience where content’s pulled out. That may be a detriment to the publisher, but maybe a benefit to the e-commerce and shop owner, which is good. Do you look into that as a business owner inherently in my brain as an SEO with development experience, but people development agencies with zero SEO experience with no fault of the road, may not think about the search experience in general. What do you say to that? How much have you been concentrating on that over the years?

Justin:
Yeah, we do. I would say that probably more than an average e-commerce agency. We think about SEO partially because our agency, of course we do lots of e-commerce and WooCommerce, but we also work with lots of really big publishers. And sometimes those big publishers are people like New York Times or whatever. But a lot of times, and I would say much more frequently, it’s big publishers like food bloggers that get 5 million page views a week or something like that, and they’re generating six or seven figures a month in revenue from ad revenue, and it’s just like recipes. And so in that world, in that publishing world, they don’t really care how great of a software architect I am. They really care if I’m not going to screw up their SEO. And so that matters more, and we have to be more on top of that than I would say the average e-commerce agency.

But of course, I think if you’re in e-commerce, not just as a developer, but especially as an agency, it’s sort of like table stakes. You have to know something about e-commerce or about e-commerce related SEO if you’re going to actually provide value to clients because it’s great to have a working website, but if nobody finds it, they’re not going to sell anything. And so to answer the question of how do I feel about search right now, I want to touch on one thing you said. I feel like, and maybe it’s just my own sensibility, but I feel like it’s getting worse and worse probably because of how much AI Google is trying to execute and has sort of fumbled the football a little bit more than, which is a terrible American saying, forgive me. But they’ve really fumbled it in relation to AI as far as how it relates to their core business of search experience, because search on Google used to be pretty good. And I feel like now it’s such garbage, a lot of it. So I’m curious from somebody who’s a principal, SEO at Yost, kind of cream of the crop top in your field, what do you think about how AI and Google search results, what the impact has been there?

Alex:
I’ve only got an hour. I mean, there is so much to talk about ai. I mean, I’m conflicted with just the term ai. I felt like 2023 was if you weren’t talking about it then there was something wrong with you. And now I can’t even stand going to a talk about AI in general. Now I know what it is. I get it. I get what it is now. I just want to know how it’s actually going to be used. Well, I feel like some big companies and even Google have got a real issue, right? Because AI is too expensive for ’em to power yet they must, from a PR point of view, say that they’re going to use it intelligent. But like you say, over the years, in your opinion, search results have got worse. And I find it funny because Google are basically saying that they’re trying to stop spam so much, and yet you may say that the opposite is happening over time.

The problem is that we’ve got a lot more web spam in general, which just does happen, but they dunno how to deal with duplicate content and more challenging for them. They want people to have helpful content, but helpful content is a matter of opinion. And that creates so many complexities with personalization from anything from do you even onions for recipes, for example, I use recipes as an example of what AI should output. So let’s actually use it as a recipe. I want to know how to make spaghetti bolognese. I would not just trust what’s given to you. Here’s the recipe, right? Well actually we all know that there’s different interpretations of spaghetti bolognese who made it? Is it someone from Italy or America? Because they may have differing tastes, the person may just do it in a different way that I don’t think is right.
Are carrots included? And celery, some people would say. Yeah. So that kind of thing is something that AI can’t just give to you straight away or it’s not ready yet. It’s definitely quite far away. But also when you give AI out as information, the more information you give, there’s less real estate for ads, which is Google’s business model. So now they’re in a conundrum, but they say that they’re confident, but I dunno, let’s wait and see on the 14th of May, I dunno when this actual podcast will air, but on 14th of May, 2024, which is after today, Google IO will be being hosted and they are going to announce something about what’s going to happen with SG is going to roll out. But is it becoming more helpful? I think the question is what is helpful? And at the Reddit agreement that’s going on at the moment, they’re using Reddit and they’re pumping out, they’re bringing in a lot of the content and understanding it and people are saying, why?

Why would you use Reddit? And my answer is, if you were a machine and you wanted to understand humanity in its best, but also its most degenerate and worst form, I would probably say that Reddit’s a really, really good candidate for that information. And actually to understand the way that humans think. Reddit is definitely the brain dump of the planet in my opinion. And it’s actually great content and it then goes into what we think of ai. All we do is build sci-fi films about how they’re going to overpower us and then kill us. No offense to us, we shouldn’t flatter ourselves. That’s our opinion of what we think something more powerful might do to us as a subspecies.

We’re a paranoid species. AI is not paranoid unless we make it, but it won’t do that because that’s illogical. So I don’t think we should fear ai. I don’t think it’s going to ruin everyone’s jobs or take them away. I actually believe that AI will come up for solutions for humans on how to enhance themselves in order for us to use that as an aid to help us do our shit right in the future, do jobs better and create more opportunity in the same way that when the internet came out, you wouldn’t have said that paper wouldn’t exist within 20 years. It’s still around. It’s just that technology has created a different way to do business, a different way for people to do jobs in a different way. Like marketing. I was talking to someone over the weekend about career prospects and when I was looking at my career advise and had a meeting when I was 16, not once did the marketing come up and I’m going to assume I’m very confident that no one came up to you and said, computer programming is a way you could go down.

And if you did, I’d be actually really pleased that someone actually did that. But no one said marketing and I thought it just wasn’t there. Then I discovered SEO and blah, blah blah. And then I looked back and I watched Mad Men and I got really annoyed because I was like, there’s marketing agencies in the sixties that were there, and it was just, why didn’t you tell me that that existed? And that’s actually maybe something I would’ve excelled on and I might’ve excelled further than I have done today. I dunno if that answered my question about AI and search, but it’s definitely an interesting way. I don’t think anyone can predict what to do, not even themselves.

Justin:
Yeah, I mean I think your point about the quality of using Reddit as sort of source material for the modeling is a really astute point because it is probably the least caricatured version of human output. If you go to social media, it is highly inflammatory, it’s very caricatured, it’s all the hot takes where Reddit is just everything good, bad, ugly, but it’s just sort of unvarnished UNC caricatured. So that makes sense, and I think we’ll see what happens in May, but I think the best probably PR strategy is to really under promise and over deliver any good agency would. Whereas I think kind of the opposite has happened with much of AI right now. It’s like, oh, it’s going to save the world. It’s going to replace your developers. It might be eventually helpful for some people,

Alex:
But it is all connected because I think of AI now and look, let’s connect it back to e-commerce, right? Let’s use a smart fridge, great example. It knows what you’ve got inside the fridge. It knows when you’re going to run out of stuff. It will add it to a shopping list that’s all connected to some brand that will also, of course need to be set up properly with the right development stack and all of those things that, I mean, I think that e-commerce going to be intertwined with daily life more so than it is already now. I mean, looking at voice search, you can ask Alexa to buy something for you. I don’t need to type and it can take away, and maybe I do want to do a bit of research into the kind of products I might want to do, but if I know that I’m going to buy the same dishwasher tablets every time, we all know. But you can have those buttons, they still have them. You just click a button.

Justin:
I don’t know if Amazon still sells those

Alex:
Crazy, but I think they’d be great for it. They must be great for offices until someone blew the whole year’s budget on coffee. But it will, in my opinion, become more engaging where you can just go all the way, not just through Amazon, but anywhere through your Google Wallet and be able to buy something really, really, really quickly, which I think is going to be really good. I know that people don’t like having personalization and ads thrown at them personally. I do. I feel like I’ve got good self-control to not be all taken into all the product marketing. Plus I’m a marketer, so I believe I’m cynical. It’s like a magician knows the magic, so why would they ever get excited? Just like I’m sure you can relate. We can’t look at websites the same, not like a normal person. We look at a website, we see how long it’s taking to load. What’s that nav bar? Oh, that’s nice transition you’ve got going on there. But yeah, I do think AI will become more important in our daily lives in an unconscious way, but we need to get off the, it’s like me saying, I’ve got a smartphone. We all have smartphones, right? We’re nobody special. And that’s the same with products and services. Using AI isn’t a USP

Justin:
Anymore, right? Right. Yeah. Finding real ways to add value. I saw a tweet the other day, I forget who it was. It might’ve been Jason Cohen or something like that. But basically for startups that are building their entire startup based on filling an AI feature gap that some other startup has, don’t do it. The gaps are closing and they’re closing really quickly. So don’t build based on, oh, we’ll just add AI to it and make it better. It’s like, nah, everybody’s doing that.

Alex:
Exactly. And I think people should learn from the previous technology releases that have been out there. People forget what didn’t do well or didn’t do as well as everyone hopes. So I think of wearables when Google Glass came out, we just weren’t ready for it yet and we’re still not ready. We’re still using our thumbs and our hands to do things that we want. And it was just weird. I tested them. The next one was voice search, which is around, I even just used it, but I remember when Alexas and the Google Home came out and obviously voice search just went like that. Everyone was testing it out. And then people went, look at this graph, oh, mobile search will be a thing of the past in two years, and then everyone will be using voice search. That’s the future. So optimize for it. And then people started wasting their time doing it.

And here we are still using the same devices, and I don’t think that graph just went up and up and up. It will have plateaued in the same way that chat GPT use may have plateaued, and it kind of did last year at some point because things can’t grow forever. And the last example is I was into the marketing of NFT projects when there was the Wild West of NFTs. And knowing what I knew about Google Glass and Voice, I could see that this was not something that is a continual growth. It will peak. Plus you’ve got the added volatility of crypto bros that control that small element and do really, they don’t realize how much power they may yield. But the shame about that crew, if I can call it crew, it is a large crew, but it is a very small niche, is that I just didn’t think they understood the mass market and they were just more interested in the collective element of an NFT to bring the price up of something rather than the way in which NFT technology can be used for everyone in the future, which is what I was as a brand marketer was thinking of.

And unfortunately, I knew that the Wild West was bigger than me with one little pistol, so you just had to take it as it came. But it was interesting because I thought, I still think that NFTs or blockchain technology can really revolutionize e-commerce in some verticals such as legal or some very official documentation where blockchain is used as the receipt or art for example, which is what NFT are you still for today? And people still do it. But that’s how I came in. I collect art and I understood what NFTs were from a mass adoption point of view, but it’s a shame that control. But it’s a good lesson. I was going to build a lot of stuff in WordPress connecting NFTs and WordPress, and I’m glad I didn’t really push buttons and make other people, a team of people spend more time building something because it’s just not there, is it?

Justin:
Yeah. I mean the utility there is for things like currency, it is for things like providence and chain of command, like legal buying and selling real estate, even law enforcement, actual custody issues, things where knowing where something has been and whose hands it has been through with some level of anonymity could be really, really useful and revolutionary. But if I’m just buying cat food, probably don’t need to buy it with an NFT.

Alex:
No, no, no,

Justin:
No. Now we have people with JPEGs of monkeys that they spent $50,000 on that they can’t sell for 50 bucks.

Alex:
Exactly. But it’s weird. I owned one of them and it is very weird looking at it. If I kept it as long as I did, I would have lost a lot of sleep. And it’s crazy because I could afford to invest what I did at the time. But I’m also very aware that people really don’t, and they pour all of their money in, they get into serious issues. And meanwhile, on the other side of things, there’s a 14-year-old with 50 million in crypto that their parents don’t know about, and this kid cannot even spend it too late. They don’t even understand taxes. So how can they even declare any of this stuff? Can they even declare taxes? The 14, right? It’s one of those weird, weird places, but unfortunately NFTs on blockchain had that connection with Crip. So that connection was made that you could buy with crypto.

So it was great for people who wanted to play more and collect more crypto. But for me, I thought the NFT would be great for things like brand loyalty. That’s where my angle was, if I should be able to think of it, Web3, that’s what Web3, web one’s username and password. Web two is a login with Twitter or X or whatever. And Facebook Web3 is logging in with your digital wallet. I should be able to have an NFT in there that Purina, if you’ve got it in America, the cat food place, I should have a Purina NFT, and they should know how long and how much food I’ve been buying from them and giving me discounts based on that. Tesco or Walmart, you have a Walmart NFT, they should know. So that’s how I do it. They should be giving away these NFTs for free.

I have a Walmart card. You have a Walmart card. If I spend double the amount as you, I should get double the amount of loyalty just like any other loyalty card. And that can be used very easily. The technology, if you have this wallet, show them this price or show them an exclusive product that you can’t get unless you have that wallet. That’s the technology that I think would’ve been really cool if it was really adopted by the masses. And not to say that brands didn’t try it. Gucci tried it, MasterCard tried it, Boohoo, British clothing brand tried it. Lots of people have ’em, and I still have some of those NFTs, but they’re just not doing anything with it, just me. And that 14-year-old kid can’t even get, right.

Justin:
Yeah, no, it’s a funny market and I think history will look back at it and look at the early days as exactly that. I was like, wow, those were early days. It’s useful now, but look at what it used to be, which I think is kind of the same with any kind of revolutionary or innovative technology is that the early days are much earlier than anybody realizes when they’re in them.

Alex:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. That reminds me of that office. The thing you did at the end about the good old days, you don’t realize, but it is true. And weirdly enough with NFTs, they all still exist. They’re just not worth a lot. But that doesn’t mean that in the future, bored apes can’t have some resurgence with some brand, the NFTs, the nft, the owner’s still the owner. Why can’t that person have 10% off something in 10 years as well? Because this all might, you know what the cycle of crypto is like. So this may come back. You never know. That’s the main thing about NFT. You never know. All of these things that we laugh about now, those stupid eight things that are worth nothing, maybe be worth double what they were in 10 years from their height. And then those people will be laughing again because they obviously didn’t sell them. They’ve lost it. So I’m just going to keep it now. What’s the point? Just in case it comes up again, that would be interesting to see if anything happens. But hell yeah, bored. Ape’s got really a lot of investment. Doodles got investment. They had Pharrell as their chief brand manager, but where have they all gone? It was a very weird place. It was a very unregulated And then Sam Free ruined it all for everyone.

Justin:
Yeah. Oh my goodness. You could take an hour just talking about him and that story. It’s just unreal. The entire thing.

Alex:
It is unreal. But I thought interesting about him not going back to him quickly. It would seem to be the biggest financial fraud in history making Bernie Madoff seem like he was just doing it on a Tuesday morning. And yet my parents, for example, don’t know anything about this guy or what happened. And I think it was in the news in England at least, there’s a very quick segment. Maybe it was an American thing, it was a bit bigger and I know that they could get a little bit more, but it’s not like it’s a real massive issue that happened. I thought a bit more would’ve happened to regulations since then.

Justin:
Yeah, I would say a much bigger deal in the new cycle in America with a 24 hour news cycle that is part of our modern day, things come and go so quickly where that entire story didn’t really come and go quickly. It was in the news for weeks and months really, the trial, the sentencing, the story out as it was breaking the drama of it all. And so I think what everybody sort of had something that they felt they felt a certain type of way about it is because there was something in it for everybody to feel a certain type of way. He comes in and he’s like, I just want to give away everything. And he’s making billions of dollars to give away. And so there’s one segment of people who are like, oh, he is a communist. That’s terrible. So there’s that bent of like, oh, I don’t like this guy.

And then there’s this sort of hyper privilege. You look at his parents and they’re these Stanford professors or whatever, this hyper privileged perspective where they sort of see him getting in trouble and they assume that they can buy their way out of it and that he will get a slap on the wrist or whatever. And then, so there’s that camp of people who feels like, oh, he’s just this privileged whatever white person. And so you have everybody left and center thinking this guy is the worst. So he’s kind of this wonderfully perfect villain. And of course humans we’re all just a mixed bag, and I’m sure he’s the same, but he just sort of had every angle in which somebody could latch onto something that they didn’t love about him, aside from the fact of just wasting billions of dollars and getting all these celebrities to endorse what he’s doing on one Super Bowl and then on the next Super Bowl, there’s no crypto because of him. Right.

Alex:
It’s crazy. It is. I mean, it’s going to make a fantastic Netflix documentary or maybe a film. Everyone’s been wanting Jonah Hill to play him or something.

Justin:
Yeah. Oh my goodness. Yeah. I want to circle back to something. I mean really, you just mentioned it in passing, but it is, to me, it’s so impressive and unique. What was, you talked about the process of getting some career counseling as a teenager, and here you are today as a principal, SEO at Yost. Give me a two minute version of that journey. How do you go from, I don’t know what I want to do with my life to, I’m a principal, SEO at the biggest SEO thing in the game. What has that journey been like?

Alex:
I was building computers as a kid when I was a teenager. I got a computer, I wanted to buy it as you get it, as a tower. Built that. So I knew we wrapped my way around computers, then I was taught HTML, and I understood that that was in school as well, which actually, to be fair, that was quite good considering it was probably 19 97, 19 98 flat, HTML, that was it. And then between that and college university, I taught myself PHP, HP, and just went into web development, downloaded the PHP manual and that was it. But meanwhile, in university, I was studying for law just in case none of all this computer stuff was a phase. And then in 20 years we’d be back to paper and everything. So I was like, I’ll do both. Didn’t want to be a lawyer. So I continued, I actually went into tv.

I worked as a part of TV production for a bit as that guy, it’s called a runner. I dunno what they’re called in America, they’re still called runners. But it’s basically someone who runs around and gets everyone cups of tea and drives a 50 miles to get a specific can of coke that they, that actually happened. I did that and then I thought, this is useless. You have to just kiss ass forever to maybe get an okay pay. And all I wanted to do was maybe release my own TV show, said that I’m going to go back into web development. And then I was told about SEO and said, do you understand this? And I went, I’ve never heard of SEO did a day course. And then at the end I understood everything. And not only that, I realized I was doing SEO in the past.

So if I go rewind back to when I was a teenager making HML sites and PHP, I made my own South Park fan site when I was 16, it was on season three. And I realized that you could rank on Google, which by the way had no sophisticated algorithm. So I could rank for Durex or Nike trainers on my South Park site. And then I realized that I could click jack so I could get paid per impression on an ad network. And then what I did was I made a one pixel by one pixel iframe that loaded on every single page load. And I brought all of these people in. What I was actually doing was SEO at the time, black hat, SEO. Nevertheless, without knowing what ethics were as a teenager, this is hacking, kind of hacking code, not hacking code, but I’m hacking the way that it interprets it.

And that’s kind of where it started. And I realized that I should actually have a job doing white hat, of course SEO. Then I started working in-house for small agencies as well. And then I created my own agency just over 10 years ago, my wife who was also doing SEO, but from a content and creative point of view that’s still running now Fire, just a small agency where we do organic paid PPC, email and of course WordPress development and design. But then after the NFT stuff that I told you about, I kind of wasn’t in Fire Cask as much and I decided to not go back and see if anyone noticed I was even there. And it turned out that as long as I did audits at nighttime, stuff like that, I wasn’t needed in client meetings or weekly updates. As long as I’m around for answering technical questions, then that’s it.

And I thought, well, I don’t want to work for another agency. I own one. I would work in house, so who would I work in house for? And Yoast is was clearly the most natural match for someone like me. And then I started talking to Jono Alderson, who I’ve now replaced at Yoast, and they were talking about filling a role and then he kind of described me. So I just obviously went into the interview process and I was one of two SEOs that got hired, which was just under a year ago now. And here I am.

Justin:
Wow. Wow. That’s amazing. What a cool journey. So what has the last year looked like for you and how different has it been from your last decade or more of agency life?

Alex:
Agency life is a different beast to in-house. And of course you’d know that and not just being an employee of an agency, owning an agency is this whole other level of pressure that you get that you also have to hide from everyone else other than your co-owners, which is my wife, which is obviously also hard because I want to enjoy my evening and my family life as well. So it wasn’t that I was getting burnout, but I was probably getting burnout. It’d been 10 years and I was done with agency client stuff and people and managing people. So I thought I want to get more into product. I’d made a couple of WordPress plugins in the past. They were nothing complex or anything like that. There were just these simple plugins that just did the job. And I knew I wasn’t going to make anything like Yoast at the time.

He was already ahead of me when I got into WordPress, he’d already created the first versions of WordPress, SEO. He knew more than me and he was more of an authority and I’d be damned if I was going to go up against him. So I worked with him weirdly enough with social structured data and Facebook OpenGraph and opening, defining the image and the title of that kind of stuff. So I did that kind of stuff and it was just, it’s very different in the way that because the product’s SEO, one thing I don’t have to do anymore is agree that I’d be retained on time and then have to talk people into why I was retained on time immediately. That’s an SEO is problem of I’m paying you now, where’s the results? And the results are organic. And yet when no one’s speaking about that magazine page that we all paid 10 grand for without any tracking and no one knows how it actually performed, you’ll do that again next month.

But I’ve got to answer all of these questions even though the attribution is the same. So I don’t miss that. But of course, I really, really enjoy getting involved with the product. The product is something I knew anyway as part of my job, SEO in general. So it really is, it was the right thing to do at the right part of my career. I’m really enjoying it and it’s really good to have both worlds. Having a little bit of agency time away from my normal job kind of is that amuse bo that I’ve still got both going. But yeah, it’s really enjoyable.

Justin:
That’s amazing. How do you find, because sort of in this space too of exploring products and maintaining sort of client services as an agency, building sort of a product incubation arm, how do you find that the work that you do still do in your agency informs what you do at Yost and vice versa?

Alex:
Because my work’s different. I’m one of the only techies there. I just update. I mean we’ve got Slack, so whenever something happens that I know is relevant to my team, such as there’s a Google Core update that just finished on a few days ago. So of course I update that and do any other commentary, that kind of thing. But other than that, because everything is mainly content and PM based and stuff that they’ve all known for years anyway, there’s actually not much that they need to know from a technical level. I get involved sometimes more with the dev projects of what schema should be in this, how should this URL structure be? What can we do to improve or optimize this script without harming search visibility, that kind of stuff, which I’ve always enjoyed more anyway, it’s still very balanced and everyone knows that if they ask me a question, those kind of questions don’t need an immediate answer. And they know that they’ll get their question by the time they have a coffee in the hand the next day. So it’s nice to balance it out. And it’s also good to see from a products point of view how an agency works and vice versa because being in Yoast, being an agency owner has been useful to them as well on how some of the end customers think rather than just getting people that may not know Yost or only know Yoast from being in house in one place.

Justin:
Right. So talk to me a little bit because seen me, I’ve seen not being in the SEO world, but adjacent to it, folks like Lily Ray and other kind of big SEO people talking about the impact of this latest core Google update. Can you tell me a little bit about what you’ve seen with it? I mean, what we’ve seen with our bigger publishing clients is a really mixed bag and a lot of confused people. So what are you seeing with it?

Alex:
I don’t want to say too much. It did only finish rolling out on the 25th, and it’s definitely dangerous to say what happened. Some people are very comfortable saying, oh, I can see what’s happening. And the rollout isn’t over yet. Some people may have and you may say you might have a dip, and then some stuff comes back just at the end, that kind of stuff. So I would say if this podcast was on a week from now, I’d have better stuff to say. But from what I do know, it seems like there’s a lot of neutral or negative that’s going out. And any positive change that someone may see, I might say may not be independently positive, but might be collectively negative for other people in sites that you are benefiting from. So that may be something to look at. It’s always good to look in search console if you don’t already.

It’s a great treasure trove of data, especially if you big publisher, it’s not like it’s GA where the day you install it is the day you get the day. So you can see back a little bit, but it’s always good to check out your three months on three months, what keywords were ranking that weren’t three months ago, sorry, the other way around. What isn’t ranking now? That was three months ago. What pages were being visited a lot three months ago that are no longer now? And why is the content you made, is it helpful? When I say helpful, have you made it in order to help the user or have you made it in order to rank for that term or a bunch of terms around that term or niche? If it’s the latter, go back to writing it again, improve it because it’s only supposed to be for the user.

And user interactivity is becoming more of a variable, even though it’s not proper confirmed. They’ve changed to INP in core web vitals recently, which does have to do with user interaction. It’s in three pillars of Google, such as content citations to that content and user’s interactivity with said content. So when it comes to this core update and helpful content, it’s never think of the search engine. The less you think of the search engine, the more you will ride naturally and the more visibility you will have hopefully in the end. And when it comes to ai, the more concise and unique information you have, the more of a chance you will get cited within that LLM. So looking beyond ChatGPT there’s a great one I’ve been using called Perplexity, use it. It’s great. It kind of shows you a bit more of the familiar search result that we see rather than a chat replying to you. It adds citations, it adds context, and it’s great for things like research and academic kind of stuff.

Justin:
That’s amazing.

Alex:
Well, how did you get into it? Because again, like I said before, you probably didn’t get that from your careers advisor, Hey, you can use an open source CMS and become a development agency owner. I don’t think anyone was ever going to be specific like that back in the day, right?

Justin:
No, no, no, no. Yeah, golly, that’s a really good question. How I got into it. It was much more out of necessity to be honest than it was out of any sense of this would be interesting. And so I’ll dive into a little bit of personal story. When I grew up, I grew up, my dad was kind of out of the picture and my mom was very sick with ms. Multiple sclerosis. And so that put my twin brother and my older sister and I kind of taking care of ourselves in really significant ways from the ages of eight to 15 or so. And so in that time span, I started to, we didn’t have any oversight, so we just would tinker around on computers and do whatever. And so probably around seven or eight years old, I started learning about code and tech and things like that.

And my brother and I, we would go skateboard out of skate park. And by 12 years old, I knew enough about code and whatnot. I could make websites at 12. And so I was at a skate park and there was a guy who had a skateboard company who was like, does anybody know anything about websites? He knew that was sort of like, it wasn’t going to be anybody his age that knew. And so this was probably, it would’ve been 1998 or so, somewhere in there. And so I was like, yeah, I can make you a website. And he was like, cool, how much? And again, I’m 12 years old, and so I was like a hundred bucks and he is done. And so a week later he had a website for his skateboard company. And I had this itch of this is cool, I can make real money.

And at the time, the minimum wage was three or $4 federally or something. It was low. And so I’m here at 12 years old thinking I just made a hundred bucks for a week of work and I could do this all day long. This isn’t working out in fields or factories. This is easy work. And today at 37, it’s still not fields or factories still we’re pretty privileged. And so at that point, and again, I was sort of in that mindset of I’m going to have to take care of myself. Parents aren’t really in the picture. And so the family situation got to a point where I was 14 years old. Ms had gotten so bad she had to go into a care facility. And so my brother and I had the opportunity, which I now see as an opportunity to either move in with grandparents that we had never met a thousand miles away or move in with my dad who lived in China that we hadn’t seen in seven or eight years and go live with him for an indefinite period of time.

This for context was right after nine 11. This was September 25th, 2001. And so at that point I was like, yeah, let’s hop and all of the adults in the room sort of put it to my brother and I at 14 years old, what do you guys want to do? And so we’re like, let’s move to China. So we did that for a year and then came back at 15. And that was enough experience of autonomy really, that I was in a place where I really said, I’m just going to take care of myself. So from 15 to 18, lived with roommates, move back to the states and lived with friends, finished school, and then within a month of turning 18 started the business. And so from 15 to 18, it was really just like, I’m going to continue to become the best developer I know how to be. This was before Twitter and GitHub and all these things where you get kids on there building amazing stuff. The days weren’t quite like that back in the early two thousands.

Alex:
You and MSM Messenger and mIRC.

Justin:
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I remember the good Merck days and all that. Yeah, no, it was a different in BBSs. Gosh, you remember those? Yeah, it was a different time. But I had that gift of autonomy from a really young age that I was like, yeah, I’m just going to do the thing myself. So from 15 to 18, it was build the craft, build the skills. Really, as soon as I turned 18, it was like, okay, I’m going to start the agency and go knocking on doors, see who needs a website basically. And so that was 20 years ago. Wow.

Alex:
Weirdly doing those things and being forced to be an adult when you’re younger does get you going as an adult and makes you probably stand on better legs later on in life. To be fair, I mean, I know I had zero ambition until after university, so it was weird. I think probably my wife brought me into having an entrepreneurial mindset because she already had one. It is very interesting to see how different people’s journeys lead them into some we’re doing the same, well, very similar things. Our parents would think we’re doing the exact same job even though we’re really not. And it is very annoying because I’ll get a call off my brother or something going, can you sort this laptop out? And I’m like, that isn’t my job. And in your head you’re like, although yeah, I actually could because I do know the generalization is true despite you wanting to do it. It’s also a curse, but I feel like I’ve stolen the technological skills from my entire family and brought it to my own. So I’m sorry about that, guys.

Justin:
No, yeah, I mean we all have to stand on somebody’s shoulders. So even looking at the time, those early years in the early two thousands, what an incredible time to get into tech. I think in some ways now it’s so much easier and in some ways now it’s so much harder. The space is so saturated and you have to be such a differentiator. You have to really provide unique value where back in 2005, I could just go to businesses and be like, Hey, this internet thing, this website thing, you need it. Here’s why. And you could make money. So yeah, it’s definitely pretty incredible the times that we’ve come up in.

Alex:
Yeah, it is interesting you say there’s opportunity, it’s easier, but it’s harder. That’s really true. I find it harder at the moment to run an agency because there are younger people who were me 10 years ago who have the energy I had 10 years ago doing that now, and I no longer have that energy and going into your forties and stuff like that. And you’re like, well, I know 10 years ago I wasn’t thinking about what I’d be doing at 50 60, but now I am. And it is very interesting the way in which your mindset goes, but then that makes you work a different way as well that you couldn’t do 10 years ago. But I’m glad I did when I had the energy. I actually used it parted a bit too much rather than focusing some of that energy on that work that really stands them into the thirties, forties and fifties. Yeah,

Justin:
Yeah, no, absolutely. I think now about how I’ve gotten into this sort of agency space, the things that I wish people would’ve told me back then, the things that I had such amazing opportunities because other business people in my community saw me as this 18-year-old kid trying to make it and they took chances on me. And so I look back now and I see that, and it does make me think a couple of things. Number one, how do I identify those people in my community now and take those chances on them? And also, I’ve got five kids in the world that they are graduating high school and university. The world that they’re going into is so different than what our parents and grandparents thought for us, right? Because the idea back in the 19 hundreds as my kids to remind me I’m from is go to college, get a wife, buy a house, live a happy life.

And the world has changed so much that I’m constantly wondering, how do you prepare the next generation for what’s coming when things are shifting and moving so quickly at breakneck speed, teaching them, oh, go into AI and machine learning. It’s like by the time my 14-year-old is done with university, how much human input is really going to be required there? It’s right now as they’re young and teenagers and things like that, much more of what I’m thinking is how do I prepare you to be an excellent human that people really want to work with? Because AI is always going to be helpful. Machine learning and software development. These things are going to be helpful and you can learn them now. You can learn them anytime. But the stuff that is really hard to teach once your brain is fully formed is how do you become someone that people just really love working with? How do you become someone who knows how to set a budget in a timeline and meet both of them? How do you become someone with integrity? Like AI can’t really teach those things, even university can’t necessarily teach those things.

Alex:
No, no. And it is interesting the more that this becomes a valid point. I mean, I’ve got a 2-year-old and I do think about that and weirdly at the beginning it stopped me from wanting a kid was this uncertainty. And this was before AI was the buzzword. So it was like, what are we getting these kids into in the future and how easy is it going to be? But then you get to the harder but easier remark that mediocrity will make it harder that if you do anything, this is what I don’t like about some parents, that they think that the teaching teaches everything. And actually parents are the extracurricular educators, not just parents. And that by the time they come out of school, they should have that set of life skills that teachers aren’t obligated to give. And I think that’s where it’ll be important because mediocrity will be more so that makes it the opportunity to excel over that mediocrity, those people will kind of like a rich poor gap will get wider kind of thing.

That it may be easier to become richer if you apply yourself at the right times earlier on in your life that may have still been applying to us, which is very interesting, but they can’t replace us yet. They may be more intelligent in five, someone was saying in five years it’ll reach singularity, but that doesn’t mean that we’re not needed for ourselves or for the world to continue. What do we do to bring in money? I don’t think that those are going to really be the things that we’re going to worry about. This isn’t going to be an episode of the Terminator, and if it is, there’s no hope, right? Not like there is on the films. There isn’t going to be some Terminator who’s just going to make mates with the kid creator of what have you, and that’s how it works. Well either die without knowing, kind of like the submersible when everyone said no one even knew because it happened like that faster than that click. That’s probably what it would happen if we were to die. None of us would even, and therefore it’s blissful anyway because we’d be naive to it. Again, going matrix style, aren’t you? Does it matter if you’re in the Matrix, I guess is part of the question.

Justin:
Yeah, no, we got really existential here at the end. I like that.

Alex:
I know I started from an I like South Park.

Justin:
Yeah. What a journey we can end with.

Alex:
I like South Park. Oh man. I dunno if you’ve seen the episode of South Park about AI and ChatGPT.

Justin:
No, I haven’t. I saw the first South Park was a distinctly teenage phenomenon in my life. I remember when it came out in 1996 and gosh, I would’ve been 10 or 11 should my parents have let me watch it. No, but like I mentioned, they weren’t really there, so it was a very big part of my life.

Alex:
See mine too. But I mean I stopped watching it, but then I came back to it. I mean, after I knew they were making a Kanye episode again, and after I knew they were making a Prince Harry episode, I was like, I’ll give it a go. And then they were both very funny and the season has been, but the AI one was great, but it does, the thing about Salpa is that despite the juvenile comedy, they do bring up really, really good debate. And this one was teaching and education. So the kids found out that chat, GPT existed, wow, it can do our homework for us. Mr. Garrison gives out the homework and then Mr. Garrison goes home and goes up to his other half and goes, I’ve just found this thing called ChatGPT that can mark all the kids’ work. And then that’s what was, there was this relay of AI created work that then created AI, created marking of the works and no one was actually doing anything. And whilst again, juvenile actually does create a really good and goes back to mediocrity, the only kid that, they’ll probably be one kid in that class who just didn’t use AI and did the work and therefore is knowledgeable. Whereas the others were like expect now the machine to have that knowledge. So hopefully we’re not going to go warly style and everyone’s just going to end up in a mobility scooter and with all machines telling us how to live properly without moving all lazy and then complain they’re taking over even though we submit to it.

Justin:
And I think circling back a little bit to something that I think is true now and I think will probably be true for a while, is whether it’s an e-commerce site or content or anything else that’s AI driven, you can kind of tell the human part of, you can parse out and distinguish something between what is a unique perspective from a human and what has been sort of cobbled together by AI.

Alex:
How do you know that ?

Justin:
You can feel it?

Alex:
Yeah. No, no, no. I agree. I believe that if I read something that’s been created by ai, I know it has. And conversely, if I read something that I was told that was made by a human, but I would really not be happy about that fact and I would probably get put off by the brand weirdly enough. But if I didn’t know, how do you know? I would like to hope that we are clever enough to figure it out. But talk in singularity again in a few years there will not be a difference or will there, the machines will know how to do puzzles that I don’t know at the moment. We know that if it has zero always gives ’em zero errors grammatically and spelling, for example, and humans make mistakes, then they’ll realize that and then some in

Justin:
They can learn. Artificial intelligence is different than emotional intelligence and so will they ever get to an emotionally intelligent place. That to me is That’s true singularity when there’s actual emotional intelligence. It

Alex:
Is crazy. It is crazy. But yeah, it’ll be interesting to see how web development companies work in the future as well. Whilst staff feel sorry for Stack Overflow now, will it just again be, it won’t be able to, it can create websites and stuff. I just don’t think, again that human touch is, and people of people not robots just like brands, people, people over brands. That’s why people like spokespeople rather than just seeing a logo. It’s one of those things that I think would be quite interesting to see how we deal with e-commerce or just transacting in general in the future.

Justin:
Yeah, I mean I tweeted this a long time ago, but in agency world we have charts that show who’s responsible, accountable, consulted and informed. And you can’t put AI in any of those columns. You just can’t. And so maybe consulted. And so I think as long as humans are around, we’re going to like working with humans. And I mean even to other effects like AI is not going to come and fix my pool or unclog a toilet or whatever. There’s going to be work for humans for a long time, I think even in the agency world. So I’m optimistic anyway.

Alex:
We’ll be needed somewhere at some point.

Justin:
I’m sure that’s what we have to tell ourselves, Alex, isn’t it?

Alex:
Yeah. So have you got any projects coming up that you’re allowed to talk about maybe or allude to?

Justin:
Yeah, I mean I think the most exciting thing for our agency right now is we’ve been in this agency client services space for a long time. One of our big recent launches that we loved that was so much fun was the Chia Pet website that moved over from Shopify to WooCommerce. And so we are doing lots of fun things in the e-commerce space, but the thing that we’re most excited about right now is really converting a portion of our agency into what we’re really calling a WooCommerce product incubator for the people. So there’s a lot of WooCommerce product companies and all of them are driven by markets, they’re driven by passion, they’re driven by all types of things. And we’re really doing an experiment, I would say over the next 12 months of what if we just sort of didn’t try to push something onto the market, but pulled something from the market of like, Hey, here’s what these people really are desperate for WooCommerce to be able to do that I can’t do.

And we have 20 years of experience building out e-commerce, data modeling and user interfaces and all kinds of things. So let’s take these ideas from the people that might not be broad or big enough for a big wide product market push that it’s not going to be a billion or even a million dollar idea, but let’s take a portion of our agency, make it a product incubator for the people to build out some products and see what happens. So we’re spinning up some products right now, really following the sort of Basecamp three and six weeks cycles for a good V one on things like that. So that’s been fun because again, being with WP E-Commerce and having some product background but not really diving all into it, it’s something that we’re really excited about right now as an agency.

Alex:
That’s really cool. That’s really cool. From a yo’s point of view, I know we’re doing lots of product development stuff and I know that away from Fire Cask, I do product design, but offline I’ve designed a backpack, which is interesting. Now I can’t look at backpacks the same again or luggage in general. I look at the quality of stitching and things like that nowadays. But that it’s nice to also, it is nothing to do with what I do, but it does still teach you product development from a digital point of view as well, which is a bag and a WordPress plugin. Clearly very different things, but also the methodology of making it happen is not very similar, but it goes through the same workflow process of design, implementation, testing, valuation, all that kind of stuff that I learned in school.

Justin:
Yeah, absolutely. That’s exciting. That’s great. What’s anything exciting coming up for you in agency world or over at Yost?

Alex:
An agency world? No, just same old doing stuff. I’m using site editor, full site editor quite a bit more now. I’m playing around with it and working more on local environments. Since MAMP stopped working, I had to install something else and now I’m using local wp.com, which I’m finding quite cool. Cool.

Justin:
Yeah, local’s good.

Alex:
Yeah, it’s been really good. And yeah, I wanted to do my own theme around customer. I’m like, no, no, no, I just want to strip it. I don’t want to be such a techie. It’s like try and think about end user. I want to go through and just start as though, try and pretend I don’t know any coding and see what I can get up to without actually implementing any code or implementing as a little third party resources as possible. So that weirdly is something I like doing is going back to the, because you forget when you are running a business or you’re dealing with calls, you forget to do stuff like looking at the latest product features or improvements. And that, again, is something that’s nice to have more time to do within Yost. So yeah, no, it’s cool. I’m looking forward to what more WordPress is going to do to the website owner over the years.

Justin:
Oh, for sure. Yeah. I’m more optimistic about the WordPress direction, especially with this new phase of development with collaborative efforts in the block editor and where everything’s going. Yeah, I’m loving it. It

Alex:
Is really good. But yeah, where can people find you so that I can follow you on Twitter?

Justin:
I’m still on Twitter actually. I still like Twitter. Okay. It’s all about curation. So you can find me on Twitter at js_zao. You can find us online at Zao our website. And probably by the time this airs, we’ll have launched our incubator site simple.co. Yeah, you can find us pretty much anywhere. The Post Status slack is great. You can find me in there as well.

Alex:
That’s why we found each other. Yeah, and I’m on X as well at Alex Moss. My company is FireCask.com and of course Yoast is yoasts.com, which is Toast with a W.

Justin:
Toast with a Y. I love it. That’s wonderful. Well, thanks for a great chat today, Alex. This has been fun.

Alex:
Yeah, no worries. No worries. And we’ll chat again soon, I’m sure.

Justin:
Sounds good.