Published by Sue Johns-Chapman
Published Date 25.07.2024 
Blog post for Yoast being in the final of the Global Search Awards
Yoast is an innovative and progressive software development company, best known for developing Yoast SEO, the number one plugin on WordPress with over 13 million users worldwide. Yoast’s mission is SEO for everyone!
Founded in 2007 in Wijchen, the Netherlands, the Yoast team consists of about 150 people. With around 80 people working in Wijchen, and the rest of the Yoasters based all over the globe.
As part of Newfold Digital, Yoast continues to give back to both the local and WordPress communities. With team members serving as WordPress Core contributors, Yoast actively participates in WordPress events worldwide by sponsoring, volunteering, attending, and speaking. Additionally, Yoast organizes WordPress contributor days and oers funds like the Diversity Fund and Care Fund to support contributors.
One of Yoast’s core commitments is to educate customers. After all, SEO for everyone means sharing SEO knowledge with everyone. So far, the Yoast SEO Academy has helped over 500,000 people (and counting) learn more about how to master SEO and improve their websites.
Entering the Global Search Awards 2024 has provided an opportunity to demonstrate Yoast’s dedication to empowering businesses of all sizes with SEO tools and knowledge. This nomination also recognizes the incredible achievements of the Yoast team over the past year, particularly with the launch of the AI-generated meta description and title feature, for which Yoast is shortlisted in the ‘Best Global Search Software Tool’ category.
The AI-generated meta descriptions and titles feature simplifies SEO for digital novices by generating optimized titles and meta descriptions for posts and pages.
The launch of the feature involved significant cross-functional collaboration at various levels. Even while the product-market fit was still being validated, the development team had leaped to the challenge and was already building the feature. The quality assurance team was monitoring the final results at all intermediate stages, enabling a constant feedback loop between all of them to make sure no stones were left unturned. The Yoast team came through and solved all technical issues faced.
Released in August 2023, and expanded in March 2024, this feature enables Yoast SEO Premium users to instantly generate personalized titles and meta descriptions tailored to their content. Customers can choose from 5 options, with the ability to generate more or tweak the results as needed, ensuring they remain in control while being assisted by AI.
This release combined Yoast’s SEO and linguistic expertise with the capabilities of OpenAI. While anyone can ask ChatGPT for a meta description, the real value of Yoast’s feature lies in the quality of the prompts and the built-in technical knowledge for quality assurance checks. This feature assists businesses with limited SEO expertise to adhere to best practices, enhancing their chances of attracting visitors from search results.
Overall, the introduction of AI into the product has been a key enabler in assisting customers to overcome the (let’s face it) overwhelming amount of SEO best practices with which they need to navigate.
Comment from the company
Kimberley Cole, Senior Vice President – Europe at Yoast reflects the sentiment of the full Yoast team:
“We are immensely proud to be nominated for the Best Global Search Software Tool award and wish the best of luck to all the nominees across all of the award categories”.
Connect with Yoast
● X/Twitter ● LinkedIn ● Instagram ● Youtube
