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Find the original on: https://cms2cms.com/blog/interview-with-florin-muresan/
Today we’re excited to introduce you to Florin Muresan, CEO of Squirrly, an expert at validating startup ideas and products on the market, SEO and Content Marketing. Squirrly SEO 2020 is the Popular Tool that NON-SEO Experts use to increase their search engine traffic. You will see success in the first few weeks if you follow the Daily SEO Goals and work with the included tools. Enjoy reading
Florin, tell our readers a bit about yourself. How did you get the idea to create the Squirrly SEO plugin? Who or what inspired you?
Thanks for having me!
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I’m CEO and Co-Founder of the Squirrly Company, and this is the second tech company I’ve co-founded (both of them started with my current co-founder, Calin).
I was a Social Media Expert 11 years ago (it was a really new and edgy thing back then). I also did SEO and webdesign work for clients.
Having worked with 500 Small Businesses on their digital presence I’ve realized that they need a lot of help to understand how they (the SMBs) can reach customers and how customers could reach them via the Internet.
Once we started a Website Builder SaaS back in the day, we realized that the biggest problem that customers had was not building their own site. It was getting it out there. The problem is they couldn’t make their site take off, and the site ended up having very few visits.
So clearly, the website needed a lot more than just being held active and placed “up” on the internet.
We quickly gathered 16,000 users to that website builder, because we were the only ones to teach (after we re-iterated; or “pivoted”) the users how they can make their sites famous and gather an audience for whatever they did: photography, art, book writing, recipe blogs, construction companies, real estate, etc.
It became clear to us that our methods of motivating and coaching users into action (the actions that lead to getting traffic to their websites) was the thing we did best. Our advisors and mentors also told us the same thing, including one of the early investors in Sound Cloud.
So we said: Okay, let’s do all the good things and ground-breaking work that we do on WordPress, because they already have millions of people building websites there.
That’s how Squirrly SEO got started. We knew from experience that this was what people needed the most and we’re happy that we finally built a Private SEO Consultant for WordPress. These days it can take you from having a really bad site, to having a super popular one that’s ranked for tens of keywords (in some cases even thousands of well-searched-for keywords).
We know that you consider education as the most important thing that humans have. What would you recommend newbies to learn first of all about SEO?
This is a really good question, and if you would have asked me this question years ago, my answer would have been completely different.
1) First thing they need to learn is that changing meta descriptions and playing around with schema implementations won’t get you to the first page of Google search.
2) Also: the fact that ranking for the homepage of the site is a poor strategy and that one should use at least 20 pages in their sites in order to move the needle on SEO.
Creating a SEO Strategy, based on keywords that end-customers search for. After they understand the two key points I wrote above, then they need to start learning about this and it will make all the difference in the world for their business.
By teaching our users, using the steps above, we’ve helped them completely exceed their very own expectations in terms of organic traffic growth.
You have already created a software product and an educational product. So, what are your next plans?
To keep building insanely great marketing products.
We have 8 best-sellers in our list at the moment: https://www.squirrly.co/keep-ranking/
Our vision is to help customer Be Found.
Via: search engines, social media, email inboxes, blog posts, training materials, content marketing.
With Squirrly SEO we cover being found via search engines.
With Squirrly Social we cover being found via social media
With Starbox PRO we cover making authors found via blog posts. It makes them really shine inside the articles where their author box is placed and this really helps authors be found by the readers of those posts.
With Education Cloud 2020 we’ve started getting third party authors to create content, so we help them be found via training materials. They build more trust and authority by creating exclusive classes for our own private “Netflix for Marketing Education”
With ContentLook, we help those who have over 200 blog posts to really figure out which of their content works amazingly well for their content marketing strategy, and to figure out how to better insert their best pieces of content into the Customer’s Journey.
It’s been our dream to help all kinds of dreamers, creative types and business owners to Be Found. We’ll just keep building on that.
Which difficulties have you met during the development of your project?
Bad competitors. From giving us 1-star reviews (that were actually traced back to them; this isn’t just a hunch or opinion) to other things.
I guess the biggest problem is that most companies in SEO are currently lying to people and not telling them that you can’t do SEO without taking into account all 200 ranking factors that Google uses.
Telling people they will rank higher on search engines, because they wrote a new Title and Meta Description is just wrong. There are way more important ranking factors contributing to actual SEO, than just these basics that the other plugins do.
Pushing code inside a page’s source code is not what SEO is about.
As far as I know, your website is created on WordPress CMS. What are your perspectives on the future of WordPress? Do you think that the WordPress market will keep on growing?
Yes, I really think that WordPress will keep growing.
The things you can do with plugins and theme builders in 2020 is pretty much phenomenal.
Back in 2012 when we switched from our own CMS to WordPress we didn’t expect it to become so good. We thought that it would grow, but we never thought it would become so good.
There are many good companies doing great work to make WordPress a super impressive CMS. And the ecosystem is just huge these days.
What does your typical workday look like? Is there something special you do to stay productive during the day?
I don’t think I have a typical workday.
There are many exciting projects that we work on internally with our core team. A lot of the projects become huge hits with our community, so there’s no telling what will happen on any given day.
We also have customers from over 90 countries and when I need to have calls I might have to be in the office very early or very late, depending on time zones.
What I can tell you is workdays involve insane amounts of coffee.
To stay productive I just listen to Taylor Swift… and HammerFall. How those two work together is a mystery even for me, but it’s what it is.
We know it’s hard to take out time from a busy schedule. But, everyone needs to take a break. What do you do in your free time? Do you switch easily between your personal and professional life?
No, I don’t switch easily. I really love the work we do, the new challenges we can solve for our customers, so these things tend to occupy a really big portion of my brain activity.
In my free time I love to travel with my wife and my 5 year old child. This year has been quite sad on that front, so it’s been harder to disconnect.
However, we do build a lot of things: from Lego to Hot Wheels tracks (some of them defy the rules of physics) to train tracks we create lots of interesting worlds together.
Oh, and I also love writing in my free time. Writing SciFi and Fantasy.
A million thanks for accepting our interview invitation. If there is something that you want to share with our readers now is the time? Please feel free to share as much as you want.
Yes, I’m happy to take this opportunity.
Learn. Learn as much as you can.
There’s so much you can be doing for yourself and for your business just by learning about marketing from people who know how to explain it.
Invest time in finding great sources of marketing knowledge. There are many things to find and they can make a real difference in helping you to finally take off and reach Digital Marketing Superstar level.
Our team is extremely thankful for the time Florin has spent to share his insights and motivate us. We want to sincerely wish him great luck and achieving new levels of success!
