Yoast has a new CEO: Thijs de Valk

As of last week, Thijs de Valk is Yoast’s new CEO. Thijs used to be the Chief Commercial Officer at Yoast. He’s very excited to start this new role of leading the company. Marieke van de Rakt, former CEO and founder of Yoast SEO academy, will be focusing mostly on content marketing as Creative Marketing Manager.

The new CEO: Thijs

Thijs first started working at Yoast right after finishing his Master’s degree in Pedagogical Sciences (which is akin to developmental psychology). This was back in 2012 when he was employee #4. In his time at Yoast, Thijs has had a lot of roles, ranging from doing support, writing reviews, and marketing and product roles. He’s actually worked at Yoast two times. He came back for his second and current “stint” nearly 3 years ago. His reasons for coming back also make his love for the company clear:

“Yoast was my first ever real job. So it was good for me to have a few years’ worth of experience in other companies. What I’ve mostly learned is that there are few other companies that are as vision driven as Yoast. Yoast is constantly driven by their love for the web and wanting to improve the web as much as possible. That intrinsic drive and the extraordinary people that work here meant I just had to come back. And I’m now ready and extremely honored that I get to lead this company.”

Will there be any big changes?

“In short: no. We’ve been acquired by Newfold this year, which will give us, and is already giving us, a lot of opportunities. Yoast will continue its mission as it always has. We’ll still be helping people improve their website’s SEO through our software and our academy courses. The business is really running quite well, so there’s no real need for any changes.

Having said that, there are still so many chapters for Yoast to write. And I’m extremely excited to help write those chapters. We want to keep making a positive impact on the web and we already have some amazing stuff lined up to do just that. As ever, it’s still onwards and upwards!”