Woorank

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Woorank

Technology

Limited Liability Company

Belgium

www.woorank.com

Instant results, easy to use and fully automatic

Boris Demaria

Benoit van der Maas

Jean Dérely, Nils De Moor and Boris Demaria

Summary

Woorank is a company that helps optimizing your website, from SEO to digital marketing. Woorank helps to analyze and optimize websites.

Background

At first Woorank was a side project, the name Woorank comes from ‘to woo’ which means to seduce, Woorank tries to seduce the Google search rankings. At that time there was a new industry called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The problem was that there were self-proclaimed experts who charged sometimes a very high fee for optimizing websites. For most of the people it was very hard to understand what they were talking about. It was also difficult for the clients to asses if they did a good job or not. For an average person it was very difficult to know if the job of the expert was worth the money.

Then the founder Boris Demaria came to the idea to create a benchmarking tool to asses the digital marketing effectiveness. A friend of the founder started as a SEO-expert, in his job he had to asses every website manually. Then Boris and his friend were convinced that there should be a way to automate and streamline this process of assessing websites. They started systematically listing all the criteria and ranking signals that have significant importance for search engines. With this system it was possible to wrap up all the results in a simple report

To start Woorank the founders needed some money so at the start they used their own money to finance the start of Woorank.

It all started from a crazy idea, they all were very curious and adventurous so they wanted to have some kind of minimal viable product (MVP). At that time Boris worked at a webdesign company, a developer in that company was also very interested in the idea of Boris. Together they worked a couple of months to create the first version of Woorank. They’ve put the website online and for one and a half year the website ran all by itself. The website was totally free at that time, Woorank became quite known and the traffic kept increasing. At that point the founders began thinking how to continue with Woorank, their website didn’t generate any profit, but there was still a cost to pay. The positive news was that there was a need for a website like Woorank, there was interest from all over the world. So the founders decided to quit their current job and focus on Woorank. For expanding Woorank they needed money to pay employees, servers and all other costs. They asked different business angels, banks and other resources to find capital. Every person they talked to said that it was an interesting idea but that there was no way that they would invest anything. They all told them to come back when they had their first paying customer. Of course this was not the news the founders hoped to receive. Then they received some financial help from their parents, the CTO lowered his salary to the minimum and the two founders started working without salary for more than one year. They created the company in July 2011, they put all their effort in coding a website that would be the first paying version of Woorank. The website went live nine months later. And then just after two months they reached their break-even point. At that point business angels and banks offered them capital but the founders denied. From then on Woorank grew organically meaning that they only used their own money to grow the company.

Mission

Woorank believes that everybody who has something valuable to say or to sell deserves to reach and grow his digital audience. It is WooRank's mission to facilitate findability so that they can make the digital world a more relevant and fulfilling marketing playground.

Vision

To be a findability facilitator, they want to democratize the digital marketing for everyone.

Values

Accessibility for everyone, transparency, convenience.

Business Model

The businessmodel of Woorank is very innovative, this is also confirmed by Solvay Business School who uses Woorank in different cases because of their businessmodel. The businessmodel is the honeypot-strategy as the founder names it. It’s all about creating content that you would offer for free. The website was free, everyone could generate as many reviews as they wished. But the brilliant part was that every review would be publicly available. The more reviews users generate, the more content on the Woorank website. This content would then be indexed by Google and bring more visitors on Woorank.com. This kind of vicious circle worked extremely well. Today this strategy wouldn’t work anymore because Google changed its algorithm.

Another important part is that because the company is founded in Belgium, the website had to be multilingual. This is very rare, for example in the U.S. websites would only be in English neglecting the fact that there is a large Hispanic and Chinese community. Because Woorank is available in six languages a review wouldn’t create one page but six, this creates six times more content findable by search engines.

Normally SEO is very technical and very website specific. Nowadays there are more and more ways to increase the visibility of a website outside of that website. It all started with backlinks, this creates a kind of spider web between websites. Now there are also local directories, this is for when websites want to have a strong presence in a certain segment for example in Foursquare or Yelp. At Woorank they automate all these insights to give the most relevant recommendation.The main idea of Woorank is being a tool to easily audit a website. The users will get a report of the website at a certain moment.

Woorank wanted to use a subscription based businessmodel, in that way the revenue is recurring. To make sure the subscription model would work they searched for locking-factors. They made it possible to see changes in website-traffic. Advanced review is the payable service of Woorank, this features a certain tracker that monitors the website. With this tracker the user will get alerted when something important happens with the website for example when the website is down. A lot of small business owners only realize their website is down when their customers tell them, when a website is down for more than an hour this could completely destroy the visibility and this is very difficult to fix. The freemium model includes one free website review without paying.

Growth

Last year Woorank had 2.500.000€ revenue, they aim for 3.500.000 next year. The year after they plan to have an exponential growth. Compared to other businesses, Woorank grew enormous in the past years but this still didn’t meet the ambition of the founders.

Customers

The first users were web-professionals, since then the non-professional use increased a lot. The main target are small and medium sized companies. Woorank divides their users into 4 main segments:

·The experts in the digital marketing field, they are improving their client’s website using Woorank. They know everything that is mentioned on the Woorank website.
The pitchers, they use Woorank to pretend to be an expert in the digital marketing field. These are mostly freelance website builders.
DIY’ers, these are business owners who have the will and time to improve their website themselves. This segment is divided in four more segments
- E-commerce websites
- Click and mortar businesses, this is not an e-commerce website but people can book or reserve online. The customers will still have to go to a physical place to get the product or service, for example: hotels, restaurants, and concert-halls.
- Brick and mortar-businesses, these are physical shops that want to use their website to attract customer to their shop. They don’t have online revenue.
- Portfolios: any kind of freelance consultant will want to have a kind of online business card. Their website is to show their expertise. This is also used in the B2B market where businesses show who they are online but not sell online.
·The newbies, these people discover that they have a problem with their website. They don’t have the time and skills to improve the website themselves. Woorank connects these people to their own directory of experts

Competitors

There is some direct competition but most of the time these companies position themselves as a Woorank alternative. This is quite positive for Woorank because those sites keep reminding customers of Woorank’s existence. Woorank also has indirect competitors, these are online digital marketing tools but they only asses some parts of the website, not every part as Woorank. Woorank sees some users that stop using Woorank to probably try another tool, but a lot of these users will eventually start using Woorank again

Conclusion

Opportunities for Woorank are mainly partnerships in the form of affiliation and also in the form of exchange of visibility by partnering with content marketing websites. Woorank also has some weaknesses, the lack of deep knowledge of the users because all of them are acquired online. Another weakness is the dependency on search engines, when Google decides to change something in their search engine Woorank will have to change their platform too.

Boris Demaria gave his best advice for starting entrepreneurs;

Find a real solution for a real problem, a problem that a lot of people have.
Work on a MVP, it just needs to give basic idea of what you have in mind.
Try to run an small advert campaign, if you do it well, some people will have interest in your product. After finding those interested people, ask their email address and find out if your idea makes sense for them.

Starting Woorank wasn’t easy, one of the biggest problems they faced was finding the good team. The way of working in the startup will change with the evolution of the company, this means the employees will also have to their way of working what could be a problem. Also building a good company culture wasn’t easy, a company culture is a like a house of cards build on trust, it’s though to build and very easy to break.

The ambition of the founder is being extremely relevant in every single website review. The future of Woorank lies in being able to only give the most important insights for a certain type of website on a certain time. The future will be less, because less is more.

Posted on 10/05/2016