SiteGuru

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SiteGuru is a Dutch seo website audit company. The company was founded in 2018 by Rick van Haasteren and is based in Katwijk.

SiteGuru crawls and analyzes your website to help your SEO and online marketing activities. We monitor your website and help you find and fix issues. Get started for free!

Company History

Rick van Haasteren details the beginnings of their company in their Starter Story interview: ^[1]

Q: How did you get started on SiteGuru?

I’ve been working on side projects for as long as I can remember. I’ve built an online HTML course, a travel blog, and many other things - some successes, mostly failures. Although I think failure isn’t the right word. I wasn’t always able to capture a big audience or make it profitable, but I always had fun and learned tons of new things.

One of the things I built is a wine webshop that specializes in South-African wines. I run it together with my wife. I can tell you, starting a business together is a great way to test your relationship. The webshop is doing great, and an extra benefit is that we always have plenty of good wines if we feel like opening a bottle.

During my day job as a project manager at an internet agency, we would launch new websites every few weeks. I noticed that with every launch, there would be a couple of small issues that affected the website’s performance in search engines. A missing meta description, a few big images making the site really slow, or a no-index tag that was missed. Ough!

I wanted to create a checklist in Excel that our developers could use to make sure they didn’t miss anything. The problem with those checklists is that, well, nobody actually uses them. Instead, I created a tool that checks the homepage and listed the issues. All you had to do is enter the URL and you’d get the results.

If I would have known how hard it would be to build an SEO tool, I probably never would have started.

I loved the idea of building this into a full-blown website audit tool, but I knew it would be a lot of work. To validate the idea, I took a few weeks to build a minimum viable product. Then, I set up Smartlook, a screen recording tool, and I would spend $10 on Google Ads every day to drive some traffic to the website. Each day, I would get about 10 visitors and I watched their recordings. It was clear that people liked it, but I also saw what wasn’t working, and how I could improve it. It’s a super cheap way to test your product, and it’s almost as good as sitting next to your customers and see them use your product.

I still have my day job and spend time in evenings and weekends building the product.

Source ^[1]

Technology

SiteGuru is built on Amazon Web Services.

They use SendinBlue and G Suite for their email. Google Suite and Todoist for their productivity. Twitter for their social media.

References

Contributors

Contributors to this article:

• Pat Walls, Founder @ Starter Story
• Wiki Updater