Identifying viable opportunities to start a new online business that stands a chance to succeed is harder than ever. All markets look overcrowded, and it feels like there is always someone one step ahead. What do the top in class know that you don’t?
In this interview series by Website Planet, experts from the top companies in AI, SaaS, martech, and more reveal exactly how they validate gaps in their industry to develop solutions that thrive even in the most competitive markets, and what emerging trends they’re going to leverage to keep their competitive edge. A condensed playbook backed by decades of experience and expertise, concrete metrics, and real-life stories that will help you learn how to spot the right opportunity at the right time, and craft a truly-unique value proposition.
Bhanu Ahluwalia is the Chief Marketing Officer and a co-founder of Rank Math, one of the most popular SEO plugins for WordPress with over 3 million active installations, and a number of positive reviews and accolades within the WordPress community that is not entirely possible to count anymore. He is also the brain behind MyThemeShop, a theme and plugin marketplace with over 550k users.
What gaps or trends in your industry led to the founding of your company, and what are your biggest milestones so far in terms of customers, revenue team, etc.?
Back in 2015, while running MyThemeShop and various other sites, we realized that none of the SEO plugins on the market offered a complete SEO solution. They didn’t offer everything that we needed. We saw an opportunity to build something better—a plugin that could meet all our SEO needs in one plugin.
Since we had the capacity to develop it for internal use, we started building what would eventually become Rank Math. For over three and a half years, we used it in-house, refining it to solve the challenges we faced as professional bloggers and website owners. As word spread and demand grew, we decided to release Rank Math publicly in late 2018.
The response from the community was incredible. Rank Math quickly gained traction, and we’ve been grateful ever since. We’ve recently surpassed 3 million active installations, a milestone that reflects just how well Rank Math has been received.
What are currently the most pressing pain points that you solve, and what makes them more urgent now than in the past?
One of the biggest challenges in SEO today is keeping up with the constant changes in search engine algorithms. What works today might be outdated tomorrow, making it difficult for website owners and SEOs to stay ahead.
Search engines are continuously changing how they evaluate content, which means businesses must adapt quickly or risk losing traffic and visibility. But keeping up with Google updates takes time, and SEOs have so many tasks to take care of.
Rank Math simplifies SEO tasks through automation while ensuring that you are always aligned with the latest best practices. This helps you stay competitive and effortlessly adapt to the fast-paced SEO landscape.
How are people usually trying to fix these problems, and what’s wrong with these solutions?
In recent years, SEO has become more complex due to frequent updates from search engines like Google.
We’ve seen significant changes, including updates to the Schema Markup that Google recognizes and new guidelines around AI-generated content. The migration from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 has also required website owners to update their tracking setups.
If you use multiple plugins to manage your on-page SEO efforts, keeping up with all these changes would have required waiting for updates from respective plugins or making manual adjustments.
With Rank Math, our users don’t need to worry about these changes. We constantly update the plugin to keep pace with new SEO guidelines, so users can rest assured they are already following best practices without even realizing it.
This approach helps our users stay ahead of the curve, allowing them to focus on growing their business instead of being bogged down by the technicalities of SEO changes.
What features or unique approaches make your way to solve them better, and how has that helped you make an impact? Can you share metrics or stories that show the difference you’re making?
Rank Math was built from the ground up with website performance in mind. We designed the plugin to be lightweight and scalable, ensuring that it doesn’t slow down websites.
One of the core aspects of Rank Math is our modular approach—users can activate only the features they need, keeping their website’s code base slim and high-performing. Whether it’s redirections, advanced Schema, or Content AI, users have the flexibility to enable just what’s necessary.
This framework has allowed us to easily introduce new and essential features, making Rank Math the first plugin to bring several SEO innovations to WordPress. By being modular, we ensure that users—from beginners to advanced SEOs—can tailor the plugin to their specific needs without sacrificing speed.
What exciting new projects or updates are you working on right now? What made you decide to focus on them, and how are they going to benefit your customers?
We’re always looking for ways to make SEO easier and more effective for our users. Right now, we’re focused on expanding our AI SEO features.
One of our latest updates is the Blog Post Wizard within Content AI, which allows users to generate long-form, SEO-optimized content in just a few clicks. The idea behind this tool is to remove writer’s block and streamline the content creation process, enabling users to produce high-ranking content faster than ever before.
Similarly, we introduced a feature to generate alt text automatically for the images that don’t have one. Our Content AI analyzes the image and generates a suitable alt text.
These updates highlight our effort to simplify SEO tasks that are usually time-consuming, and over time our users will continue to see benefits in terms of saved time, improved SEO performance, and higher rankings.
What trends and technologies are you keeping an eye on? What opportunities and challenges will they bring to your industry?
We’re closely watching the evolution of AI in SEO. As AI models continue to improve, they offer unprecedented opportunities for content optimization and automating SEO efforts.
The beauty of AI is that it levels the playing field—tools like Rank Math’s Content AI allow solopreneurs and small businesses to produce high-quality content without needing a large team or resources.
The challenge will be ensuring that AI tools don’t make content feel generic. We’re addressing this by making our AI tools collaborative—allowing users to input their own insights and have the AI optimize around them. This way, content remains human-centered but enhanced by AI.
The future of SEO is undoubtedly tied to AI, and we’re excited to be a part of this evolving space.
If there was one piece of advice you wish to leave for those starting now, what would it be?
SEO is not a one-time task—it’s a continuous journey that requires adaptability.
With every major update from search engines, people tend to ask, “Is SEO dead?”
The answer is a resounding no. SEO is more alive than ever, but it’s changing. What worked yesterday may not work tomorrow, and that’s why it’s essential to stay updated and flexible.
Rank Math is built to evolve with these changes, so my advice would be to embrace SEO as a continuous journey. Keep learning, stay adaptive, and use tools like Rank Math to streamline your workflow and stay ahead of the curve.
With over 13 years of experience in SEO and managing content websites, he has coordinated over 5000 product reviews and interviews with the biggest names in eCommerce, web hosting, cybersecurity, SaaS, AI, and online marketing, to provide newbies and experts with untapped, actionable insights from the top experts in the industry on how to build and grow websites.
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