M&A in SEO is a topic that you won’t find a lot of content about. But it’s a high-stakes topic that can make our brake organic visibility.
My guest today is Daphne Monro, who is Head of Website & Content at hosting.com, where she oversees web strategy, content operations, and SEO for a global hosting network powering over 3 million sites.
She lived through multiple high-stakes domain migrations and rebrands, and knows the ins and outs of how to make this a success.
Full interview with Daphne Monro, Head of Website & Content @ hosting.com
Check out the episode on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.
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Auto-generated transcript
Niklas Buschner (00:02.446)
&A in SEO is a topic that you won’t find a lot of content about online. But it’s a high stakes topic that can make or break your organic visibility. My guest today is Daphne Monroe, who’s head of website and content at hosting.com, where she oversees web strategy, content operations and SEO for a global hosting network powering over three million sites.
She lived through multiple high stakes domain migrations and rebrands and knows the ins and outs of how to make this a success. So Daphne, welcome to the podcast.
Daphne Monro (00:40.497)
Thank you so much for having me today. I’m really excited to discuss this topic and share all my insights. So let’s go.
Niklas Buschner (00:48.086)
Yeah, I try to make sure to extract as much knowledge as possible out of you. but let’s start personal. How did you come into SEO?
Daphne Monro (01:00.647)
So my SEO journey became a very natural progression, I think. So I started my career agency side working on personalized emails back in Las Vegas where I grew up. And then once I moved over to the UK, I started building websites to start something on my own and grow into the business. And obviously, once you start working on the web, you realize that
SEO is kind of a foundational thing that every website needs if you want to be found. So I got really into the performance of these sites that I was working on, the user experience, and then diving into keyword research and all the other stuff that comes with the onsite, offsite. And yeah, I realized I didn’t want to do anything else. I really wanted to niche down into SEO. And so I’ve just…
stuck with it and grown into it for almost the last decade now. And I love it. I wouldn’t want to do anything else.
Niklas Buschner (02:03.542)
Nice. And how did you end up at hosting.com, your current employer?
Daphne Monro (02:09.799)
So I came to hosting.com about two years ago when we were a world host group. So this is pre-acquisition of A2 and pre-domain name purchase. So I got to be here kind of when we were building the foundations. And as the business grew through M &A, so did my role naturally. We realized there was a lot of websites through all of these new businesses that needed love and attention.
So I moved into the head of website performance role and then got really into the content side too. So now I’m head of website and content, which means I get to help build our brand tones, work with our local leaders and really develop all of our different content strategies cross channel internally and externally for all of our different brands and locales. So it’s my dream job and it’s super, super cool.
Niklas Buschner (03:08.91)
But you’re obviously being paid to say that, but no, just kidding. No, no, no. They, they obviously, hopefully just pay you a decent salary that you deserve in like your role. But I obviously introduced M &A and SEO and you already mentioned like the history of takeover, domain name purchase, et cetera. So obviously the journey is very strongly connected to that.
Daphne Monro (03:11.588)
They don’t find me to say that.
Niklas Buschner (03:36.726)
I can imagine a lot of folks either reviewing or listening to this that they’re not really familiar with what’s involved in &A and SEO. So I would suggest let’s start maybe with a super high level understanding of &A and SEO. So my very stupid question is, is this just about buying a company and thinking about what to do with their web presence or what’s involved?
Daphne Monro (04:04.209)
So &A, which stands for mergers and acquisitions, only works when it’s strategic. You can’t just go throwing money at issues hoping to solve problems. And I think everybody in SEO knows that foundationally. However, when you find a partner, for example, one of our most recent mergers with Rocket.net, you can build better businesses together.
and strengthen everybody at the same time. So using that as an example, we were lacking in a high quality managed WordPress product and rocket.net has the best product on the market. So through being present at events like CloudFest and just natural conversations, it seemed like a no brainer that we would make this connection and build our brands together.
So having Ben Gabler move in as Chief Product Officer, he’s the CEO of Rocket.net, has been a super powerful strategic move, not just for us, but also for our customers, because we’re solving an issue that we know customers were complaining about. But taking it back to the SEO side, when you look at mergers and acquisitions, sometimes people think of it as a dirty word, right? Big businesses buying businesses.
but it’s so much more than that. And we actually strengthen each other by working together. And, you know, some of our smaller acquisitions early days have been some of the most foundational team members that we have here today and have been able to grow with us. So, yeah, that’s kind of my synopsis on that.
Niklas Buschner (05:48.622)
got it. So if I understand this correctly, if we like quickly separate the &A and then the SEO part, it’s basically you see a company that would be for example, a great addition to the group and has like a strong offering where you might not necessarily have a blind spot, but where you just feel like hey, they’re the leader there and we want to have them on the team, so to say. And then the SEO part is about
How do we make sure that we get the best synergies? Or is it also buying a company that, for example, has a strong SEO presence? So you’re basically buying them due to their SEO, if that makes sense.
Daphne Monro (06:34.799)
Yeah, mean, it’s definitely part of the driving is understanding the SEO strength of their sites. And also that goes into strategically deciding whether we’re going to migrate these sites into our bigger brands like hosting.com or let them be standalones like we have for Web Central, for example, because it’s a leader in the Australian market that we just couldn’t be at hosting.com because
We don’t have that authority that Web Central has built over these years and years of being a present member of the community. But when we have the discussions about which companies we’re going to purchase, of course SEO is one of the first things that we look at. What is their keyword portfolio? What is their authority, their domain ranking? Do we trust their domain? Do we want these domains pointing to other businesses that we own? Are they spammy?
So we do a deep investigative dive, but also then it comes to things like the team members and the products that they offer and the educational side, what we can leverage and build together. And I like that you use synergies. I think that’s a good way to summarize this.
Niklas Buschner (07:45.358)
Yeah. I think probably some people will obviously say, we’re just sugar coating &A, but I think, as you said, some, some, some topics get a bad rap. So for example, AI search also, or G O A O also gets a bad rap for like being, like just SEO in like a new more fancy clothes. But I think we, should, yeah, we should talk about just, the,
Daphne Monro (08:08.131)
Totally.
Niklas Buschner (08:13.655)
the things basically behind the scenes and like take it with a pinch of salt and not be like too biased already from the get-go. So let’s maybe look at this one example you just shared where you said we couldn’t just immediately integrate them into hosting.com because this is obviously something that I could imagine a lot of people asking themselves. So I buy a company and I
integrate maybe the offering into my product suite. They have built up an SEO presence under their domain. Maybe their presence was even like a positive factor in the due diligence for us. What do I do with the domain? Do I let them live on their own or do I integrate them immediately and like redirect, et cetera? So what’s your take on the nuances here?
Daphne Monro (09:07.622)
I think like any SEO would say, it depends. Each unique situation has its own unique resolution. Really just diving into more than just SEO, less than their keyword portfolio and more about how customers want to engage and where people are expecting to go when they interact with a brand. So Web Central has…
an example is a long-standing community present in the Australian market. So we had looked at customer feedback and customer experiences and realized that people want to pick up the phone and have an Australian on the other end of the line. And we don’t want to ruin those experiences by just buying a company and taking it over and changing everything. We deeply care about these businesses and the customers to give them the
the right experience that matches with their expectations. So for some people, does mean that hosting.com is the solution because there’s a lot of earlier acquisitions that we had that are smaller brands that didn’t have the infrastructure, the products, or the care that hosting.com can offer. So those ones are easy. But some of these are much more nuanced and deserve their own marketing and their own…
global leaders, actually internally in my team, we in the content department have Georgina who leads the global marketing strategy, and then we have local leaders who lead their own locales. So, know, Australian market is going to be having marketing done by Australian people. In Bangladesh, we have marketing done by people in Bangladesh, so on and so forth, so that the right people know who they’re engaging with and…
We don’t just think that everybody’s the same and everybody wants the same experience. We want to keep the authenticity that these brands have built and also empower these communities with our global infrastructure.
Niklas Buschner (11:15.297)
Makes sense. I also recently had a guest on the podcast who talked about this, like the balance between having global strategic elements and like centralization, then also local leaders. So he leads a 30 people enterprise SEO org and they operate like in Germany and Belgium and France. So not, I would say, culturally so
different countries if you look at it from like a bird’s eye perspective, because all of Europe, but like the south of France is like very different to the north of Germany. So if I see you like operating globally and you mentioning something like Bangladesh, so how do you balance that? What are the things that you keep like globally or like where someone owns the global perspective and what are the things that you keep locally because
I feel like there’s no obvious answer to that.
Daphne Monro (12:17.446)
Yeah, there’s not. One thing that we do well, I think, is keeping a lot of the CEOs on board with us. So like Ben, who I used as an example, but Imran from EY Host is one of our recent acquisitions. And he’s come in and he’s actually the operations leader for all of Bangladesh. So he is right there in person. You can come, the community speak with him and he is leading what strategic decisions we’re progressing with.
So things like pricing or marketing or how-to content videos, we have boots on the ground. So I think that having those really senior people who have built these businesses be able to pass that knowledge on to us and then we work together to enhance the global strategy but also keep that local leadership present.
It is an ongoing challenge to give each brand and location the right experience. And sometimes we do mess up. We’re humans at the end of the day, but we have back-to-back conversations with our community all the time to keep on getting better.
Niklas Buschner (13:38.51)
We will come to the hiccups a little bit later. But let’s take a step back again and look at whatever recent &A project you’ve done. So I’d like to understand a little bit the phases of the project, because I can imagine that there are points where you are particularly involved, and then there are aspects of it where it’s maybe like,
Daphne Monro (13:40.808)
You
Niklas Buschner (14:07.849)
an &A team or like other teams on the company, give us a little bit of maybe like the timeline, the roadmap, like how is this all unfolding and where are you stepping in and how.
Daphne Monro (14:09.618)
Mm-hmm.
Daphne Monro (14:22.876)
Yeah, so a lot of the times the conversations happen when I’m not in the room. We have a very active C-suite who engages with the community and is always looking out for opportunities for &A, but partnerships and just ways to build and work together. So often there will end up being an invite in an NDA that gets sent to me.
And then I’m welcome into the conversation. this is typically because in the hosting space specifically, &A is very competitive. I’m sure there’s lots of markets that are similar, but it’s a tight-knit group of people, and a lot of these people have been working either in hosting or WordPress for the past 20 years. So you start to know everybody and go to the same events and et cetera.
So yes, I’ll get an NDA and then I’ll get an invite to a meeting. And this will be when I start to do my research and I’ll look into typically, you know, head to insert SEO tool here and dive into what their keyword portfolio looks like, what their performance is, what have they been doing over the last five years and what opportunity do I see. But also this is the point in our business where I kind of have to sell us too.
because we want it to be a mutual arrangement and agreement. We want both parties to be happy. So I also have to go back and look at all the great stuff that we’ve been doing and put together reports on how we’ve been successful in the past and how we’re gonna bring that strategy to life with this next move. So it’s a lot of sitting down and talking and opportunities and nice meals sometimes if I’m lucky.
And then we get the ball rolling and pretty much once the ink is dry on the paper, we start with the migration process.
Niklas Buschner (16:22.221)
Okay, and migration process means not necessarily all domain goes with a redirect, so to say, simplifying here, goes into a new domain, but migration process also involves, like what does it involve?
Daphne Monro (16:38.768)
Yeah, so for us, migration can be the customer migration to our light customer portal, which we want all of our clients to be on, which I’m less involved in. But then from a website perspective, we like to have all of our websites on our stack. So pretty much every time there’s an &A, we are going to be migrating them to a new CMS. I don’t want to necessarily plug any…
one here, but I’m sure you could go to any of our sites and see that we’re running Statamic, which is great, super fast. So we do that movement, which also will probably include a content consolidation task. When you look at some of these businesses like A2, for example, we’re talking 25 years of blogs. There’s a lot of stuff that wasn’t performing and bloating the site.
So we’ll do content consolidation, CMS migration, and then put our redirects in place. And sometimes if necessary, we’ll do a rebrand. So you can look at Sue Impressa, Web Central, what else have we done? Mockahost.easy. And these ones have all had rebrands post-acquisition, which has been run by George Walters, who’s our creative director, who is phenomenal.
And we get to get some flavor in there and make these brands sing, which is a part of the process that I really love because we can be very technical and strategic, but once you add that flavor on top, really, these websites come to life and you can see why it’s important to have different brands to be in these different places in the market.
Niklas Buschner (18:20.117)
And given these different steps across the whole project timeline, what would you say are the make or break points?
Daphne Monro (18:29.928)
Ooh, timelines. Timelines, I think, is a good one. So we acquired A2 Hosting in January, and I found out about it in December. And then we needed to completely rebrand in April. April 28th is the day that we went live. A 25-year-old business moving to a domain name that was just parked with no authority, no nothing.
I’d say one thing that I suggest to other businesses is allow for a little bit more time. Luckily, we have a phenomenal team and we were successful in hitting that deadline, but it was stressful. There was a lot of sleepless nights, but it brought the team together. I think timelines is a really, really big one for make or break. And then also just like silly checklists. Like if the URLs…
aren’t changing domains and you’re keeping your URL structure, make sure that you have trailing slashes. If there’s trailing slashes, check that the redirects that you had in place are still going to be in place. All of the things that can easily be forgotten. Like if you are doing a domain name migration, tell Google Search Console that you’re moving your container to another container and things like that. So just taking time to do like a pre-flight checklist and actually
finishing everything on that list, think. I was really lucky to work with several agencies on this project as well. So I think in the end we had like three agencies just to make sure all the SEO was as good as it could be. And then of course my great internal team that we have on staff. lots of people, lots of checks, and then ideally if possible lots of time.
Niklas Buschner (20:25.564)
And if you reflect on that migration process, obviously time is one component, but you were like very constrained on time there. Would you still say like operationally everything went well? Were there things where you felt like if I would have to do it again, here are a couple of things that we learned that maybe we added to our playbook, so to say, that we can do better.
in the next migrations.
Daphne Monro (20:56.488)
For sure. So in the case of A2, I think a lot of the conversations were, if we’re gonna do it perfect, we’ll never launch. So I kind of liked that approach, which I struggled with personally, but I learned from that. But going back to migrations that I did learn from, Sue Impresso was one that we launched with just our core product portfolio and kind of…
forgot about some products that had been ranking really well just because we were looking at a list and trying to achieve a list with the new perspective. So one thing I learned from that, which was earlier on in my career here, was to definitely take the time to dive into what that brand already is before we make our moves.
If we’re not offering a product in the new portfolio or for whatever reason, do we want to leave that landing page because there’s lots of links back to it anyways and put some information on there to direct users to the correct product that we currently offer and just leveraging that existing authority? That was definitely one of the early learnings. Thank goodness before we had the big ones.
Niklas Buschner (22:13.292)
And if you recap on migration projects where you basically did not or discontinued the old domain and moved everything over to the new one. So I’m not sure if this has happened now after you moved to hosting.com already. But I’m wondering, is this basically a net new
increase then in traffic and invisibility, etc. So if I’m thinking like the domain I’m buying, they’re getting, I know traffic is vanity, but for the sake of my example, they’re getting like 50,000 clicks from Google a month. So and then you’re moving it over. Probably most people would love to see those 50,000 clicks just coming on top on what I already have. But is this the case?
Daphne Monro (23:05.617)
Yeah.
Niklas Buschner (23:09.472)
Like, can you do a simple calculation like that?
Daphne Monro (23:12.882)
So obviously you need to keep in mind that Google’s gonna catch up with you or wherever you are, it’s gonna catch up with you even if you’re doing some quick wins. So as long as you’re purchasing a domain that’s within your topic and you’re not just migrating it over to a landing page that has no relationship.
with the information that you’re sharing. I think that that is a quick win that could have long-term advantage. I don’t think you’re gonna keep your 50,000 clicks. If you’re going to migrate all of that existing content that was on that domain name that you’ve purchased onto this guy over here that you’re building and then properly redirect, then I think there’s a case that you can keep those 50,000 clicks. And I think that we can see in the market, people are picking up on this and…
building businesses this way for sure. It’s often about keeping the authority though and making sure that you have the right content on the end that still matches customer intent, which is just foundational SEO strategy. So we’re kind of entering a world where I’m considering it bit more of black hat SEO strategies coming back with the rise of AI and…
all these cheeky ways that you can get yourself in, like AI overviews, for example, I would still never want to push those strategies, even though you can win right now. And always think about the long-term benefits and think about the sentiment that you want to resonate with your community and your customers. But hey, if you want to buy that domain for 50K clicks, go and buy it and test it out. Let me know how it goes.
Niklas Buschner (25:02.636)
Got it. So please people comment if you have experience on that or if you’re going to do an experiment tapping into the other scenario if you keep the domain as is and like let the brand live on its own so to say like obviously connected in the back and etc, but Is there anything you’re doing in terms of? strengthening each other like
Daphne Monro (25:10.024)
for sure.
Niklas Buschner (25:30.006)
doing content collabs or like, does it make sense to set links from hosting.com to like the other side, something like that.
Daphne Monro (25:39.432)
It’s really good question and it’s something that we talk about a lot actually. So we haven’t actually done it yet because I keep feeling that I should test it, I should just test it. But I feel, I don’t know if I want to be sending links to all of these different brands and not letting them just perform in their own because the whole philosophy is that they should be standalone brands.
And if we need that network to strengthen them, maybe that’s a sign that they don’t need to exist on their own. That’s just something that pops in my head when I dive into that scenario. So we haven’t, there’s definitely different brand owners and people who have come to me and said, hey, can we please get a hosting.com link? And I’m always like, I don’t know, because I’m very precious. And I want hosting.com to remain the number one in the hosting space, which I’m sure it will.
Niklas Buschner (26:24.63)
Hmm.
Daphne Monro (26:32.474)
So I don’t know, watch this space. Maybe I’ll let you know if I do and we can put an update on, because maybe it is time to just test it.
Niklas Buschner (26:41.14)
Awesome. Maybe another use case I was thinking of, where I just would like to know if you’ve already done something like that or like, if not, what’s your take on that? So I could see maybe hosting.com and one of the brands you purchased. Like let’s say, for example, for whatever query that feels relevant and important to you, unfortunately, hosting.com is not yet
like in the top spots, but maybe like somewhere in the upper middle, let’s say. So we are talking now classic Google rankings. I know it’s much more nuanced, but for the sake of the example, let’s say hosting our comments, like spots three or four. And then also in the top 10, you have like the other domain, like the other brand that is obviously part of the company group. Now they’re like then with their own landing page or article, whatever on position seven or eight.
Daphne Monro (27:19.336)
You
Niklas Buschner (27:39.895)
Would you consider then for example cutting the page from the other domain that is not hosting.com and then redirecting from that to the hosting.com page to strengthen this one because in the end it’s better to be number one than just be number three and number seven?
Daphne Monro (28:02.46)
So again, typical SEO answer, it depends. If it’s one of our local brands, like our local leaders, then I would leave it and let it exist in its own right because Google will have different rankings for different locations. And I still want that brand to be big and loud for people in India, for example, with hosting Raja. Like people in India will want that hosting Raja brand in some instances because it’s run by Manny who is…
Niklas Buschner (28:06.028)
Yeah
Daphne Monro (28:31.292)
physically in India and has his team in India, who are all fantastic by the way. Or, you know, I don’t want to take that away from those people who are looking for that. But if it’s a really small brand, like, gosh, we have quite a few floating around. And I don’t want to necessarily name any of them as small ones. But there’s some littler brands floating around in time and space that are not getting the love that they deserve from us.
and from a business perspective aren’t bringing in the revenue to warrant that time. Therefore, absolutely, I’m like, cut, redirect, send that juice over to hosting.com because yeah, mean, we are one family, but there is a priority in a pecking order. We definitely want that order to be hosting.com and local leaders being level. And then, you know, everything else falls in line.
Niklas Buschner (29:28.652)
You mentioned the term local leaders already, and you obviously have like a wide ranging net of domains and companies in the group. And I saw that you recently launched in Bangladesh, which I found super interesting because honestly, I don’t know enough about Bangladesh. I should educate myself more about that. So this is something that I…
I always find super interesting if people are operating in these regions. And now I’m wondering because you were also physically there and you obviously played a role in the whole lounge and everything. How difficult is it for you to lead such a new market that I would maybe it’s a wrong premise that I would consider also quite different
culturally and language wise.
Daphne Monro (30:30.534)
No, you are absolutely correct. That was what my speech was all about when we were in Bangladesh. And I think I started it by saying, you don’t want an American woman to stand here and tell you how to run your business in Bangladesh, right? That’s not what people are looking for. But that’s not what I’m here to do. I’m not here to take a brand like Hosting.com
translate everything and just say, we’ve launched in Bangladesh. That’s not launching, that’s not building community, that’s not building trust. What we are there to do is leverage the incredible team that we have there and let them lead us. So Imran, who I’ve spoken about today already, who was founder and CEO of EY Host, is the business that we acquired and the reason that we went and did this big
launch event in Bangladesh. But also we had some team members there already who have been with hosting.com longer than me. For example, Pfizer. And in my team, I have Asad and Zayed. So these are content creators in the local community who tell me, hey, Daphne, we’re not going to say it like this. The community is not going to engage well. we’re going to actually physically phone call people instead of sending out emails because
That’s how our community prefers to be spoken to. Or, you know, people are going to want to barter for hosting prices and we got to give them the opportunity to barter. I said different things like this. There’s no way that I could come into this community and know that without having these important conversations and also by physically being there and standing in these rooms and having these Q &A’s. I think we had about 800 attendees.
which were existing customers, the tech minister, and loads and loads of founders. Women of WordPress Bangladesh was there. And we put the mic out on the floor and we let people ask us the tough questions in real time. And off the back of that, we change our content strategy or we go and look at our pricing because we actually want to be local. We don’t just want to bring big business to Bangladesh, you know?
Niklas Buschner (32:52.268)
But you still have to lead the team in a way. do you mainly lead it? So obviously it makes total sense to have people basically do upwards management and also make clear what’s the mutual goal and then help them have the autonomy to make these calls and guide you in that sense.
Daphne Monro (32:56.827)
Of course.
Niklas Buschner (33:20.778)
Do you mainly then, for example, just look at like quantifiable data stuff. in terms of how we’re doing ranking wise, how we’re doing AI visibility wise, whatever is like concerned in that sense, because I mean, it would also be like not really helpful to go to pages and then have Google translate, translate from like Bangladeshi to English because it’s obviously lacking a lot of nuance. So how are you handling this operationally?
Daphne Monro (33:50.162)
So my job is to be the voice between these local leaders and then of course the C-suite and the board, which ultimately our decision-making has to be profitable decision-making and we do need to KPIs and we do have metrics that we need. And that does tend to drive the priority order of which location we’re looking in and what content we will be creating.
The good thing is, is that we have a very similar product portfolio across all brands and we have a very large and talented team who get to have their voices heard. But yeah, sometimes, unfortunately, we do have to shut down ideas and progress with the things that are going to drive results because at the end of the day, we are still a business. I think that’s the part of &A that gets heard the most is that
It’s just big business and I do get it because we are corporate. Of course we are. But we do absolutely give autonomy in the platform for different people to educate and share. And the content creation in 2026, driven by trust and authority. mean, strategically from a business perspective, makes sense to be led by people who know these
people and places the best.
Niklas Buschner (35:21.004)
I think it’s super interesting because I also know a couple of people that are working in leadership for sometimes German companies that have like expanded in Europe and other places and they have similar challenges. So it’s definitely something where I feel like it’s just like, part of the process. So I would never judge &A based on just being like, we have to acquire a company. mean, in the end it’s to,
Daphne Monro (35:31.645)
Mm-hmm.
Niklas Buschner (35:50.966)
hopefully adults, people that agree that we will engage in a deal. But how do you ensure, because I mean, autonomy and letting the local leaders do their thing, like, I mean, this positively is, so it makes total sense, but how do you ensure that like the knowledge travels, like literally travels across the globe, like things that are maybe like working well in Bangladesh that
could also be helpful and inspiring to a business in, I don’t know, if you have another fancy country where you’re operating. don’t know. Let’s say just the US, so to be a little conservative here.
Daphne Monro (36:25.64)
I’m
Daphne Monro (36:30.852)
Yeah, first, mean, the US is our largest market, of course. And obviously the stuff that works in the US is going to work 90 % of the time everywhere else because we all want to access our products in a way that’s just simple, right? Like we don’t need to make things super complicated all the time. But there’s also something simple like I had to learn how to say Bangladesh. They like you pronounce it Bangladesh.
But everybody, you know, as an American, you’re going to come in and be like, Bangladesh. It’s just those nuances and being able to speak to people correctly. that is where I really get that support. But my content team are also hosting experts at WordPress, like pioneers. So people who already know the space in the products and want to make that content easily digestible. And that is simply put just.
Niklas Buschner (37:04.491)
Hmm.
Daphne Monro (37:28.104)
90 % of the time what we’re gonna put out everywhere anyways. But for that other 10 % of the time, we have those voices internally and we are gonna stop and listen to them.
Niklas Buschner (37:39.405)
Hmm. Let’s quickly talk about team because I think also, people listening or watching that are, in a leadership position themselves, they obviously have to, decide on hiring and decide on the perfect candidate profiles. and what is, what is it that you are looking at, like in terms of, what people have as attitude or skillset, whatever, that you need to.
work in such a truly global business because I could imagine that it’s different to work in a company that is solely operating like domestic US versus US, Bangladesh, other countries, obviously in connection to the local leaders, but still, like you have to work with this like global perspective all the time.
Daphne Monro (38:34.812)
For sure. And hosting.com is not for everyone. And I will just start by saying that we are almost a thousand people big, but we still operate as a startup. And like our core is built on like hustle culture. Like I am still doing things I was doing as an SEO associate because when the job needs to get done, you do the job. And that’s kind of, I know some people
in their career don’t want to work like that and that’s totally fine. But we’re looking for people who get up out of bed and go, wow, I am part of this phenomenal global brand. I get to empower people all over the world. And sometimes that means I have 5 a.m. meetings. Sometimes that means I have 8 p.m. meetings because I have to be here for my team who is everywhere. But…
I love that. I love that I get to speak to all these different people and share and grow in a way and actually physically be present in places that I may have never been able to go myself. For example, we went to India last year. I went with the CEO, just me and the CEO to India to go and meet our team. And it changed my life. It was just such a phenomenal experience. But you will get there with hard work.
And sometimes giving up your Sundays and hustling and building quickly and breaking things and then finding out how to fix it in post, it’s not for perfectionists, but it’s for people who are passionate. And that’s what I would say about hosting.com culture for sure.
Niklas Buschner (40:20.236)
Nice. Agree. A personal note on that one. I once had the honor to host a webinar with Aerobs, the like, AEO platform from the US. And it was scheduled for Friday. And I think like based on Eastern time or like, I don’t know, like one of the time zones in the US at like 12 a.m. and we were writing back and forth and I didn’t realize that it was starting only at 6 p.m.
on a Friday my time. Now you could say like no issue at all, but I bet you there are a lot of people that would say, yeah, hosting a webinar like with a Q &A at the end at 6 p.m. on a Friday, like I want to be off for the weekend by 5 p.m. You bet. So and this is so I just want to give a plus one on that one. If you want to make things happen, sometimes you just have to go the extra mile.
Daphne Monro (41:06.727)
Yeah.
Niklas Buschner (41:17.782)
especially if you’re working with people in different countries and strongly different time zones.
Daphne Monro (41:22.449)
Yeah.
And I will just add on to that, that everybody in our team does do it. And I want to give a shout out quickly to Corey Miller, who runs our agency success program and so much more, our community leader. His title is actually Chief Evangelist. When he joined, he was part of the A2 acquisition. He joined and he, that man was on calls at like 4 a.m. because he didn’t want to miss a thing.
He was like so excited. Nobody was telling him to be there. He just was there, you know? And that energy and being surrounded with people who are so excited to be here is awesome. Cause it is, I mean, with a name like hosting.com, I mean, why would you want to be anywhere else? It’s like, it feels like Google. Like I’m not going to lie. That’s how I feel.
Niklas Buschner (42:11.136)
Yeah, 100%.
Nice, nice. We have this in the transcript, so AI Search will be able to use this in the sentiment when people ask, like, AI mode. So how is it working at hosting.com? And then I hope that this video will be part of the citations. And then it says hosting.com is like working at Google. This would be nice.
Daphne Monro (42:40.145)
you
Niklas Buschner (42:42.316)
Cool. Another topic I would like to talk to you about is we, I would say mainly talked about &A SEO in the sense of acquiring a business where there’s also like a huge importance in the product of the business. So like, as you said, WordPress hosting specialists and they’re the best at what they’re doing, like rocket.com. We wanna like…
Daphne Monro (43:00.092)
Mm-hmm.
Niklas Buschner (43:10.88)
have them on the team, so to say. But then there were also two occasions in the SEO space even, where obviously it’s also maybe somehow about product, but I would say it’s more about like media. The first was 2022, where SEMrush acquired backlinko.com. And the second one was, I just quickly looked up again, last year actually, where H-Refs acquired detailed.com.
Daphne Monro (43:24.092)
Mm-hmm.
Niklas Buschner (43:39.944)
and the accompanying SEO extension. So have you somehow followed or like heard anything about these acquisitions?
Daphne Monro (43:51.366)
Yeah, mean, just bringing up SEMrush right now is making me think that I believe Adobe just recently acquired them. that, like acquisitions are happening all around us, right? But going back to the content perspective and acquiring for education and just like great content that’s been built over time in your niche.
I think that that strategically makes so much sense. And I don’t think hosting.com is in the business of doing that ourselves just because we are building our own content hub off of the back of the hosting experts that we have internally and kind of leveraging those authoritative speakers themselves to align with EE18 and all that jazz because we have full ownership of it.
But for other businesses, I can absolutely understand why you would do an acquisition like this. I do think it’s kind of funny just going back to the Adobe acquisition with Ahrefs having acquired as well, because I’ve loved their marketing campaigns about Adobe acquiring SEMrush. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but take a look. They’re just fun, little fun.
marketing material pieces.
Niklas Buschner (45:18.412)
Yeah, let’s see how it goes with Adobe and SEMrush if Adobe will let SEMrush live on their own. Do you have a take on that? It’s actually, it’s a super interesting topic. I wanted to get someone that is ex SEMrush on the podcast to discuss what do you think, how will this go? They declined, unfortunately, but you are free to speak about it, so.
Daphne Monro (45:27.255)
Daphne Monro (45:41.02)
Well, I’m not affiliated, but I am experienced obviously in mergers and acquisition. And I will say that there’s always change. There’s always lots of new people who are going to make new decisions. in all cases, and this is kind of why &A gets a bad rep, is because they’re for better or for worse.
Niklas Buschner (45:45.589)
Yeah, yeah,
Daphne Monro (46:08.14)
And sometimes, like looking in the hosting sphere, EIG is known as kind of the enemy of the world because they went and bought lots of hosting companies and really diminished the support, raised the prices incredibly. And sometimes hosting.com gets compared to EIG online. We are not EIG. And I can tell you, you can hop on a phone call right now with our CEO who wants to put time in with the customers and work on building products and…
brands that are right for our users. Do I know if Adobe is going to have that kind of passion for SEMrush? I don’t know. I don’t think it’s a normal thing in the &A space to have. But I can say fullheartedly that our team does. And it’s been very cool and it’s shifted my perspective on everything. So who knows? Maybe they will and it’ll be phenomenal. Watch this space, I guess.
Niklas Buschner (46:54.636)
Hmm.
Niklas Buschner (47:02.7)
But do you think, for example, maybe quickly drawing back on the SEMrush Backlinko acquisition, do you think it’s then a buy or build thing and you decide to just build it? Like SEMrush decided to just buy the educational content platform, so to say. I think they still operate it. They also still operate it separately. So it’s still backlinko.com. But like the cookie banner is the same as on SEMrush.
Daphne Monro (47:20.156)
For sure.
Daphne Monro (47:28.904)
I had it like
Niklas Buschner (47:32.542)
And it has a lot of integrations, like where it says, like, find the best keywords and try SEMrush for free, et cetera.
Daphne Monro (47:43.462)
Yeah, I guess the buy and build, buy or build perspective definitely makes sense because if you have the opportunity to acquire a large voice in your community and strategically angle it in a positive light for yourself as a business, mean, that makes sense. It’s a quick win and probably a long lasting one. I mean, I’m just going to do a quick peek at the domain ranking.
Niklas Buschner (47:48.641)
Mm-hmm.
Daphne Monro (48:11.356)
back lingo and just see what we’re working with. But if it was driving great value as a resource, mean, it makes sense to put yourself in there in a positive light, of course.
Niklas Buschner (48:28.736)
Hmm. Yeah, of course. Yeah, they also, I think it’s interesting because if you just check like a content piece, for example, on backlink co, which is like link building for SEO, and then you just scroll down so you don’t like there is a little pop up at the top, at least on the desktop, like, use SEMrush to check, check my sites SEO. But then what I found, what I find even more interesting and like more subtle is that they then use screenshots from the SEMrush product.
Daphne Monro (48:46.653)
Mm-hmm.
Niklas Buschner (48:58.038)
to make certain points like how you do a backlink analysis, et cetera. And this feels smart to me. Drawing on that, are you familiar with the Kanji now called Iru, the sequence content brand thingy? No, okay. Let me try to summarize it really, really shortly. And then I’m interested to hear perspective. And maybe it’s something that it’s also something
Daphne Monro (49:04.722)
Totally.
Daphne Monro (49:16.569)
I am not.
Yeah.
Niklas Buschner (49:27.744)
that could be interesting to consider in future acquisitions. So the previous CMO at Kanji, now they’re called Eru. It’s like a mobile device management kind of software. like managing Apple devices, I think. She did a post, so her name is Sylvia something, like it’s a little bit complicated name, I can’t remember.
Daphne Monro (49:45.416)
Mm-hmm.
Niklas Buschner (49:54.996)
She posted that they have launched a what she called content brand, which is called the sequence.com, I think, and where they basically post content about this whole mobile device management topic. And then they just like integrate Kanji now, you’re into the whole like not only educating, but then what is a good software to help you do that. And what they noticed is that
Daphne Monro (50:20.955)
Yeah.
Niklas Buschner (50:23.634)
in terms of classic SEO metrics, it didn’t really do anything. So not a lot of traffic, not lot of rankings, but they were cited a lot in AI search and it helped them basically have alongside their own content and maybe alongside Reddit, et cetera, just another domain that basically acted as a support in ensuring that your brand is part of the AI answer.
Daphne Monro (50:34.3)
Yep.
Daphne Monro (50:52.828)
For sure. Like I kind of nodded to earlier in our conversation, like I do feel like we’re back in the black hat SEO sphere where we’re finding, I kind of do a little bit. Like gray, it’s that middle ground, right? Where I think it’s, you’re kind of trying to cheat the system. And I don’t think that it’s gonna, I don’t think it’s gonna have that long-term value, that trust and authenticity. And now I’m worried about being quoted on this.
Niklas Buschner (51:01.494)
Do you feel like it’s blackhead? Yeah? Okay. Okay, okay.
Niklas Buschner (51:13.228)
Mm-hmm.
Niklas Buschner (51:19.564)
Mm-hmm.
Daphne Monro (51:22.182)
Maybe black cats a step too far. But I do. Sorry, no.
Niklas Buschner (51:26.442)
Do you feel like then backlinko? So for example, if I look at backlinko and I have like there, it’s obviously like the site was already established. So it’s a little bit a different timeline here. But when I look at the link building for SEO article here, it’s just randomly. If I search on the article, if I search for hrefs, if I search for surfer SEO, if I search for like SysTricks,
It’s not mentioned at all. I search for SEMrush, it’s mentioned nine times and also like just in the content, just casually like built on it by pulling competitor backlink reports using SEMrush’s backlink analytics tool. Like it’s just, it’s just part of the answer. So would you also consider this gray hat?
Daphne Monro (51:57.565)
Yeah.
Daphne Monro (52:10.941)
Yeah.
Daphne Monro (52:14.812)
I think it’s strategic. It’s definitely strategic.
Niklas Buschner (52:18.257)
It’s strategic! Nice! It’s not grey hat, it’s strategic!
Daphne Monro (52:22.472)
It’s 100 % strategy in action. I do think that just with the evolution of Google and crawling and people wanting the most trustworthy sources, we will start to get a better look into who owns what when we’re asking these questions in the future. I think when we look at any brand or business and you start to look at how many people actually own these businesses in any sense of products in the world.
Niklas Buschner (52:30.763)
Mm.
Niklas Buschner (52:41.344)
Mm-hmm.
Niklas Buschner (52:51.243)
Mm-hmm.
Daphne Monro (52:52.168)
People are always shocked. There’s a few big guys. So I think having that transparency and trust is where people will shine in the future as opposed to just shoving your name on every single thing. Instead of getting rewarded for just being great.
Niklas Buschner (53:12.755)
Okay, but then in your perspective, it’s not just about doing this, like having this portal, but it’s about the disclosure. Like, am I making it transparent to the reader or the customer that this is like Backlinko is a, is part of the SEMrush company.
Daphne Monro (53:24.776)
100 %
Daphne Monro (53:30.886)
I do think that that is, at hosting.com, that’s our mission, is to be the world’s most trusted hosting company. You’ll hear every single person say that. Because trust online is hard to find. And we want to be clear and transparent. We do post on our status updates when we’re wrong. And we apologize to our customers. And we take ownership. I think that is what people are looking for. And I think…
especially with the rise of AI and all of the changes online, that’s what’s really going to let companies shine in the future.
Niklas Buschner (54:08.113)
Mm-hmm. But if I would now start like an educational platform where I share a lot of knowledge about hosting and like WordPress and stuff, and you would maybe see, for example, this platform being, showing up consistently as citations on prompts or like query searches that are meaningful to you. And like I’m not…
not mentioning any provider, for example, so it’s just based on the actual stuff I’m doing, like tutorials, how-tos, etc. Would this be something that you feel like you could consider in the future, like doing partnerships with them? Maybe not even buying the whole thing, but affiliate partnerships, for example?
Daphne Monro (54:45.725)
Mm-hmm.
Daphne Monro (54:56.808)
100 % and we do do that already like with different plugins for WordPress or Conferences and events But we do want to clearly be like we are sponsors like we are hosting that common We’re choosing to put our money here because we want to invest in the community as opposed to being a little bit sneaky Which I’m not shaming. I think that it is strategic and obviously gonna bring value and
Niklas Buschner (55:12.031)
Mmm.
Niklas Buschner (55:16.405)
Mm-hmm.
Niklas Buschner (55:19.829)
Mm-hmm.
Daphne Monro (55:24.302)
At the end of the day, we are all businesses and we got to make money to pay our bills and keep roofs over our heads. So if it works.
Niklas Buschner (55:29.717)
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So then I will be clear on that. If anyone from Backlinko listens to this, guys, get your stuff together and be more transparent in disclosing that you’re paid by SEMrush. is… Daphne said it is strategic. I would say it’s questionable. And we know what you’re doing there. Like, we get it.
Daphne Monro (55:37.828)
I know.
Daphne Monro (55:50.248)
You
Daphne Monro (55:54.076)
You
Yeah.
Niklas Buschner (55:59.404)
Cool. Okay. I have two more questions. the first one is I try to always make it so I feel like this part, we could go into even more detail here, but it was already a lot of fun. So I tried to make the podcast insightful, entertaining. think insights, we checked entertaining also, like I felt entertained. And I also tried to make it actionable.
So I always like for people to go away with a couple of practical takeaways. So if you were advising or if you were advising a company either starting or going through an &A process right now, or maybe considering they maybe have a target and they are not sure about the whole SEO aspect, like will this work out, et cetera, what would be your two to three top
pieces of advice for them.
Daphne Monro (57:01.544)
So my first piece of advice is keep in mind the existing customers. That business is successful and you’re interested because they’re already doing something great. I think that’s one thing that gets missed in a lot of &A. So keep those customers top of mind during this experience. And then number two, make sure your migration strategy is rock solid. Make sure that you’re doing things
because it makes sense for the users, CMS migrations, product portfolio changes, content consolidations. I mean, really take the time to dive into all of that on your site and their site and make the moves only where it makes sense.
That’s what I got.
Niklas Buschner (57:50.154)
Makes sense. Yeah, that’s good. I have a final surprise question, which is I I bluntly stole this from Lenny’s podcast, which is what didn’t we talk about that we should have talked about?
Daphne Monro (57:56.186)
Daphne Monro (58:08.802)
gosh, I feel like we covered so much exciting stuff today.
Niklas Buschner (58:11.957)
That came unexpected.
Daphne Monro (58:16.648)
I think I would have liked to discuss more just about my amazing team. I mean, I would have liked to like, I could spend an hour talking about each one of them. There’s 17 of them currently, so it would be a long discussion. But it really is the people behind the scenes. I’m very public. I’m in loud, but I can only do everything that I do every single day because of the team that I work with. yeah, around me, above me.
Like, I’m just covered with successful people and it’s just very exciting.
Niklas Buschner (58:53.355)
But don’t you feel like, so obviously massive shout out to everybody on the team and hopefully they will like and subscribe this episode and like leave a comment on whichever platform. think this should be the minimum engagement here. But don’t you think also that there are people on the team, because you said you’re like out there loud, there are people on the team that appreciate just being like heads down on the work and not have to
have to in on a podcast. Yeah.
Daphne Monro (59:22.77)
For sure. I already have names popping in my head. For sure. Yeah, but we have people who are amazing at what they do. Like we have content writers who are fantastic technical writers who definitely don’t want to be spending their time on a podcast. And I would never ask that of them. It is so fun, especially when I hang out with you.
Niklas Buschner (59:40.586)
Yeah, but guys, it’s super fun. maybe you should reconsider whoever definitely has in mind. Yeah, whoever definitely has in mind. I don’t know, obviously, but maybe you should you should reconsider. definitely we have crossed the hour mark. It has been an insanely. now I can check all three boxes. Insightful, entertaining and actionable conversation.
I can’t thank you enough for sharing so much, also behind the scenes, like your, how you think about stuff. think it’s always massively helpful, not just to get an answer, like do this, do that, we did that, but also understand like how you’re coming to conclusions, et cetera. So massive thanks to that. If people want to follow you around more, or if they follow, want to follow hosting.com or
Maybe even, I don’t know if you’re hiring or if hosting.com has job openings, what’s the best place to follow and to check it out?
Daphne Monro (01:00:45.736)
The best place for sure is LinkedIn. We post all of our job openings, company updates, webinars, all on LinkedIn all the time, hosting.com, quite easy to find. And yeah, check out our site as well, hosting.com. And I just want to say also thank you so much for having me. This has been so much fun and just a really great opportunity. So thank you.
Niklas Buschner (01:01:08.363)
Thank you so much. And also I have to say like hosting.com this domain name is I think so obviously I’m spending a lot of time like with domains and Samrush, et cetera. I think it’s like superb. Like it’s so on point. It’s so simple. It’s really straightforward. You can’t get this wrong. So if I see people like spelling their domain names and like, yeah, but then there’s like then there’s like an underscore like it’s not an underscore, but you know, it’s like, ah.
Daphne Monro (01:01:22.461)
Thanks
Daphne Monro (01:01:33.992)
Yeah, and I know we’re out of time, but that’s also a very fun discussion because I was here before we bought it. So I got to do the research and put together the case study, the business report for the benefits of buying a domain name with no authority. So, it is, but I have to add one more thing that’s sub.
Niklas Buschner (01:01:53.76)
Yeah, it’s like, yeah, that’s topic for another day. I mean, back in the days. Yeah, of course, of course, let’s do it.
Daphne Monro (01:02:02.76)
He did a video, Seb’s our CEO in Bangladesh, and it’s just him explaining why we spent millions on a domain. And I checked that out. That’s on our LinkedIn as well.
Niklas Buschner (01:02:14.471)
Okay, have one really final question. Did you disclose what you paid for the domain?
Daphne Monro (01:02:17.042)
You
Daphne Monro (01:02:22.406)
I don’t believe we’ve disclosed the number, but I can say it was millions.
Niklas Buschner (01:02:24.915)
Okay, but it’s a lot. Okay. And can you say or maybe like describe who you bought it from? Like, was it another company? Was it like a random guy that purchased it like at the beginning of the Internet?
Daphne Monro (01:02:40.264)
You’re asking the wrong person, unfortunately. Yeah, I wish I had more context to who it came from, but just knowing the guys, it’s probably like somebody who started their business when they were 13 with servers in their bedroom or something like that. It’s kind of what the community is. But I’m sure I can find out and come back another time if you’ll have me.
Niklas Buschner (01:02:45.266)
okay.
Niklas Buschner (01:02:56.573)
Okay. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Niklas Buschner (01:03:05.887)
Yeah, yeah, it sounds like a story where somebody like bought a Bitcoin like ages ago and didn’t even know what it was. And then suddenly someone knocks on the door and tells you, hey, this is worth millions. But yeah, that’s only the stories the Internet writes. So cool that we were able to tap into some of them. Thanks so much for today, guys.
Daphne Monro (01:03:22.758)
Yeah.
Niklas Buschner (01:03:33.983)
gals go follow Daphne go follow hosting.com if you need a good hosting provider. I’m not getting paid to say any of this. I just generally think the offer looks very solid. I will put a link in the description below or show notes or wherever you are and watching listening to this. So go check it out. And then Daphne, thanks so much for coming on and all the best to you and your whole team and the whole company.
Daphne Monro (01:03:57.032)
Thank you so much. Bye.
Niklas Buschner (01:03:59.273)
Bye bye.
