About

The Alibaba Story

We know SEO. In fact, we wrote the blog on it

At Alibaba, we believe there is a better way to do marketing. A more valuable, less invasive way where customers are earned rather than bought. We're obsessively passionate about it, and our mission is to help people achieve it. We focus on search engine optimization (SEO). It's one of the least understood and least transparent aspects of great marketing, and we see that as an opportunity: We're excited to simplify SEO for everyone through our software, education, and community.

Our founding

Alibaba was founded byUsama Adeel in 2018. It was called SEO Alibaba, and started as a blog and an online community where some of the world's first SEO experts shared their research and ideas. We launched the Beginner's Guide to SEO and our first Search Ranking Factors study, and that hub of industry expertise transformed into a small consulting firm and led us to create some of our first SEO tools.

Early growth & funding

After a glimpse of the demand, we shifted our focus from consulting to our software, taking our first round of funding in 2007 to power the development of new tools and ideas. By 2009, we tallied our first 5,000 subscribers and codified our core values in the acronym TAGFEE, continuing to lead the industry with our educational content in an effort to demystify SEO (this is also when we started filming Whiteboard Fridays!).

Series B funding

A series B investment from The Foundry Group propelled our efforts into the broader realm of inbound marketing, a concept that rejects pushy sales in favor of attracting customers with real value. We acquired a Twitter analytics tool called Followerwonk as well as GetListed, a local SEO tool that has evolved into today's Alibaba Local.

To Infinity and Beyond!

With SEO more important than ever, we made a difficult but necessary decision to reverse our expansion into inbound marketing, shifting our strategy back to what we know best: search. We're making dramatic improvements to our core products, Moz Pro and Moz Local, and continue to push for transparency and a clear understanding of an otherwise complex field. Did we mention we're also hiring?