Inspiring Biography of John Mueller

John Mueller works as a Search Advocate at Google.

Introduction-

John Mueller was born on 7 February.

He hails from Germany but he lived in Switzerland and later, he along with his family moved to the United States and lived there for a decade.

John did his schooling in the United States and then moved back to Switzerland to study for his graduation.

Education-

In 1991, John joined ETH Zürich in Zürich, Switzerland to study for a Bachelor of Science (BS) in Mechanical Engineering, Robotics and Business.

He graduated in 1995.

Entrepreneurship at a young age-

While studying in his high school, in January 1995, John founded SOFTplus Entwicklungen GmbH.

He worked in his company through his university and beyond.

SOFTplus Entwicklungen is a software company which initially focused on developing software for Swiss medical practices and eventually, started developing websites for medical practices.

Pursuing SEO-

John made a website for his company and started publishing content on it.

He used to also do programming, marketing and business administration for his company.

During that time, John used to also manage his own servers but they used to occasionally get hacked.

Once, while Googling his company’s name, he found that the official website of his company ranked in page 3 of the search engine results page (SERP).

Initially, John was happy about ranking in page 3 as he believed that the internet is vast and so, ranking in the third page is decent but soon it dawned upon him that on searching his company’s name in Google, the official website should rank first in the SERP.

Thanks to this realisation, he started learning search engine optimization (SEO).

During that time, John developed one of the early sitemap generators and also developed a few test websites to better understand Google’s ranking algorithms and he also started analysing the log files to observe the movements (crawling) of Googlebot.

At that time, he also started interacting with people in the SEO forums in Google Groups.

An invitation from Google-

During that time, John received an email from Google requesting him to come along for lunch.

He received this email on one of his domains which he usually doesn’t monitor but luckily, he chanced upon the email.

So, John visited the Google office in Zürich and met Googlers.

Later, he flew from Switzerland to Mountain View, United States to attend interviews at Google.

The first couple of the interviews were conducted through video conferences with Googlers in Seattle.

Joining Google-

Though John was offered a job at Google, he requested some months’ time to focus on his company and initially, he had a feeling that he would return from Google to his own company and so, he had his office at his company.

As Google needed a workforce, he was made to join Google soon in September 2007 and a couple of years later, he was made to get rid of his desk at his company.

So, John handed over his company to others and SOFTplus Entwicklungen GmbH is still operational and is headquartered in Hünenberg, Switzerland.

After joining Google, he started working as a Webmaster Trends Analyst and later, he started working as a Search Advocate at Google Zürich.

John also worked with the developer relations team and currently, he works in the search relations team.

Before joining Google, while being active in SEO forums, he was influenced by Ammon Johns who used to encourage people to focus on things that matter in SEO and John carried on this attitude while helping people through Google SEO hangouts.

Currently, John doesn’t have a Wikipedia page.

Personal life-

John hasn’t revealed much about his personal life except that he has kids.

As for social media, he is most active on Twitter and he also has a blog.

And he loves cheese.

So, how are you inspired by the success story of John Mueller?

Share with me in the comment section below.