Peace out, 2016. But before we go…

…we’re looking back at all the things we did. And boy, did we do a lot.

What. a. year.

Before we turn the page on 2016, we’d like to take a moment to look at the many bright sides this year had to offer us here at STAT.

Big values lead to a bigger team and bigger space

First, we’re reminiscing over the many “STAT culture” moments that we had together as a team.

After some quiet introspection and plenty of group discussion, we compiled a list of key words (SEO always on the mind) that articulate our values, both as a company and as individuals. Like the keywords that you track in STAT, our values give us direction.

With craft, harmony, ambition & adventure, empathy, leadership, selflessness, and levity leading the way, we upped our STAT team count by another 10 amazing people.

Anita, Cheryl, and Katie all joined the marketing department, transforming it into a locked-and-loaded lead generating machine; client success was lucky to snag Frankie and her vast SEO knowledge (thanks, 4Ps Marketing!); numerical order and Excel doc expertise arrived to the ops department in the form of Jody and Xuan; the dev team welcomed Bas’ much-needed product management plus a small army of code warriors: MJ, Zillah, and Stuart; and Victoria, Fiona, and Adrian were the hardest-working interns of 2016.

Of course, in order to house all of these smarty-pants people, we needed a bigger office! So, we said bon weekend to our cozy digs in Gastown and bonjour to the spacious offerings of our Railtown abode.

And after a raucous house-warming do, two rotisserie roasts, one pulled pork extravaganza, and a weekly D&D campaign, it’s safe to say that we’ve settled in nicely.

Care to join our plucky troupe? Check out our careers page, we might just have a spot for you.

Expanding our minds

On the research front, we laid the smack-down on featured snippets with our whitepaper, Rise to the top with featured snippets. It was a mammoth undertaking, analysing one million high-CPC keywords, and when it was all said and done, we did it all over again because we’re gluttons for punishing amounts of data.

But we’re ready to say “fare thee well, featured snippets, it’s been a slice,” and work on getting our next research piece out the door. We know that Google works tirelessly to understand the intent behind our search queries, and want to know what that looks like on the SERPs. So, by segmenting retail keywords into search intent, we’re hoping to understand the best ways to optimize content for every step of the buyer journey.

Growing our offerings

As for the development side of things, we launched some awesome new features and functions — from the Competitive Landscape tab to automatic dynamic tag backfilling and tracking new SERP results — we also squashed countless bugs, overcame several Google algorithm updates, and recently released a brand new dashboard.

And we’re not even close to being done yet. With new product roadmaps out the wazoo, the future of STAT is looking bright and shiny. If you want to follow along with our progress, keep a keen eye on our release notes.

More pizza, more beer, more bringing our community together!

To bring together an even bigger group of talented marketing minds in the Vancouver community, we re-branded our SEOyvr meet-up group as Inbound Marketing YVR, which now boasts an impressive 200-plus members and counting.

Also, as a team who knows a thing or two about data scaling, we thought it was high time that Vancouver’s data engineers got their own chance to talk tech, so we started the Data Pipelines & Distributed Systems meet-up. We’re now three huge gatherings in, and our count of pizza slices consumed is quickly gaining on the number of beers we’ve crushed and coffees we’ve downed.

SEO-savvy speakers like Aaron Bradley from Electronic Arts and software engineering experts like Boris Lau from Mobify have all taken the mic on the STAT mezzanine this year, and we can’t wait for who’s joining us next.

And before we forget, STAT’s CEO, Rob Bucci, shared our startup story (which may or may not have involved riding a lion) to a packed room of entrepreneurs at TechVancouver. Next year we’re planning to be even more involved in encouraging budding entrepreneurs to choose the path less travelled — maybe they’ll also be bootstrapping their way to success.

We went here, we went there… we went everywhere

STAT was out in full force this year on the conference circuit — we sponsored 10 industry events and attended nine. Rob presented at four, bringing the featured snippet gospel to the stages of BrightonSEO, MozCon, SearchLove London, and State of Search Dallas.

Along with meeting new friends, reconnecting with old friends, throwing down demos, and soaking up a ton of valuable SEO knowledge, we also gave away seven Amazon Echos and clothed nearly 4,000 attendees with our almost-famous STAT tees.

SearchLove SanDiego and Napa Summit are just a few of the stops we’ll be making in 2017.

Giving it all back

Last year, we decided to embark upon an ambitious donation goal for 2016 — $1,000 each to 12 worthy charities — and were lucky to have the opportunity to share our good fortune with these excellent causes:

• St. Paul’s Foundation
• Save the Children
• BC & Alberta Guide Dogs
• Breakfast for Learning
• Fort McMurray Fires via the Canadian Red Cross
• Moving Forward Family Services
• Wildlife Rescue Association
• Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation
• Canadian Cancer Society
• Doctors Without Borders
• WE (formerly Free the Children)
• Startups Care & YWCA Metro Vancouver

In 2017, we’re excited to up the ante. Eleven charities will each get $1,000, and one will get a donation of $12,000 — because a little can go a long way, and a lot can go even further.

And as far as individual donations from STAT employees go, we managed to contribute $3,000 to various causes, which was then matched, dollar-for-dollar, by STAT, plus we’ve ended the year with a $2,000 cash donation to the Vancouver Foodbank.

And speaking of charity, our friend Brian Wood over at Wayfair is a true SEO Hero — by attempting to outrank Wix on the SERPs, he could win $50,000 to give to Worldbuilders. You can read all about his endeavour and give him a helping hand here.

So, to wrap things up with a nice bow: over the past year we grew our team, our space, and our community, and we’re excited for all the amazing things to come in 2017!