Neil Patel is the co-founder of Crazy Egg, Hello Bar, and KISSmetrics. He helps companies like Amazon, NBC, GM, HP and Viacom grow their revenue. In this week’s interview, he shares is insights on SEO:
 

1. Many young marketers I’ve met want to gain technical SEO skills. What advice do you have for them?

   You need to practice SEO on your own site to gain technical skills. Sure you can read about SEO, but until you actually practice it on a site, you won’t get good at it.
   
   I also recommend avoiding practicing on client sites as messing up will cost them a lot of money.
    

2. What are 3 simple on-page SEO tactics every business should implement to increase website search ranking?

   Make sure your title tags are unique on each page. Same with your meta description tags. And lastly make sure your URLs are clean and contain no extraneous characters.
   
   Although it will be easy for you to implement the above 3 things, don’t expect it to have a major impact on your rankings. Most on page elements don’t have huge impact.
    

3. Many marketers believe content marketing is the new SEO. What are your thoughts on that?

   I agree with this. I even wrote a blog post on it in 2012. :) 
    

4. Marketing Managers and Directors are always trying to measure their digital marketing performance using metrics. In addition to the increase in a site’s search ranking for targeted keywords and organic traffic, what’s an important metric you use to assess SEO success?

   Revenue. It is the most important metric for most businesses. If search traffic isn’t generating you more revenue, something is off and you should adjust your strategy.
    

5. One major SEO challenge many businesses face is the frequent changes Google makes to their algorithms. What are 3 tactics businesses can adopt to stay on top of SEO best practices?

   You shouldn’t  worry about best practices or Google’s algorithm. Instead you should focus on building a great product or service. Google’s goal is to show users the best site out there. Typically the ones with the best product or service win in the long run.
    

6. You clearly have an abundance of knowledge and experience in SEO. How did you get your background?

   I practiced SEO on my site for many years. In addition to that I consulted with hundreds of other companies. After years of experience you eventually pick things up.
   
    

    

   
   Neil Patel is the co-founder of Crazy Egg, Hello Bar, and KISSmetrics. He helps companies like Amazon, NBC, GM, HP and Viacom grow their revenue. The Wall Street Journal calls him a top influencer on the web, Forbes says he is one of the top 10 online marketers, and Entrepreneur Magazine says he created one of the 100 most brilliant companies in the world. He was recognized as a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by President Obama and one of the top 100 entrepreneurs under the age of 35 by the United Nations. Neil has also been awarded Congressional Recognition from the United States House of Representatives.