- The five most important skills in SEO.
SEO shifted from being a technical discipline 10 years ago
to being a multidisciplinary area
that involves a few different skills.
And if I had to tell you all the skills that SEO involves,
this video could become too long and overwhelming.
I'm going to go through the foundational skills
anyone who works with SEO should master.
Without these five skills,
you're not going to do as well as an SEO.
The first skill I have for you is creativity.
See, in SEO, one of the biggest ways
that you get rankings is building backlinks.
Everyone used to build backlinks by writing content.
And when they were doing that,
I started creating a really detailed guide
that had visual graphical images,
kind of like an infographic,
and my content started generating
more backlinks than other people.
Then other people started doing the same.
Then I started doing data-rich posts.
Then people started doing that.
And then I'm like, wait, with content,
you got to keep updating.
It doesn't mean you shouldn't write content,
but there must be a better way to get backlinks.
And there was, free tools.
If you look on neilpatel.com, I have Ubersuggest,
which is a SEO tool that's mainly for free,
has over 10,000 backlinks.
I have A/B Testing Calculator,
I have a backlink tool that just tells you
how many backlinks you have.
I continually release tools and update my tools.
And by doing that, I'm generating more SEO traffic
and ranking higher because I'm not
actually going out there and fending for the links.
Just releasing a tool for free has done really well for me.
And if you can't build a tool like I did,
you can just go to sites like CodeCanyon, download a tool,
pay a little bit of money,
and release that tool on your website.
But that's the example of creativity.
It's thinking outside the box and you should start
leveraging your creativity muscles
and start thinking outside the box.
The second skill that you need is understanding analytics.
I'm not talking about reading a report.
There's Google Analytics, there's Google Data Studio,
but when you look at the report
and you're like, oh my search traffic's going down
or it's going up, do you understand what's
actually driving you more conversions?
What key words, what change you need to make
to actually get more better results?
That's what I mean by analytic skills, right?
So when you look at these reports,
what changes do you need to make to your SEO strategy
so you can actually get the results you're looking for?
The third skill that you need to understand is CRO.
That's Conversion Rate Optimization.
You're probably like, "Neil, CRO has nothing
to do with SEO."
Well, think of it this way.
You're writing a lot of content when you do SEO, right?
Content marketing, you need that to get backlinks,
to get traffic on Google, Google, a lot of it,
is based on text and words people are typing in.
And when you get this traffic to this content,
you'll find out as a SEO well, I'm getting all this traffic.
But then when you talk to other people in the company like,
yeah, you're getting more traffic,
but we're not really seeing any more sales, any more leads.
So how can you convert those visitors into customers?
So with those blog posts,
you need to mix in links that generate sales
or forms that capture more leads.
In essence, you need to learn CRO to some extent.
You don't need to be an expert on it,
but you need to learn it to some extent.
So for example, if my site was selling kitchen appliances,
I may do an article like Top 10 Toaster Ovens.
And I could link in the article
to some of the toaster ovens that we sell to generate sales.
That's an example of CRO.
The fourth skill that you need to have is people skills.
See, SEO is turning into a multi-person organization,
and it has for a long time.
So you got to work with other people.
You got to work with people who can promote the content,
whether it's on social media or whether it's doing
manual outreach and asking for people to share that content.
You need to deal with people who can write content,
who can create social media content,
people who can deal with copywriting, just for headlines.
You need to deal with people who can deal specifically
with making those technical changes to a code
and implementing, getting them released, right?
These are all examples of people that you have to deal with
that are working on SEO.
And if you don't know how to manage,
work with project management solutions,
whether it's Asana or the Trellos of the world,
you're not going to be efficient as a team
and get the results that you're looking for.
The last skill that you need to learn is experimentation.
Look, did you know that Google
roughly makes nine algorithm changes per day?
That was data from a few years ago,
they haven't released any new data points
on how many algorithm changes they're doing per year.
But when you look at it,
they're making almost 10 plus algorithm changes a day.
How do you keep up with that?
Well, you got to test.
I don't always know the right answer.
You're not going to always know the right answer.
You got to test.
From testing your title text to meta text
to see what gets the most clicks
to testing a SEO strategy on a split page
to see if it increases your rankings or tanks it
to testing things like crosslinking to updating content
to testing on adding videos within your content
to see if you can increase time on site.
These are all things you need to test.
To testing global expansion, right?
If you test these strategies, you'll see,
oh, expand to other countries using hreflang
and translating my content, transcribing it,
gets us more SEO traffic, or it doesn't work that well.
Oh, let me see if I need to build links
in this other country to that country-specific content
to see if that solves the problem.
These are all examples of tests.
And if you don't test,
you won't be able to keep a with the algorithms,
so don't be afraid to test and have your traffic fluctuate
in a positive way or a negative way.
Testing is good, 'cause it tells you
what you should do more of and what you should do less of
and it'll help you improve in the long run.
Now, if you're looking for a job in SEO,
check out my add agency, NP Digital, we're hiring,
or if you just want my team to do all the SEO stuff for you,
we're here to help.
Just reach out to us at npdigital.com
or if you have any questions
and just want us to help you with anything,
just have any question you want answered for free,
leave a comment below, I'm here to help you out.