In this interview, Neil Patel discusses recent product developments at NP Digital, including a backlinks opportunity report, expanded link data, competitor keyword gap analysis, a Chrome extension, and the early rollout of SEO automation. He explains the company’s competitive strategy: rather than matching feature‑rich giants like SEMrush and Ahrefs, NP Digital targets small and medium businesses (SMBs) with an affordable, easy‑to‑use, and increasingly automated SEO tool, planning to move upstream to enterprises later. Patel emphasizes that agency growth hinges on building robust systems, processes, and training rather than simply hiring more staff, allowing younger or less‑experienced hires to become productive. He contrasts custom, client‑specific services with productized offerings, noting that while custom work yields better results, it can limit margins. NP Digital serves a wide client range—from SMBs paying a few thousand dollars per month to large corporations spending millions—supported by a 400‑plus employee team. For hiring, Patel looks for candidates with long tenures, promotions, and passion, viewing loyalty and proven value as key indicators. Regarding marketer skill sets, he advocates an omnichannel mindset and deep expertise in a chosen discipline rather than chasing every trend. To stand out in a noisy market, he stresses delivering exceptional service to one customer at a time, relying on referrals for sustainable growth. Finally, he offers brief advice on aligning marketing and sales to improve closing rates, though details are limited in the excerpt.
Chapters
One thing you mentioned in the past, like we talked a bit about conversions, paid conversions was something like 1% when we last chatted. Is that still the same now or what changes have you made since we last chatted?
So I haven't kept up to date too much with our conversion rate. The team more so does. I do know a lot of the improvements. I focus more of my energy on product. So we released a backlinks opportunity report where we show you all the people that link to your competition but don't link to you. So that way you can do outreach and increase your odds of getting links. We've added a lot more link data from anchor text information to where the links are coming from, the regions, all that kind of stuff. We even got more specific with things like competitor analysis. You can see all, there's a competitor overview where you can see all the keywords your competition ranks for that you don't. So we look at that as keyword gaps, right? So that way, you know more content that you can be creating. So we were just adding more and more features to make the product more usable, better. Give you better results when it comes to your SEO. The Chrome extension has been growing. We made a lot of updates there as well too. And in November, I think we released our first version of SEO automation where we try to do the SEO for you automatically.
And how's that been? So SEO automation, I know it's been on your checklist or bucket list for a while to test it out. Has it spun out as nicely as you hoped?
No, takes a lot longer, but hopefully it starts working out and we'll find out more in November with the first go-around. But I believe we'll be there. We just brought in a CEO to run the division. His name's Max and he specializes in marketing automation and that's all he does. Not like email automation, but literally automating marketing. And he did that for one of the big holding companies, Dentsu Aegis.
Very cool. How are you thinking about when it comes to competing with obviously the big players, right? The SEMrush, the Ahrefs, you know, in the moment they're obviously the top players in the game. You're coming in close on them. How are you thinking other than features? I mean, that's probably a battle that's tough to win against, right? Competing against features. Is there other things you're looking at on how you're able to compete with them?
Yeah, so we're not really trying to compete with them on features. I'm trying to create the most usable SEO tool that helps you get results when you don't have a big budget, right? So think about an SEO tool for SMBs. And eventually I'll go upstream towards enterprises, but I'm really trying to focus on small and medium businesses. And the key is, instead of giving them more features and more reports, how do you just do more for them? Because they don't have the manpower like some of the bigger corporations have.
So I guess trying to make it easier and more affordable, I guess that's probably your entry-level point of getting people in and then kind of moving up.
Affordability, easier to use, and automate more stuff so you don't need as many people. That's our goal. I'm not saying we're fully there yet, but that's where we're trying to go.
Love it. That's the vision. When it comes to running NP Digital, I know many agency owners, they eventually move to building a SaaS, right? After whether they hit a plateau in terms of where their growth potential is or they get burnt out for some reason, just managing too much employees and staff. So after you've been running NP Digital for a little bit, what are some suggestions maybe you have to other digital marketing agency owners who are listening in? To help them scale an actual business effectively?
What kind of business, SaaS or agency?
The agency part.
Okay. So when it comes to scale, the biggest thing I've learned is systems and processes. See, because agency stuff is very heavy human-oriented, right? If you have a lot of people, it's hard to keep Growing by hiring more people. It doesn't mean that you can't, it's just, it's harder and harder to find more amazing people. The landscape is more and more competitive. So you got to create systems, processes, trainings to really level up everyone. Even when, you know, you're growing or you can't find people, at least you can hire younger people, people who aren't as experienced and really get them going and get them to where they need to be. And when you systemize stuff, create the processes, create the automations, it makes your team much more efficient. And hopefully you don't have to be as labor intensive, which And helps you scale more too.
And would you say, like, in terms of pricing and how you structure the different, uh, you know, service offerings, do you like to go more, you know, productized and, you know, having specific services, or do you have custom for everybody?
Custom, no cookie cutter. You really figure out what's wrong with the business and then you apply it to that business. You can try to do cookie cutter, that approach works for others too. I've just found that you can't provide them as great results because what one business needs is different in many cases than others. It's not as scalable, but it allows you to provide better results to customers, which is what we've seen. The margins aren't as good, but again, you provide better results to customers, which is what we focus on more than just trying to scale up our business.
So, scale isn't kind of your priority. It's more results, getting good quality deliverable, and not even profit margins, right? It's just, let's get good results for them. It doesn't matter whatever it takes.
Exactly. And we do care about scale. Of course, we are a business and we do want profit, but we believe if you provide the best results and you do amazing work, the other stuff eventually comes.
And then I think from my understanding, what I heard is you've opened up your services to all kinds of all-sized companies, not just the bigger companies with bigger budgets. Is that accurate?
That's correct. We work with SMBs and our average SMB pays us around $3,000, $4,000 a month, all the way to really large corporations that can spend millions and millions a year with us.
And how are you able to kind of manage those so many different kind of processes, stay profitable, and then, you know, split that focus and offering between SMBs who need, you know, this much attention and then, you know, the big guys spending millions of dollars?
We have amazing team, great leaders. I think we're at 400 and something employees.
Okay.
Ad agency. So good amount of headcount, which does help as well.
Nice. Okay. So just getting the right people on at the right time, at the right place, right?
Bingo, you got it right.
So as a digital marketer, I think there's a lot of noise out there. How do you kind of tailor your messaging in a way that would say distinguish yourselves from all these, you know, get-rich-quick scammers, marketers who are just making, you know, giving a bad brand and name to the rest of the marketers out there?
One customer at a time. The way you really grow in any business is you provide amazing product or service, you do really well, and you keep getting more referrals. It's a long, slow, boring way to grow, but that's really how most people grow. And if you can end up just doing really well from that aspect, you'll do well in the long run.
So it's not— so it's even that noise is going to be out there, that those get-rich guys are going to be, you know, flashing all that stuff, but it's not going to last. And, uh, you know, if you do good work, it's going to continue, right?
Bingo.
Yeah. Um, so in terms of competition and maybe valuable skill sets, how do you say, you know, you can become a better or more effective digital marketer than maybe your competitors or your peers? So you mentioned good service. Um, are there any key skills or qualities that you say are, you know, uh, that are differentiating among the best right now? You know, for yourself, for example, when you're hiring somebody, is there something that, that really, you know, strikes you as important right now?
Not one quality. What we really look for when hiring someone— are you talking about hiring an employee or hiring an agency, to clarify?
Uh, employees, yeah.
When I'm looking to hire employees, I just look for people who have been in my space for a long time. Whatever companies they were at, they stayed there for a while. They got promotions at that organization because it means that they were seen as valuable, right? If people keep promoting you. And people who love what they're doing. Because if you can do that, typically you're finding really good employees because they have a track record of doing well. And let's say if someone's had 2 jobs, over the last 10 years or worked for 2 different companies, and at both companies they've gotten continual promotions, and they're the exact same type of person that you're looking for, for the exact same role that they've already been in the past, chances are they'll do a good job because they were loyal to 2 companies, they got constant promotions, which means that people found them valuable, and if they love what they're doing, they'll really go above and beyond for your customers or your Your clients, whatever you want to call them, and they'll probably do an amazing job for you because they've done it so many times in the past.
Nice. And would you say there's specific digital marketing skills that you look for right now? You say, you know, if somebody is listening in and saying, hey, like, I want to focus on a new marketing hack or skill set, is it SEO? Should I still be focusing on that? Or is that kind of old news? Is it, you know, marketing analytics?
Yeah, there's not one anymore. Marketing's turned to omnichannel.
Mm-hmm.
Whether you want to do SEO or CRO or paid advertising or cool video creation or UX/UI design, there's not one thing. And I don't think you need to be a jack of trades at all. Pick the one that you're most passionate about and just focus on that. You know, it's like when I was a kid, they told me that you could be a jack of all trades, right? You'd be good at anything that you put your mind to. In the corporate world, you don't need to be. You just need to do one thing really well. And just harness all your energy on that one thing and that's it.
So don't focus, focus on chasing the trends and what's hot right now. Just, you know, what you're good at is always going to be valuable if you can show your work, right?
Bingo.
Yep. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, marketing and sales teams, obviously you manage both, both of those kind of, uh, departments. You know, the marketing having to work with sales teams or even having sometimes do sales themselves. Do you have any suggestions or tips on maybe how to improve Closing rates from sales teams, whether that's a marketer generating better qualifying leads or maybe it's suggestions within the sales process themselves?
When it comes to closing, we don't really use a process like, this is what you need to do and this is slide 1 in your deck, slide 2. We more look at it as problems and solutions. What are the problems? Can you identify them? Here are the solutions. How can you prove that you've done it before successfully if you can? Show them projections ideally if you can, and break down what you're going to do and give away the farm. What I mean by that is show them everything that you're going to do and just be like, look, here it is. Here's going to be our playbook for you, and this is what we're going to do. You can either go try to do it ourselves or you can pay us and we can do it for you, and we can do it right the first pass at it because we're successful at this and we've done this so many times before.
