Get to know Andrew Shotland, CEO and Founder of LocalSEOGuide

Andrew is the proprietor of www.localseoguide.com and one of the top local search consultants in the industry. Andrew offers full service SEO, search engine advertising, website strategy and local search consulting with a specialty in yellow pages and local directories SEO. He has provided his services to numerous media, ecommerce companies, franchises and start-ups including Bing.com, DexKnows.com, Yellowbook.com, The Yellow Pages Group Co. of Canada, Truvo, Telegate Media, Business.com, The Los Angeles Times, Cox Communications, The New York Daily News, Ingenio/AT&T, D&B & Sequoia Capital, Friendster, MOG.com, ChaCha.com and Spoke.com. Local SEO Guide also provides small businesses with search marketing services.

Please introduce yourself and where you work.

I am the CEO and Founder of LocalSEOGuide. We are an SEO consulting company that specializes in multi-location, ecommerce and media SEO. We work with some of the largest, and smallest, brands in the world.

How do you think SEO has changed over the last 10 years?

I would argue that on one hand SEO hasn’t changed much. We are solving a lot of the same problems for clients that we were solving ten years ago (wow – time flies when you’re having fun!). On the other hand, there are a number of new challenges and we now spend just as much time optimizing client information inside of systems like Google My Business, Apple Maps, Knowledge Panels, etc. as we do optimizing their sites. I imagine a lot of people might also say mobile has become a big deal, but thus far, besides a few technical and UI issues, we don’t see mobile optimization as all that different from desktop.

How did you get introduced to digital marketing, more specifically SEO?

I got into SEO because I had a start-up, InsiderPages.com, that was an early version of Yelp. We wanted to be Yuge. We had very little traffic to our site. Someone told me I might want to look into this thing called “SEO”. I found some guy who told me to update my title tags and a couple of other things. We quickly went from about 3,000 people/month coming to the site to 30,000. I started experimenting. Within a few months we got the traffic up to about 1.5 million uniques/month. You could say I caught the bug after that.

What are the services you provide to your clients?

The services we provide to clients include SEO audits (we love figuring out 1 billion+ URL sites), Google My Business work, particularly for clients with hundreds or thousands of locations although we do single location work as well – we also do a lot of white label Local SEO work for other agencies, and of course content creation and linkbuilding. We just launched Locadium.com, a service that monitors your Google My Business pages for unwanted changes.

What strategy according to you will prevail in 2018 for SEO?

Per above, we think the same strategies we have been using still apply for 2018

What would your advice be to people who are looking to take up digital marketing as a career choice?

If you are thinking about SEO for a career, I’d advise you to start working on your own sites to figure it out. And of course read a lot. There are a lot of great SEOs sharing information online all the time. Follow them on Twitter. That said, in my experience, the people who tend to excel the most at SEO are those who were forced to learn it to save their job. Nothing like the sword of Damocles hanging over your head to encourage you to figure out this ridiculous form of marketing.