This episode, Local SEO Guide’s CEO Andrew Shotland talks about the different ways to get clients without marketing, how he built his credibility online, and the most important aspects of a successful website. Andrew Shotland has been working in SEO for over 15 years and is the CEO of LocalSEOGuide.com, where he helps large and small businesses with their Search Engine Optimization marketing. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of The Consulting Trap:
- How to become an SEO consultant.
- Ways to get clients without marketing.
- How to build credibility online.
- The most important aspects of a website.
- Why companies change the SEO agency they work with.
- The importance of being transparent with your clients.
Resources:
Connecting with Andrew Shotland:
Connecting with the host:
Quotables:
- 1:36 – “One day two guys flew down from Seattle to have lunch with me and I’m like who flys from Seattle to have lunch with me I mean I’m a great lunch companion but they wanted to pay me 90 thousand dollars to do SEO for them, this is my first year as a consultant and buy lunch and pick up the cheque and I’m like I’m curious guys I have to ask why me well you ranked number one for local SEO we figured you know what your doing so already that domain purchase paid off instantly.”
- 4:07 – “We at one point we’re probably the fastest growing site or one of the fastest growing sites in the world that caught the attention of Google. Google gave us the first partnership to feed reviews into Google Maps and that caught the attention of Sequoia Capital and SoftBank Capital who gave us a few million bucks to get big and we thought we were going to be billionaires and we hired a bunch of people and someone wanted to redesign the website because it looked like Craigslist and you can’t have a site that looks like Craigslist that’s not successful and I didn’t know what I didn’t know about technical SEO we redesigned the website and the first day we launched it we lost all of our organic traffic because of a technical SEO problem which I could identify in a heartbeat but at the time I had no clue.”
- 23:02 – “About 20 percent of our new clients either just fired an SEO agency or are currently working with one they’re unhappy with and usually they’re unhappy with it because there’s no transparency, the results aren’t good but mostly what we hear is I don’t know what they’re doing or I think they’re just bullshitting me.”
- 29:22 – “I worked for a guy once he was a weird dude but a great salesman and he did phone sales back when phone was all it is and he figured out every time someone hung up on him he made 25 cents and so 25 cents for every no I think is a really great formula for pretty much everything in life because you’re going to meet a lot of no’s and who cares that’s just one more thing on the path to getting to a yes and I think that’s for everything, not just sales.”