Aurel Davidyan 0:00

Well, Andrew, welcome uh to the Oral Dividend Show. We are excited to have you. I've uh did a little research about you, and I love what you've built and what you've done. You built some incredible companies, and I'm excited to talk to you.

Andrew Shotland 0:15

Well, thank you. Nice to be here. Always fun to be on a podcast.

Aurel Davidyan 0:19

Yeah. So uh tell me a little bit about yourself and uh just a quick background of what you're doing and where you started.

Andrew Shotland 0:26

So I've been doing internet stuff for kind of forever. In the 1990s, I helped launch Showtime Network's first website, the TV movie channel. And then I pretty quickly moved over to NBC to help them with their startup internet crew. And very long story, but I ran NBC.com back when it was like weird to see URLs and TV. Like we did a lot of the early, like, hey, um, we were watching TV, go to this thing called the internet and do something and something will happen type of thing. And uh in 2003, I helped start a company called Insider Pages, which was an early version of Yelp. And I knew nothing about SEO at the time. And one of our investors told us, hey, you you might want to uh try this thing called, I've heard called SEO. It sounds like it's cool. And I was like, what is that? I found some guy who told me some tricks, and we started doing SEO and it started working. And we had the right mixture of content and links and things on our website that it worked really well. So this is around 2005, let's say. And we became one of the fastest growing websites on the planet at the moment, like for a split second. That enabled us to raise a lot of money from some big venture capitalists who thought we were like gonna be Yelp basically. Yeah, and um, and we hired someone to run marketing who decided that our website sucked, and so we rebuilt our website. And um, I didn't know what I didn't know about technical SEO. And when we launched the website, we lost almost all of our traffic because of a technical problem I could fix today in like two seconds. Yeah. But at the time I had no clue. So uh, long story short, the investors end up selling the company to City Search. I got fired the day I lost my job. I happened to be having drinks with a guy who was running the website for the Los Angeles Times. And he said he was all excited because he just got approval to redesign their website. And I said, Oh, what are you doing about SEO? He's like, What do you mean? Like, this is when SEO people didn't really know what SEO was at the time. And I said, Well, let me tell you what happened to me today. And I told him this story and he freaked out and said, Hey, can I hire you to do some consulting? And so the next thing you know, I'm an SEO consultant, and it was like right place at the right time. And I just started getting people who knew me, like, hey, I heard you're doing SEO consulting. Can you help me? And within like, I don't know, a month I had like five clients. Within three months, I had like 10 clients. And I remember at one point my wife said, Hey, are you gonna go look for a job? And I was like, working 24 hours a day. And I was like, Yeah, I think I have a job now. And that was uh actually this year, 20 years ago. And so I've run this company, local SEO guide, since then, doing SEO for really like say some of the biggest businesses in the world and some of the smallest ones.

Aurel Davidyan 2:56

That's awesome. Very impressive. Uh, you've been doing uh search and SEO for 20 years. What's one moment that completely flipped how you think about growth?

Andrew Shotland 3:08

Of growth? Hmm. I don't know if I have an answer for that question. The first thing that comes to my mind is in about 2008, let's say, uh-huh. I was the New York Daily News hired me to to do an audit for them and consult for them, uh, the newspaper.

Aurel Davidyan 3:23

Yeah.

Andrew Shotland 3:24

And I realized they had an entire duplicate version of their site dating back to 1996, like the old design on a subdomain, a part of their website that no one knew existed. And I said, Oh, you got to get rid of that. It's like a complete duplicate. It looks like the 1996 homepage and stuff like that. I didn't say how to get rid of it. I just was in a meeting I kind of threw out. Yeah, we need to fix that. And a week later, they had turned the whole thing off without telling me. And I didn't really even notice it at the time. And uh the GM called me up a week after that and said, Hey, we we just lost like 10 million visitors to our website overnight. And he said, I I know there's such things no pain, no gain, but is this how it's supposed to work? And I was like, What did you do? And I realized that for a variety of reasons, turning that that site off like had to be done super carefully and not just with a blood instrument. And so I was like, turn it back on, turn it back on. And they turned it back on and thanked, and I at the time I actually knew someone at Google and I said, Hey, can you fix this button? And I guess they pushed the fix this button because then Deadly News was kind of an important site. Yeah. So that taught me, I don't know if that taught me anything about growth. It's maybe it taught me that um, whatever, with great power comes great responsibility. You have to understand like the levers you're able to pull and the consequences of your actions, and you have to be very deliberate about them. You can't just rush into stuff. And so, as the expert, when people hired me, my words carried weight. Yeah. Like they would whereas someone internal might say, Oh, we need to turn that off, and they wouldn't do anything about it. The fact that this guy they're paying, who's from Silicon Valley, kind of said it, like suddenly they do it. So, um, and I also learned like to become a good doctor, you have to kill a few patients. Because I guarantee you, I've never done that but that again, right? Yeah. And maybe that's why clients kind of like us is that we've fucked up a lot. And so we're from your mistakes. Yeah, exactly. We if we've learned a lot, unfortunately. And I think that's why. So, anyhow, it's not unique to me. It's just like any business that's had any kind of longevity, you kind of learn what not to do, probably just as important, if not more important, than learning what to do.

Aurel Davidyan 5:30

That's uh that's a good one. Um, I have this question for you. You helped turn uh inside pagers into a national platform. What's a good story from uh the ride uh there uh that still makes you laugh or cringe?

Andrew Shotland 5:44

Oh, everything makes me do both. I mean, it was such a that's um huge, huge success. Okay, this is a this is this is a good one. So we actually created the first paper call advertising platform for small businesses. I don't think there was one out there before we did it. So we found this company VoiceStar that had call tracking numbers, and we signed up advertisers and then basically charged them every time someone got a call, more or less. And so we launched these numbers all over our website. And what we didn't anticipate was that our competitors, salespeople, we we made a big announcement. Hey, we're the first call tracking thing. And so our competitors immediately scraped all our phone numbers and started using that as a sales tool and started calling all our advertisers who barely even knew that they were advertising. Like we convinced, hey, we'll give you free ads or something to get them on the network. And the call had what's called a whisper prompt. Meaning when you answer it, it says, This call is coming to you from insider pages. Yeah, right. And then it the person answered. And so one day we get a voicemail on our helpline or whatever we had. I don't remember even how maybe the CEO got it. This poor woman who had like a dog grooming salon was getting called like every five minutes from salespeople, and it's like from insider pages. And so she just like laid into us on voicemail, like like half screaming, half crying, like make it stop. Yeah.

Aurel Davidyan 7:14

So it wasn't you guys, it was the people that scraped the data.

Andrew Shotland 7:18

Yeah, it was our competitors. Yeah, they're salespeople. That's hilarious. It was really smart. Yeah. Right? And they were like, oh, Insider Pages sucks. Look, they gave me your phone number and they're charging you for this call. Yeah. Why do you want to be on that platform? Be in our thing, we're cooler. Do you guys still do that? I'm no longer at Insider Pages. I have no idea what they're it's so Insider Pages got kind of subsumed into City Search and ceased to really become an operating company. It's just like a website, a kind of a duplicate website of CitySearch.com. Which does City Search even work anymore? I don't even know. I haven't heard their name in a million years.

Aurel Davidyan 7:52

What's the biggest SEO mistake you still see huge brands making, even like companies like Walmart or Home Depot, from since you're an expert, do you see any of these mega companies make any mistakes on the their SEO?

Andrew Shotland 8:08

Sure. You know, anytime you have a super complicated organization, the odds that you make some kind of mistake go up because um SEO is like this discipline that spans like different teams. So it's technical, it's marketing, you know, it's communications, it's whatever it's like a million different things, content. And so in big operations, it's very easy to um miss stupid little technical things that could make a huge difference. So companies like Walmart, I'm sure they they make mistakes every now and then, but they've got it pretty dialed in at this point where they've made all the screw-ups, and so they have pretty SEO is such a significant revenue item for them that they've kind of I don't want to say they have a bulletproof system. But most most of the most common mistakes we've seen at bigger companies and smaller ones is they just don't give SEO a seat at the table. Meaning it's an engineering-driven culture. They release fast and furious, and they were told or they were asked, hey, can you let us look at stuff before you push it live? And yet they forgot. So we have one client that we've been working with for about a decade, like multi-billion dollar brand. And um, it took like 10 years to actually get someone from engineering to actually have like a dotted line to SEO, meaning like they're responsible for talking to the SEO team. In fact, there was no SEO team until three years ago, really. I was the SEO team. So um they make a lot fewer mistakes now.

Aurel Davidyan 9:37

That's awesome. Is uh how is AI shaking up things for you, uh you guys? Is it doing most of the work or is it not? Are you guys using AI at all?

Andrew Shotland 9:47

So there's maybe two use cases for AI. There's how do we rank in AI, which is we spend a lot of time, like how do we increase our client visibility in AI? We spend a lot of time doing that. And then how do we use AI to improve our systems? Yeah. And I would say we're probably farther along at the ranking part than the systems part. We're still all this agentic stuff that's now happening. We're we're starting to dabble with it. In fact, here's a good use case. I just used Claude Cowork two days ago. Yeah, client launched a bunch of pages. I just said, hey, Claude, can you go and just check to see how they're indexed in Google and do it every day and let me know? And so it's doing every day at 9 a.m. I get a little report from Claude, and it's like, hey, look, you're got 10 more pages. So we're doing little productivity things like that that are saving our team time that you know for repetitive tasks that they would normally be doing. We see a lot of potential in using AI to kind of look at our data and help us make decisions. So, as an example, in Google Search Console, you can get a list of a lot of the search queries that a URL shows up for. You can then take that list, put it into a decent LLM, and then say, hey, based on the queries it's showing up for, this is the title tag and the content of this page. How would you improve it, the title tag and the content and whatever? How would you include the information on this page to basically address the topics that are in this keyword set better? So as an example, you might be ranking number 10 for a keyword that has a lot of impressions, and so you want to improve your rankings in that. It might come back and say, Oh, add that to your title tag, or write a paragraph about this, or something like that. So we're we're doing that kind of stuff.

Aurel Davidyan 11:34

But AI hasn't been uh replacing humans yet in your company or in what way you're doing right now.

Andrew Shotland 11:41

No, we're not a kind of huge believer in AI is gonna replace everybody. So the way people in in the industry say is is there are two points of view. You can do more with less or you can do more with more. And um and so we're on the more with more track. And we kind of encourage our clients to be more with more. Like, let's be more productive, let's get more things done, let's take that budget and do a lot more. And right now with AI, what's pretty clear is it's sped things up tremendously, like in all facets of the market. And so we're trying to kind of walk that fine line between moving fast and not breaking things. I think the successful SEO agency or in-house SEO person over the next year is gonna get really good at becoming what they call an orchestrator.

Aurel Davidyan 12:32

Yeah.

Andrew Shotland 12:33

Like, so I have Claude doing 20 things, and it's all designed to build to an outcome that I control. And I don't think the human involved in that is going away anytime soon. I just may be asked, I mean, the human may be asked to kind of have their fingers in many more pots. But SEOs by nature typically have, especially generalists, like we're not just technical or content or whatever. I think it's a pretty crazy industry. Like, we're expected to know everything about everything we do, right? And everything the teams we work with do. I know. Right? Yeah. What other job is like that? I I don't know many.

Aurel Davidyan 13:08

No. I mean, you look, if you look just five years back, there's you know, we didn't expect that. Now, like me as a founder and CEO, like I expect all my employees and all my people to know everything too, because like we have all the tools, right? Right.

Andrew Shotland 13:24

So I always say the number one skill in SEO is curiosity. Yeah. Like, why did that happen? What's going on? What is that all about? And with all these tools, it makes it easier for curious people to kind of go deep.

Aurel Davidyan 13:37

And you know, it makes them better. There's the tools out there, and the people that are lazy or like don't want it, or like, oh, I can't, I'm not tax heavy or whatever. It just sets them back further and further, and then pretty soon they fall off.

Andrew Shotland 13:50

I don't know if I call them lazy. I just say a lot of people are inertia is like a thing, right? Oh, this is how I do it. They didn't want to I can already see, I can already see like this is how I do it over the next year, isn't gonna that's not a good message to clients. Yeah. Um it's like, oh no, we're we're up to speed on the latest, is what they they'll want to hear. Even if half of that is bullshit. Yeah. They want to know that you're kind of staying abreast of the latest and greatest.

Aurel Davidyan 14:19

Yeah, that's awesome. Let me ask you a personal question. Outside of work, what is something you're we're weirdly passionate about or do for fun that you know people don't see or know about you? Weirdly passionate about.

Andrew Shotland 14:33

Um I don't know what I'm weirdly passionate about. I love skiing. I don't know if that's weird. It's cool, but um, most people who know me know know that. And uh here's a weird one that I didn't realize was a thing. So I historically have not had a very green thumb. I live in California, and in theory, I should be my home should be a garden of Eden. Yeah. And it's a garden of dead things. Just plants everywhere. Yeah. And over the last year I suddenly realized I'm wait, I have like ChatGPT and Gemini and all these things. They can tell me how to do this. And now, like I say, every day I point it at a plant, I'm like, how do I make this thing better? Um, and so I've had these two lemon trees on our property that when we bought it 20 years ago were full of lemons. Within two years, they were kind of dead. And they haven't maybe I get one lemon every other year out of them. I blame them. I chat GPT'd the crap out of them, and um, they are now producing lemons. Lemon. I love it. So it works. It works. Yeah, there are a lot of great little stupid use cases like that where LLMs are amazing. Yeah. That's awesome. I probably like boiled the ocean doing it, but hey, that's not my problem.

Aurel Davidyan 15:46

You you might offend somebody, but who cares? One last question, kind of um what's the single uh the single mindset or habit you see every founder who actually builds something that lasts?

Andrew Shotland 16:01

It seems to me successful founders have a very big P under their mattress, meaning there's something that drives them crazy and they're obsessive about solving that problem.

Aurel Davidyan 16:14

Yeah.

Andrew Shotland 16:15

It's kind of an OCD thing. Um, you know, oh the fork is just out of place. I gotta keep putting it right in place or whatever. And I think really successful founders have that about a business problem or maybe a life problem that business is solving, and they can't stop. Like the ones who really crush it, they're a bit sociopathic that way. Or maybe that's not the right word. They're very narrow focused. I need to solve the problem. Like, I can't go out to dinner with you tonight. I need to solve the problem. I can't go have uh 10 beers with you tonight. I need to solve the problem. I don't need to sleep tonight, I need to solve the problem. And so it's a bit unhealthy, but that's the um that's probably why I don't have a billion-dollar company because I'm I'm kind of like, yeah, I need to I have that P under my mattress, but I'm like, you know what? I can sleep with that P.

Aurel Davidyan 16:57

I don't know. But like almost everybody I know is like that. Most of the founders I know, the exactly what you described, then they're identical to that. You know, they're just they can't stay still, they gotta finish, they gotta do whatever they started, or they want to complete this project, and they're so busy, and then as soon as one project is done, they have to start another one, and uh it's just it's a cycle.

Andrew Shotland 17:18

I once um read an interview with I think Stevie Wonder's ex-wife or something, and she was like, you know, you'll be sitting in the middle of a conversation with him, and he'll just get up and leave and go to his studio and start writing or something. And you know, she was annoyed by that. And I was like, he's Stevie Wonder. Like, what would you rather have him? I don't want to have a conversation with him, I want him to make another great song.

Aurel Davidyan 17:42

So Stevie is probably like that. Are you a believer? Uh for me, like, you know, uh, in my business, in my career, I've uh put God first in everything I do. How important is fate in business, do you think? You're talking to the wrong guy. Yeah.

Andrew Shotland 17:56

I could care less. No, all right. It's not my jam.

Aurel Davidyan 18:00

Well, I just want to ask. I think uh that's it with for all all the questions, and thank you so much, Andrew, for joining uh the Oral Dividian show. Really appreciate it. All right.