From Showtime Networks to NBC to SEO

Andrew's been doing internet stuff for kind of forever. He was at Showtime Networks, the cable channel, when the internet first became a thing. He helped launch Showtime's first website in 1993.

After that, he pretty quickly went to NBC and joined their startup internet group at 30 Rock. The mandate was just figure it out. He did a lot of weird stuff like invest in startups, give them $10 million of TV time in the middle of the night on CNBC in exchange for pre-IPO stock, and make like $100 million kind of thing.

He ran NBC.com for a while back when it was weird to see URLs on TV. He did a lot of the early work of hey, you're watching TV, go to this thing called the internet and do something, and something might happen.

The Insider Pages Story: Zero to 5 Million Visitors

Andrew got into SEO in 2003, in local SEO actually, because he helped start a company called Insider Pages out of Idealab in Pasadena. Insider Pages was an early version of Yelp. They started around the same time as Yelp.

They had like zero traffic coming to their website. One of their investors said, hey, why don't you try this thing I've heard about called SEO? Andrew was like, what's that? The investor didn't know really. He just said I heard it's good, try it.

So Andrew found some guy who knew someone who knew someone. He hired a consultant, paid him a little bit of money, and he taught him tricks like hey, update your title tags and add unique meta descriptions and add internal links. Stuff that never even occurred to Andrew was important.

Because they had a national database of US businesses and they were getting reviews, they started growing exponentially as soon as they started doing it. Within months, literally, they went from zero traffic to like 5 million people a month.

They were one of the fastest-growing websites on the planet at the time. This was right around the time when Facebook and YouTube were just starting. They caught up pretty quickly, but this enabled Insider Pages to raise money from Sequoia Capital and SoftBank Capital, big VCs.

They moved the company up to the Bay Area. They hired a bunch of people. They were going to be billionaires.

They hired a head of marketing, and she suggested they redesign their very crappy-looking website. They redesigned the website. Andrew didn't know what he didn't know about technical SEO.

The day they launched it, they lost almost all of their traffic from a problem he could solve today in five seconds. At the time, he couldn't figure it out. The person he hired probably had like a thousand clients at the moment, so he was hard to find.

Basically, long story short, they ended up selling the company to CitySearch for about what they put into it, and Andrew got fired.

How Getting Fired Started His Consulting Career

The day Andrew got fired, he happened to be coincidentally having drinks with the head of the Los Angeles Times website, LATimes.com. He was all excited because he just got approval to redesign their site. He was like, whoa, I'm going to redesign our site.

Andrew said, what are you doing about SEO? The guy was like, what are you talking about?

Andrew told him what happened to him that day. The guy freaked out, had a couple cocktails, and said, hey, can I hire you to do some consulting? Andrew was like, hey, I don't have anything else to do, why not?

The LA Times became his first SEO client. He had a good enough network, and it was right place at the right time. People started coming out of the woodwork. Hey, I hear you're doing SEO consulting. Within a month, he had like three clients. Within two months, he had like six clients. Within three months, he had like 10 clients.

He remembers at one point his wife saying, hey, are you going to go look for a job? He was like, I think I found one.

That was over 18 years ago, and here he is still doing this very goofy marketing channel thing.

I told Andrew that's such a cool story. You kind of should have been a billionaire then, right?

He said yeah, damn it. That is crazy. Just because you had to redesign the website and you know how to fix it now.

But Andrew said that wasn't what killed them. What killed them is they invested so much time in SEO because it was awesome and very little time in actually coming up with a business model that works.

When things hit the fan, they had nothing to fall back on because they were so focused on growing. At that point, top-line metrics were what drove everything on the internet. Growth was the thing. The investors wanted them to make money, but they were much more like no, you need to grow because that's what creates multiples and value.

I told him that's the whole cliche of don't put all your eggs in one basket. That's what we preach to all clients. You should be running ads along with social, with SEO. Also build your brand. Just don't just be running ads. It looks like he learned that firsthand, unfortunately.

Andrew said it actually ended up being a really great experience because it suddenly made him incredibly empathetic with their clients. That's what enabled them to do so well early on. He would get on the phone with these business owners who were clueless, and he'd be like, oh yeah, this is what happened to me. I lost my job. I understand that this is important to do. Immediately, that created a conversation that everyone could relate to.

I told him I believe everything happens for a reason. Sometimes you have to go through those ultimate lows so you can shoot back up. Now it's like, hey, I went through it so you don't have to. Please don't do this, this, and that.

Andrew said he doesn't believe everything happens for a reason. He thinks everything just happens. Maybe we differ there.

Eight Years as a Solo Consultant

Initially, Andrew was just a solo consultant. He did mostly technical and strategic consulting. So he'd do audits and then help clients with strategy and help them with larger sites. When you're updating them all the time like they did, you'll break them. You'll break the SEO because you're not paying attention.

He'd basically be like, hey man, I will look at your site before you push it live. I'll quality check all your development, all that kind of stuff.

That was great. He did that for about eight years as a solo guy, and it was amazing because he didn't really want to grow a business. He just wanted to watch his kids grow up. He wanted to make a decent living. If he wanted to go to Tahiti and sit on the beach, he wanted to go to Tahiti and sit on the beach.

But he ended up not really going to Tahiti and sitting on the beach. He ended up becoming like the consultant he hired initially, meaning he had a lot of clients. At his peak, he had around 40 clients.

The dirty little secret of SEO consulting is if you're just doing technical and strategic consulting, one person can handle 40 clients. It's not optimal, but it's not like every site needs something done to it every day. You just need to make sure it's going in the right direction and be ready to solve problems and troubleshoot.

But at a certain point, he was starting to lose business to clients who wanted execution help and needed an agency. So then he just started hiring people and building a small agency, and here he is.

I asked if consulting is still a good model or should you also be involved in fulfillment?

Andrew said there's no one type of client. Not every client is the same. He likes to say their target customer is anyone with a website and a budget.

Some people just want an audit and then want to check in once a quarter and make sure they can ask questions. They want to meet once a month and ask questions and get feedback and troubleshoot. That's perfectly legitimate. Not everyone has a budget or wants to spend a lot of money on their SEO program with outside vendors.

He thinks there's plenty of work that way for independent consultants or even agencies who want to use that model. But there's just as much for the execution work, and that's ultimately where growth typically happens for an agency.

The COVID Explosion

I asked Andrew what changed in his mind and what he did to begin to scale up from being solo.

He lost some clients who were like, hey, I need someone who can do everything for me. He was also working 24 hours a day. He wasn't seeing his family as much as he thought he would see them. Or he saw them, but it was out of the corner of his eye while he was working.

He'd worked in big companies before and had a kind of phobia of big teams. At NBC, there were thousands of people, and he kind of hated that. It wasn't the place where he thrived.

So he basically found some smart people he knew in the industry and was like, hey, I'm going to grow this thing. You want to do it? They're like, yeah, why not?

They grew organically. As they got more business, they hired more people. In the first year, he hired three people. Then the next year, three more, then three more.

Then when COVID hit, they exploded. They grew exponentially. They basically doubled within six months in terms of size. They went from like 15 to 30 people or something like that.

I asked why that is.

When COVID first started, when lockdown first happened, Andrew remembers having a meeting with his team going, hey, I don't know what's going to happen. They lost like four clients in a week, that week in March 2020. He was like, we're good, but who the hell knows what's going to happen? I've never been in a pandemic before. I don't know how it works.

But within a month, clients just started pouring in because everyone was going online and everyone realized that everyone cut their ad spend immediately. Suddenly, no one had any business except through organic and direct. But it was slow because everyone had avoided investing in SEO because it's easy to avoid. It's weird. I don't understand it. I don't get it. I don't like it.

Suddenly, everyone's investors and boards were like, what's the SEO play? Everyone's doing SEO, and all these people doing SEO are cleaning up. Andrew would wake up every morning, and there'd be another lead in his inbox from some big company or little company.

He thinks most digital agencies went through the same thing: crazy growth in 2020, 2021, 2022.

I told him I wasn't really running my agency around that time. I was kind of in the copywriting space, but I started my first agency about two years ago. So I was kind of out of that unfortunately. I missed out on the gold rush.

What Multi-Location Businesses Need to Know

Andrew's LinkedIn profile says he specializes in multi-location businesses. I asked him how that would apply to home services and pest control. Let's say a pest control company has like five locations. What do they need to know about being a multi-location business to grow and then maybe scale up to 10, 20 locations?

There's no magic to it. There's just having your processes. Off the top of his head, in no particular order:

Typically, you need a website. You're either going to have one website for the whole brand or multiple websites for each location, a single website for each location. You have to figure out what's the best setup.

They've done a lot of research and a lot of projects for consolidating multiple sites into one. Usually, one site is better than multiple sites. If you have a franchise and you have like 100 franchisee sites, you'll almost always do better if you put them into one corporate site.

Then you need a content strategy. That can be as simple as location pages, so pest control in Houston kind of thing.

You need to understand the intent of queries, which is a fancy way of saying look at how your customers are searching and look at what Google is showing for those searches, then try to reverse engineer it for yourself.

The Location Page Strategy

As an example, maybe you have a pest control Houston page, and then you do termite inspection. The question always is: should I have a termite inspection national page, a termite inspection in Houston page, or just put termite inspection on my Houston pest control page?

The answer is there's no right answer. The answer is what is Google showing at this moment in the results and what are the odds?

If Google's showing a national page like Angi.com termite inspection or Joe's Pest Control Houston termite inspection, then you should probably have a national page. By national, he means one page for all your locations.

If Google's showing Midland termite inspection and you see Joe's Pest Patrol Houston Midland termite inspection, that's a signal that you should create a termite inspection page for Midland.

It's always going to change, but the more you scale, the more you have to use that kind of data to inform your strategy. Let's say you have a thousand locations. It's kind of expensive to make those things stand up. Maybe you're not going to get anything from it. You're the one advocating for it, and you're going to get nothing from it.

You have to constantly be looking at the data. They've built a lot of tools to kind of try to figure that out.

Then you've obviously got your Google Business Profiles. You need to make sure those are set up correctly.

The Google Business Profile Truth

Here's the big secret. The thing Andrew really hates to see is when agencies charge clients a ton of money to manage their Google Business Profiles.

Someone told him they were pitched like $300 a month for Google Business Profile management. That doesn't sound like a lot, but if you have 10 profiles, that's $3,000 a month. Google Business Profiles take about 10 minutes a month to manage.

You just need to make sure they're good. Right category, right services, right service area, photos and videos, and that you're responding to reviews. You're encouraging your customers to upload photos and reviews and videos. That's all the basic things.

Just go search YouTube and you'll find a million people telling you how to do it.

Then for organic rankings, you probably need some link building. Those are kind of the basics.

There's all the other sites like Apple Maps and Facebook and Bing Places. You should have your profiles on there.

The Apple Maps Heat Map Trick

Apple Maps is pretty cool actually because if you have an account there, you can get insights, basically a heat map as to where your business is showing up and getting clicked on in your service area.

Why that's interesting is you can start to see, oh, let's say I'm located here, but I can see a lot of clicks happening up here or a lot of impressions happening up here. Well, that's a signal that maybe this neighborhood is North Andrew. I'm in Andrew, but maybe I should create a page called North Andrew because there's a lot of people in North Andrew that are seeing me, maybe clicking on me.

Now I can broaden that. You can't necessarily guarantee that's happening in Google Maps, but you can't see that data really in Google Maps. If you do it for Apple Maps, it might apply to Google Maps, and you might get a lot more people.

There's all sorts of little things like that you should consider.

Why Service Area Businesses Need Real Locations

The thing they're really hot on for service area businesses is this:

Andrew was talking to a national tree service company. He needed tree trimming himself, so he went to Google and searched for tree trimmer near me. These guys are nowhere to be found.

He looked and their nearest office that services him is 30 miles away from him. Then he looked at like 10 other locations, and he could see they're very far away from the places, the cities they want to serve.

He said to them, okay, we can optimize your site so that you have the best chance of showing up all over the place. But you're not going to because Google for service area business, for any business, is biased towards physical location.

The odds that a business 30 miles away from me is going to show up versus a business that's five miles away from me is super low unless you're like the king of tree trimming and everyone's searching for you and clicking on you, which isn't going to happen in most cases.

What can you do? Well, you could try to game it. There are a lot of companies that sell automated click bots. You can basically run a click bot that searches for you and clicks on you. That actually can work. It's just not very sustainable.

Or you can do something else that's sustainable and real.

"What we recommend this company is you need to actually set up real locations in your in the areas you want to rank and it doesn't have to be like a storefront but you need to apply for a business license costs about 50 bucks in Pleasant California where I live um you need to find an Office Space by the way the psychiatrist on Craigslist five blocks away for me is subletting his office space for $200 a month that seems like a good deal put some signage up there," Andrew explained.

If you have equipment, put some equipment in there. Get some citations, so listings on YellowPages.com and Facebook and wherever for that new location. Then go to Google and try to get a Google Business Profile verified.

Andrew's pretty convinced if you're not doing that, you're missing out on a huge amount of revenue. If you're doing it the way a lot of businesses are doing it, meaning fake locations, so not a real business, it's not sustainable. You're going to get busted. It might work for six months, which is awesome, but you're going to get busted.

At a high level, that's their philosophy with service area businesses.

I told Andrew I 100% agree with what he said. That was super valuable. I hope the audience got some nuggets from that.

The Proximity Truth About Google Business Profile

I piggybacked off of some of the things Andrew said. In terms of Google Business Profile, proximity is so huge. I don't think anyone should expect to rank more than five miles outside of where they are unless it's super non-competitive. Either there's not many people or there's not many businesses.

Usually, you can expect five miles, maybe up to 10. I've seen rare instances where you can rank 50 miles out, but very rare. At least in what I've seen, only if you have a super strong brand.

Andrew agreed. Exactly.

Google Business Profile is super proximity relevant, which is also how a small business can actually compete with the big businesses. If you're maybe a little bit farther away from them, you know, you're a few miles away from everybody, then you can actually capture all those leads that are right next to you.

Google wants to show you the closest business because Google's whole thing is they want the results to be as helpful and relevant as possible. If you're looking for pest control near me and there's a pest control company three miles away, then obviously they want to show that one first, second, maybe third.

Andrew said the problem is most of these guys are located in the industrial park area. You're not near where the people are.

In terms of ranking farther out, I think you still can rank most location pages. Obviously, if you have a Google Business Profile in a certain city like Portland and you also have the Portland page, those two are going to power up each other. Now the Portland page is going to do better, the Portland Google Business Profile is going to do better.

But you can still set up location pages in the areas that you want to rank but your Google Business Profile isn't in. You can't set up a Google Business Profile in every single city you want to rank in, even the ones that only have 5,000 people. So I recommend setting up a location page for all of those cities.

Andrew said the easy way to figure this out is just go do a search in whatever city you want to be in. If Yelp shows up there, you can show up there. Yelp doesn't have a physical location.

The Competitor Listing Trick

Here's a little trick for the audience. If you think about how SEO works, or how we think it works, who the hell knows how it works, you look at all the pages that Google's ranking for a given search query and you look at what's on that page. You kind of go, okay, I'll just copy and hopefully do better than what those pages have. That's one of the ways you optimize pages.

If you look at pest control Houston, you can see the businesses that Google thinks are the most relevant for pest control Houston. Joe's, Bob's, and you can see Yelp's showing up. Yelp has a list of those businesses on it.

You can take your location page and have all the standard stuff: hey, we're the best pest control in Houston, we're awesome, click here to set an appointment, answer every question, how much does pest control cost in Houston, all that SEO stuff.

Then down at the bottom, put in big quotes: customers, please ignore this. Then right after, say here are the best pest control businesses in Houston. Then take the list of the top 10 that are showing up in Google Maps and put them on there.

I told Andrew I feel like you'd lose customers doing that.

He said no, no, it's all the way down at the bottom. No one scrolls to the bottom. He guarantees some percentage of those pages will start ranking really well.

I said I can definitely see how that could work. In terms of links, it should always, or at least most people agree, be niche relevant and location relevant. If it is the niche, which is pest control, and location, which is your area, Houston, if it's all the Houston pest control companies, I mean that makes sense.

I asked if he's actually tried that and it works.

Andrew screen-shared and showed me a page he made years ago. It's called Danville, California. It's about 10 to 15 miles away from him. He made a page that just said three sentences.

He ranked pretty quickly on page two of Google for Danville SEO company. He left it there for years. In April, he added this list of the best Danville SEO companies. Within two hours, he went to number four for Danville SEO company. Within a week, he was number one.

Not a very competitive query, kind of goofy. He guarantees none of his people coming to this page ever see it because it's a million miles down at the bottom.

This is not a hey, let's do this everywhere kind of thing. This is kind of a goofy thing. He views their role as what's the art of the possible. What are you up for doing? What's your risk profile?

If you have all your money in the stock market, this might work for you. Let's try it. If you have all your money in cash under your mattress, no, don't do this. You don't want this.

SEO is a very peculiar beast in that we all know now how to do basic local SEO. What are you going to do to give your clients an edge? Because they don't want basic SEO. They want money.

"I think my job is like I'm here to make you money not to like play by the rules definitely I usually play by the rules because why not but I also what's that like understand the rules so you know how to break them," Andrew said.

Building Tools to Save Money at Scale

Andrew told me about some tools they've built. He asked if I'm familiar with grid rankings, like Local Falcon and BrightLocal.

They've built their own grid rankings. Those tools are great, you should totally be using them, but they're like, we can build this and it's not very expensive.

Right now, for Local Falcon, you would pay 26 cents for a 9x9 grid per report. They were able to figure it out where it costs them way less to create that.

You can imagine when you're doing scale. They just did 80 locations in Italy and looked at like a thousand keywords. That ends up being a lot of money or relatively a lot. They're like, oh, we can build this and pay five bucks for it versus paying Local Falcon a thousand.

They just started selling this to agencies and clients. They're not actively out there selling it, but enough people have said, hey, can I buy this from you? They have a few agencies right now and clients where they're basically becoming like a little SaaS company.

If you're in the market for cheap grid rankings, they've got it.

I told him I am in the market and I think Local Falcon is even more expensive than he said.

He said it's not as cool as theirs. They have way more widgets. But as anyone who's bought SEO tools know, you get really excited by all the things they have and then you end up using like 2% of them.

They're like, we don't use these enough that we need to constantly be paying a lot for them. We just want the bare minimum thing. When we start working with a client, how do you rank in the grid for these keywords or certain keywords versus competitors? That's all we need to know. Then how did you do versus last week or last month? That's all we need to know.

I don't need 50 million options in it. I just need a bare minimum tool.

SERP Summary: Coming in September

Andrew showed me something they're launching, hopefully in September, actually for pest control companies among other things.

They've built a dataset of about half a million search results in the home services business. Then they're putting together a tool that monitors the search results over time.

He showed me for pest and animal control since February, these are what's called SERP features. How the different features in the search result change.

As an example, answer boxes have increased over time. They can see that Google owns about 40% of the results in these queries.

They haven't updated the data, so there was a Google update last week. Probably in a few weeks, they'll update this data and see how the search features change.

They're going to have a lot of different little pieces of data here that you can mine. What are the top domains at any given time in my keywords? How are they changing?

It's called SERP Summary, and hopefully it'll be in September.

I told him that would be super useful. I'm definitely going to stay posted for that.

Top Three SEO Tools

I asked Andrew what are his top three SEO tools that he uses on a pretty consistent basis.

Well, they use Looker Studio. He guesses that doesn't count. They use that for a lot of stuff.

They've built their own things. They've built a ton of tools inside of Slack, like SEO automations that connect tools. If you need to check the index of a big site, you can just go to Slack and it hits the Google Search Console API and sends back all that kind of stuff.

He has some excellent developers who work for them.

But in terms of publicly available tools, Google Search Console is the number one thing they'd use.

Probably Screaming Frog, of course, is a website crawler that anyone doing SEO should have. He calls it the SEO tax because you just have to have it.

Then you really need at least one of the big data SEO tools, so like SEMrush or Ahrefs. Those are the ones they use. They go in between them because they both have slightly different points of view on how to present data.

There's like 500 others, but those are pretty much what they'll use. BrightLocal's great too. White Spark's great too.

The problem with SEMrush and Ahrefs is they don't really cater to local search. They're starting to, but the rankings data you get is usually not so great for local. Except with this new grid rank tool from SEMrush, they're starting to do more.

My Main Takeaway

The biggest thing I learned from Andrew is that proximity beats everything in local SEO. You can optimize your website perfectly, you can build amazing backlinks, you can have the best content, but if you're 30 miles away from someone searching, you're probably not going to show up versus a business that's five miles away. That's why Andrew tells service area businesses to set up real locations with real business licenses, real office space, real signage, and real citations. Not fake locations that'll get you busted in six months. Real, sustainable locations that cost about 50 bucks for a business license and maybe $200 a month for office space. That's the game-changer for multi-location growth.

The second takeaway is the competitor listing trick that actually works. Andrew showed me proof that by adding a list of your competitors at the bottom of your location page with the disclaimer "customers please ignore this," then listing the best pest control companies in Houston or whatever your market is, you can jump from page two to number one in a week. It sounds crazy, but it makes sense from an SEO perspective. Google sees that you're listing all the most relevant businesses for that query in that location, so your page must be super relevant too. It's not something you'd do everywhere, but it's a creative edge that can work.

The third insight is that going from zero to 5 million visitors is possible if you nail the fundamentals. Andrew took Insider Pages from literally zero traffic to 5 million visitors a month within months just by updating title tags, adding unique meta descriptions, and adding internal links. Basic stuff that never even occurred to him was important. They became one of the fastest-growing websites on the planet. The fundamentals still work. You don't need to overcomplicate it. But you also need a business model that works, which is what killed them when they lost all that traffic from the redesign. Don't put all your eggs in the SEO basket.

The fourth thing that struck me is the power of empathy from failure. Andrew losing his job the day they lost all their traffic made him incredibly empathetic with clients. When he'd get on the phone with business owners who were clueless, he'd say, oh yeah, this is what happened to me. I lost my job. I understand that this is important to do. That created an immediate connection. Sometimes your biggest failures become your biggest advantages because you can relate to people in a way that someone who's only succeeded can't. That empathy is what enabled him to do so well early on.

The fifth lesson is about building versus buying tools. Andrew built his own grid ranking tool because Local Falcon costs 26 cents per 9x9 grid, and when you're doing 80 locations with a thousand keywords, that adds up fast. They figured out how to do it for five bucks instead of a thousand. They built tools inside Slack that hit the Google Search Console API. They built SERP Summary to track half a million search results over time. When you're at scale, building your own tools saves massive amounts of money and gives you exactly what you need without the 50 million options you never use. That's the difference between agencies that stay small and agencies that scale.

If you want to learn more from Andrew, check out LocalSEOGuide.com and sign up for SERP Summary in the helpful content menu. You can find him on Twitter at @LocalSEOGuide and on LinkedIn. Also check out Bay Area Search if you're in the San Francisco area. Andrew's journey from NBC to going from zero to 5 million visitors to getting fired to building a successful agency is proof that sometimes your biggest setbacks lead to your greatest opportunities if you have the empathy and skill to capitalize on them.