Lost 90% of organic traffic – now automating half of SEO audits
Andrew Shotland is CEO of Local SEO Guide, a consultancy that helps businesses recover and grow organic search traffic. He turned a personal SEO failure – losing about 90% of organic traffic after a site redesign – into a practice that now automates roughly half of enterprise audits with AI while keeping analysts involved.
Use AI to automate the formulaic parts of SEO but keep humans for the error-prone, creative work: Shotland automates about 50% of enterprise audits because fully automating them produced error-prone output. Expect AI channels like ChatGPT to become real lead sources too – about 25% of his small-business leads come that way.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
So I had a startup, InsiderPages.com. We were an early Yelp competitor and figured out SEO. We grew to about 5M visitors/month mostly via SEO. That enabled us to get a deal with Google and helped us raise $5M from Sequoia and Softbank. So we were going to be billionaires. We decided to redesign our website and I didn’t know what I didn’t know about technical SEO. When we launched the redesign, we lost like 90% of our organic traffic virtually overnight. I ended up losing my job.
The day I got fired, I was having drinks with the head of product at LATimes.com. He was all excited because he just got approval to redesign their site. I asked him what his SEO plan was. He had no idea what SEO even was.
I said "Let me tell you what happened to me today…"
When he heard my little tale of SEO woe, he freaked out and immediately asked if I could do some SEO consulting for him. I was like "It’s not like I have anything better to do."
So the Los Angeles Times was my first SEO consulting client. That was 20 years ago, and I’m still doing this crazy thing.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
Most of LSG’s business comes from referrals and former clients. It helps to have been doing the same thing for a long time 🙂
That said, I’d say at least 25% of our small business leads come from them finding us in AI like ChatGPT.
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
We have automated about 50% of our enterprise SEO audits using AI. We tried to automate about 95% of it, but we found the output was just ok and often error-prone. It also removed our analysts from really getting intimate with clients’ websites. Often SEO is half-formulaic and half-inspiration. It’s hard to get inspiration without clicking around.
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
We get about 25% of our small business clients via ChatGPT and other AI, based on self-reporting. Often they know a bit more about our reputation than those who just find us via old-fashioned Googling.
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
My advice hasn’t changed in 20 years: 1. Be authentic. Be who you are offline online. No one wants to do business with a "professional." They want to do business with a person they can get along with and work well with. 2. Give away information for free. I like to say "Anybody can unclog a toilet, but most people would prefer a plumber do it." SEO is similar. If you are transparent about how you do what you do, and the expected outcomes, that builds a lot of trust vs selling some kind of secret sauce or hiding behind jargon. 3. Get out there on social media and express yourself. It’s an ocean but you just need a few tiny fish to find and trust you.
Thank you to Andrew Shotland and the team at Local SEO Guide for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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