Change signals renewed focus on agency services at Advice
Bill Hartzer is infamous for his April Fool’s blog posts. But this isn’t April 1 and Advice Local proved they are no fool when they announced today the SEO guru was coming on board as their new Senior Vice President of Agency Services.
Bill Hartzer is one of the most respected identities in the digital marketing community. With more than two decades of search engine marketing, SEO, and social media marketing experience behind him, that is no surprise. He is a friend of the Kangadillo family and when we have SEO questions he is on the short list of people we reach out to for direction.
Bill has many accomplishments to his credit, among them founding the Dallas/Fort Worth Search Engine Marketing Association, the longest running search engine marketing association in the world. He is also in demand as a speaker and if you ever see his name on a conference agenda you should make a beeline to his session.
As search industry news goes, Bill Hartzer joining the team at Advice Local is big, and not just because it’s happening in Texas! We’re sure the search marketing grapevine will run hot on this one, so the team at Kangadillo was quick to reach out and get the facts straight from the source.
We talked to Bill Hartzer and to Advice Local President and CEO, Bernadette Coleman, about the announcement.
Is the focus shifting at Advice Local?
When we thought about the move it seemed Bill’s appointment might be an indicator of a new direction for Advice Local. We asked Bernadette Coleman the question:
Are we seeing a renewed focus on your agency side?
Bernadette tells us our instinct on this one is correct.
We started out as a digital agency for small businesses and a few years ago shifted to a digital agency with local search technologies with a focus on selling our digital presence management software and services. The funny thing is that many brands are just now realizing they need to get a handle on their digital presence. That’s a BIG opportunity for us.“
And the company is pursuing its opportunities vigorously, partnering with a number of large advertising agencies to help clients with large national brands. Bernadette explains this brings with it a need for additional tools.
Today we are offering additional custom technologies and services like store finders and location landing pages for multi-location businesses. We find most brands and multi-location businesses are just not getting it right.”
We also asked what makes Bill Hartzer the perfect fit for Advice?
His vast knowledge about local and technical SEO will help us make superior tool sets and offer scaleable local digital offerings to our many re-sellers especially our larger marketing agencies.”
And on the question of practical differences the appointment might make to the company the Advice Local President was enthusiastic
We think Bill will help set us apart from our competitors. His insight will help our team create better tools, offer superior services, and further advance us as thought leaders in the local space. We are extremely excited to have him on our team.”
Bill Hartzer on moving to Advice Local
When we put some questions to Bill Hartzer himself, his answers bore out the good news story in this for Advice Local clients.
While I can’t reveal the company’s goals for the Agency Services division just yet, my personal goal for Advice Local’s Agency Services is to provide world-class digital marketing services to all clients. We’ll focus on the client’s needs first–and make sure they get more than the return on investment that they expect.”
The transition will be quick and easy. Bill knows key members of the Advice team well, and when asked how he felt the settling in process would go he was quick to answer
I am looking forward to working with them, getting to know them even better, and getting to know the whole team.”
Speaking Schedule
For those wondering whether the new role at Advice Local will impact Bill Hartzer’s speaking schedule, we went ahead and asked the question. Bill’s answer was considered.
While I don’t expect this new role to have any effect on my worldwide speaking schedule, my first priority is Advice Interactive’s Agency Services. We’ll have to see how it all fits together.”
We liked Bernadette Coleman’s answer even more.
Will we see Bill continue to appear as a speaker at industry events?
Absolutely!”
We have a feeling another much sought after speaker may just have been added to the company’s Rocks Digital conference in June.
Given his very visible work across the entire search spectrum, it isn’t hard to believe Bill Hartzer has a pretty fair grasp of what is going on in local search too. But he hasn’t really been known for his local SEO expertise in the past, so we were interested to know how he feels about diving deeper into local SEO at Advice.
That’s exactly what makes this so exciting for me. I get to bring my overall SEO, domain name, content marketing, and social media marketing knowledge to Advice Local. While I am not necessarily known publicly for my local SEO work, I have, in fact, been working with local businesses since the early 2000s to help promote their business online. And, I’ve held roles in the past at leading marketing agencies based in the Dallas/Fort Worth area that only deal with providing SEO services to local and small to medium sized businesses. There’s a lot more to Bill Hartzer than you’ve seen publicly!
Ah! We love that. And it made us wonder what other surprises the Advice Local team might have in store during 2016.
With the recent release of the “Local Trusted Business” seal for presence management and four new “local vertical packages” for healthcare, legal, home services and financial businesses, there has been a lot happening at the Dallas company. But according to Bernadette Coleman, there is yet more to come, and it seems Bill Hartzer will be in the thick of it.
Our interest was definitely piqued when the company president closed our interview by saying
We also have a big hyper-local announcement coming soon. Bill will be very instrumental in helping us polish off this new offering. I can’t wait to share it with everyone.”
We’ll be watching closely for that announcement and bring you all the news when it happens.
You can keep up with Bill at BillHartzer.com, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
G’day Y’all!