One hundred and fifty-seven days to the general.
Critical.
By any rigorous standard, 28 of 100 is critical territory. The campaign is invisible to AI assistants when voters research the Clerk race (tested today, zero of three queries returned the candidate), publishing twenty-one indexed URLs of which the majority are duplicates or unedited theme demos, missing every modern measurement and tracking surface, and behind a well-resourced incumbent with a multi-decade tenure across breadth, freshness, third-party authority, and entity recognition. The work in this report moves the score into competitive territory (the seventies) inside ninety days.
Executive Summary
The condition of the campaign's digital presence, what it is doing well, and the three strategic priorities that compound fastest in the days remaining.
howellshaw.com sits on a WordPress JetTheme foundation with twenty-one URLs indexed. Six are real campaign pages. The remainder are duplicate donation flows, a default WordPress sample page, and a /projects section filled with theme-demo content (a Venezuela event recap, a Sanders statement, a libertarian-themed news item). No meta descriptions, no image alt text, no structured data of any kind. The endorsements page lists one person. The blog has not been edited from its template state. A reporter or voter who looks past the homepage finds a site that has not been finished.
This is a verdict of urgency, not failure. The race is winnable and the candidate has a real story (Stanford-trained designer, twenty years at frogdesign, founder of an identity firm, pastor in Henderson, Patriot Academy Constitution Coach). The site is simply not telling it. The work has to be reframed for the calendar: in ten days the Democratic primary crowns the eventual general election opponent, and the campaign needs to be visible before that consolidation. The window between now and June 9 is the cheapest voter attention the campaign will see all year.
- Replace the WordPress demo content this week. The /sample-page, the /projects feed, /fair-taxes-for-america, /voter-expansion-project, and the six placeholder blog posts are the easiest opposition research find in the race. Removing them is hours of work and removes the single largest credibility risk on the site.
- Own the Democratic primary visibility window. For the next ten days, every voter in Clark County who pays attention to the Clerk race is paying attention to the Goya versus Miller fight. The Republican candidate has one chance to appear in their consideration set before June 9 crowns the opponent and the conversation consolidates. A voter information page, a comparison page, and a fresh news cadence claim that share of attention now.
- Claim the Republican alternative SERP. When November-cycle voters search 'Republican candidate for Clark County Clerk,' the answer should be Dr. Howell Shaw, with the campaign site as the citation. Today, that search returns ambiguous results and references to the January Assembly District 22 announcement. Owning this query is the foundation of every general-election ad.
Field Notes
Observations from sitting with the site, not from running a crawler. The things a table cannot quite catch.
The homepage does not say what office.
The hero reads 'Committed to a Modern, Efficient Clerk's Office.' It does not say which clerk's office. It does not say Clark County. It does not say Nevada. It does not say 2026. A voter who lands cold from a Google search for the office cannot confirm in the first viewport that this is the candidate for it. Voters scanning for relevance leave.
The blog reads like somebody else's site.
The /blog feed is filled with six theme-demo posts: a Venezuelan event recap, a Sanders statement on a chairman resignation, an NYT congressman backing a Libertarian candidate, an electoral reform commission item, and two generic motivational headlines. None of them are about Howell Shaw, the Clerk's office, or Clark County. They are JetTheme placeholder content that was never replaced. A reporter or voter who clicks through to the blog leaves confused about whose site this is.
A 'sample-page' is still live.
WordPress installs ship with a default page named exactly 'sample-page' that authors are expected to delete. It is still indexed at howellshaw.com/sample-page. It is the single most reliable signal in the SEO industry that a site was not finished before it was launched. Voters do not see it. Search engines, opposition researchers, and journalists do.
The doctorate is honorary, and the bio does not say so.
The biography page reads 'Dr. Howell Shaw' and references an Honorary Doctor of Philosophy in Humanities from United Graduate College and Seminary International, dated February 24, 2024. Honorary degrees are not earned. Voters and reporters reading the page see 'Dr.' attached to a candidate for an administrative county office and form an impression of credentialed expertise. The first reporter to look up United Graduate College will notice. The framing risk is preventable today and unfixable after the first article runs.
The endorsements page lists one person.
The Endorsements page links Rick Green of Patriot Academy and ends. One endorsement is not a credibility surface. It is a placeholder that signals the page was built before the work of collecting endorsements began. Voters research who backs a candidate; an unbuilt endorsements page tells them the campaign has not started the work yet.
The opponent's office speaks Spanish. The campaign does not.
Clark County is roughly thirty percent Hispanic. The official Clark County Clerk's office at clarkcountynv.gov has an Español toggle. The incumbent has eleven years of bilingual constituent service to point to. The challenger has zero pages in Spanish, zero hreflang tags, and zero translated content. Every Spanish-language search for marriage licenses, business filings, or the Clerk's office routes to the incumbent's institutional presence.
The only call to action is Donate, with Volunteer as a backup.
Every visitor is treated as either a donor or a volunteer. There is no path for the curious voter, the small business owner researching DBA filings, the wedding couple looking for marriage license information, or the undecided researcher comparing the two challengers to the incumbent. The campaign captures money from people who already know they want to give. It does not catch anyone in the middle of forming an opinion about who should run the office.
The prior Assembly run still outranks the Clerk run in AI answers.
On January 28, 2026, the candidate announced a Republican primary challenge in Nevada Assembly District 22 against Melissa Hardy. That announcement remains the dominant search result when AI engines summarize 'Howell Shaw Nevada.' The Clerk's race, the actual race, does not surface. Voters who ask an AI assistant what office Howell Shaw is running for are told the wrong office. The campaign's own narrative is being overwritten by its own history.
The campaign is invisible to the assistants voters are starting to ask first.
A growing share of voters opens ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity to research a race before they ever type a candidate's name into Google. The site is built on WordPress without Person schema, without FAQ schema, and without a single structured data declaration of any kind. The robots.txt does not block the AI crawlers, which is a small win, but with nothing structured for them to read the result is the same: the candidate does not appear in the answer.
Keyword Opportunities
The terms Clark County voters will actually type. Opportunity scores are directional, calibrated to Las Vegas search demand and SERP intent.
| Keyword | Opportunity | Rank | Intent |
|---|---|---|---|
| howell shaw | High | Top 3 | Navigational |
| dr howell shaw clark county | High | Top 3 | Navigational |
| clark county clerk candidates 2026 | High | Not ranked | Informational |
| republican candidate for clark county clerk | High | Not ranked | Research |
| howell shaw vs lynn goya | High | Not ranked | Research |
| howell shaw vs jeff miller | Medium | Not ranked | Research |
| clark county clerk election november 2026 | High | Not ranked | Transactional |
| how to get a marriage license clark county | High | Not ranked | Transactional |
| clark county dba filing | Medium | Not ranked | Transactional |
| vegas wedding chapel license | Medium | Not ranked | Transactional |
| henderson nevada republican candidate | High | Not ranked | Research |
| clark county clerk's office modernization | Medium | Not ranked | Informational |
| 24 7 digital marriage license las vegas | Medium | Not ranked | Informational |
| vegas vows forever program | Medium | Not ranked | Navigational |
| dr howell shaw biography | Medium | Off-site | Research |
| howell shaw stanford design | Medium | Off-site | Research |
| howell shaw patriot academy constitution coach | Medium | Off-site | Research |
| henderson conservatives founder | Medium | Not ranked | Research |
| lynn goya challenger 2026 | High | Not ranked | Research |
| clark county business filings online | Medium | Not ranked | Transactional |
| votar elecciones clark county 2026 | Medium | Not ranked | Transactional |
| secretario del condado de clark | Medium | Not ranked | Informational |
| howell shaw endorsements | Medium | #1 | Research |
| howell shaw donate | Low | Top 3 | Transactional |
On-Page Issues
Where the campaign's current pages fall short of what voters need to find and what search engines need to rank them. Severity is calibrated to the ten-day primary window and the one hundred and fifty-seven-day general window.
| Page | Issue | Severity | Impact if Unaddressed |
|---|---|---|---|
| All twenty-one indexed URLs | No meta descriptions detected | Critical | Google fills the snippet with random page text on every search result. Each listing looks unprofessional next to the incumbent's institutional pages. |
| Site-wide | No image alt text | High | Lost ranking value from every image. Accessibility violation. Screen readers cannot identify the candidate's photo or the endorser image. |
| Site-wide | No structured data of any kind | High | Invisible to AI search assistants when voters ask who is running for Clark County Clerk. Ineligible for rich results, FAQ snippets, and knowledge panel claims. |
| Homepage | H1 omits the office, the county, the state, and the year | Critical | The homepage says 'Committed to a Modern, Efficient Clerk's Office.' A voter or AI cannot determine which clerk's office. The page is not strongly relevant to any specific search. |
| Homepage | Only calls to action are Donate and Volunteer | High | Site treats every visitor as either a donor or a volunteer. Undecided voters, small business owners researching DBA filings, and wedding couples looking for marriage license context have nowhere to go. |
| /sample-page | Default WordPress placeholder page is indexed | Critical | The single most reliable signal in the SEO industry that the site is unfinished. Opposition researchers and journalists know exactly what this is. It is the easiest credibility find in the race. |
| /blog feed | Six unedited JetTheme demo posts (Venezuela, Sanders, NYT congressman, libertarian, electoral reform, generic motivational) | Critical | A reporter or voter who clicks Blog from the navigation finds content about unrelated political topics under the candidate's banner. The campaign appears to either endorse those positions or to have published nothing of its own. Both readings are damaging. |
| /projects, /fair-taxes-for-america, /project-rnd, /voter-expansion-project | Theme demo content unrelated to the Clerk race | Critical | These pages describe generic political projects with placeholder copy. Voters who land on them from search or navigation see content that has nothing to do with what the candidate is actually running for. |
| Donation duplicates (/donor-dashboard, /donor-dashboard-2, /donor-dashboard-3, /donation-confirmation-2, -3, /donation-failed-2, -3, /donation-history) | Eight near-duplicate donation flow pages indexed | High | Search engines see a site fragmented across many similar URLs. Authority is diluted. Some indexed pages date back to 2020, signaling abandoned content. |
| /biography | Honorary doctorate framed identically to an earned doctorate | High | The page reads 'Dr. Howell Shaw' and lists an Honorary Doctor of Philosophy in Humanities from United Graduate College and Seminary International (Feb 24, 2024). Honorary degrees are not earned. The first reporter to look up the granting institution publishes a damaging story. |
| /endorsement | Page lists one endorsement (Rick Green / Patriot Academy) | High | An endorsements page with one name reads as a placeholder, not as credibility. Voters who research who is backing the candidate see a single name and form a low-momentum impression. |
| Site-wide | No Spanish language version | High | Clark County is roughly thirty percent Hispanic. The official Clerk's office serves in Spanish. Every Spanish-language search for the office, the marriage license process, or business filings flows to the incumbent's institutional presence. |
| Site-wide | No voter information page | Critical | Voters searching for the general election date, voter registration, or polling place information find the county website or news media. The campaign captures none of this peak-intent traffic in the run-up to November. |
| Site-wide | No comparison page against the eventual Democratic nominee | High | When voters finally pay attention in the fall, the search they run is head-to-head: incumbent vs challenger. The first candidate to publish a comparison shapes it on their own terms. Today the SERP is wide open. |
| robots.txt | Only blocks /wp-admin | Low | AI crawler access is technically open, which is correct. But there is no AI-positive guidance either, no llms.txt declaration, no rich crawl hints. |
| Title tags site-wide | Title tags do not lead with the office | High | The homepage title does not include 'Clark County Clerk,' 'Republican,' or '2026.' Voters who search for the office find the incumbent and the county website first. |
| Footer | 'Paid for by Friends of Howell Shaw' disclaimer placement not verified across all pages | High | The federal FEC requirement applies to campaign committees of all sizes. Nevada FPPC has its own state-level rules. Missing or inconsistent placement is a legal exposure separate from SEO. |
Content Gaps
The pages that should exist but do not. Sequenced by what compounds before the Democratic primary versus what positions for November 3.
Pre-primary the next ten days
Pre-general the next ninety days
Technical Review
Crawlability, structured data, and the infrastructure that determines whether the rest of this work can rank at all.
| Check | Status | What this means |
|---|---|---|
| HTTPS | Pass | Site is served securely. No reader warnings, no Chrome 'Not Secure' labels. |
| Mobile-friendly | Pass | Responsive WordPress theme. Mobile rendering is functional. |
| robots.txt present | Pass | Search crawlers can discover the two sitemaps referenced. |
| AI crawler access | Pass | robots.txt does not block major AI crawlers at the file level. The reason candidate is invisible to AI is content and schema, not access. |
| XML sitemap | Warning | Sitemap index references six sub-sitemaps with twenty-one indexed URLs. Roughly a third are duplicate donation flows, a sample-page, and theme-demo content that should not be indexed at all. |
| Canonical tags | Warning | Not verified across all pages. The donor-dashboard variants and sample-page are likely competing for the same canonical signals. Without explicit canonical declarations, authority splits across duplicates. |
| Page speed | Warning | Not measured in this pass. WordPress JetTheme builds tend to ship heavy scripts and unoptimized hero images. Slow homepages cost organic rankings and drop conversion on mobile devices. |
| Core Web Vitals | Warning | Real-user performance signals affect mobile rankings directly. Currently unverified. JetTheme on shared hosting typically struggles with LCP on first paint. |
| Structured data | Fail | Missing entirely. The site is ineligible for rich results, FAQ snippets, knowledge panel claims, and AI-assistant entity recognition. |
| Open Graph metadata | Fail | No og:title, og:description, og:image detected on the homepage source. Social shares may render with the wrong image or no description. Cuts conversion on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and SMS link previews. |
| Title tags | Warning | Present but generic. The homepage title does not include 'Clark County Clerk,' 'Republican,' or '2026,' which are the qualifiers voters add to their searches. |
| Meta descriptions | Fail | None detected. Google fills the snippet with random page text on every search result. |
| Image alt text | Fail | None detected on hero and endorser imagery. Lost ranking value, lost accessibility, lost rich-result eligibility on images. |
| Tracking pixels | Fail | No GA4, GTM, Meta Pixel, Google Ads, LinkedIn Insight, or X pixel detected in the homepage source. Every campaign decision is being made without measurement. |
| WordPress version exposure | Warning | WordPress generator tag and JetTheme references visible in source. Disclosed CMS plus theme is a security signal that automated attackers index. |
| Duplicate / placeholder pages indexed | Fail | Eight donation flow duplicates, a default WordPress sample-page, and four theme-demo project pages all appear in the sitemap. Search engines see a fragmented, unfinished site. |
| Internal linking | Warning | Body copy contains no contextual links between issue content, biography, and voter information. Authority does not flow through the site, and voters reading one page have no path to the next. |
| Broken links | Warning | Not crawled in depth in this pass. Broken internal links waste crawl budget and frustrate visitors. The JetTheme demo pages likely link to other demo pages. |
| FEC and Nevada FPPC disclaimer | Warning | 'Friends of Howell Shaw' disclaimer placement not visibly confirmed across all pages. Separate from SEO, this is legal compliance exposure. |
Competitor Analysis
The incumbent's site and the likely Democratic primary winner's site, head to head with howellshaw.com, on the dimensions that determine which candidate the voter finds first.
| Dimension | howellshaw.com | lynnmariegoya.com | jeffmillerforclerk.com | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pages indexed | 21 (six real, fifteen duplicate or demo) | Multi-page nav with active blog | Multi-page with FAQ, Comparison, Resources | Goya / Miller |
| Substantive content depth | Six real pages, much placeholder | Full bio, news, endorsements stack | Why I'm Running, Experience, Priorities, FAQ | Goya / Miller |
| Publishing frequency | Zero real campaign posts | April-May 2026 active cadence | Active resource publishing | Goya |
| News / press | JetTheme demo content only | Multi-post current blog | Resource-style explainer posts | Goya |
| Spanish content | None | None | None | Tie (open lane) |
| Endorsements | One name (Rick Green) | Running + 2022 Endorsements list | Volunteer-focused, donation-free positioning | Goya |
| Voter / Service Hub | None | Not prominent (institutional access via county) | Resources Guide for office services | Miller |
| Comparison Page | None | None | Yes: Miller vs Goya | Miller |
| Newsletter signup | Form mentioned, integration unverified | Donate-first CTA | 'Remind me to Vote!' email capture | Miller |
| CTA variety | Donate + Volunteer | Support Lynn (donate) | Vote reminder, volunteer, contact | Miller |
| Linked social presence | X, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube referenced | Facebook visible, not explicit | Limited social linkage | Howell (breadth) / Goya (presence) |
| Structured data | None | JSON-LD (WebPage, ImageObject, BreadcrumbList, WebSite) | Limited | Goya |
| Brand name rank | Top 3 for 'Howell Shaw' | #1 for 'Lynn Goya' | #1 for 'Jeff Miller for Clerk' | Tie (each owns their own name) |
| Wikipedia / Ballotpedia | Ballotpedia summary listing | Ballotpedia + chamber bios + news | Ballotpedia present | Goya |
| Tracking / measurement | None detected | Not externally verified | Not externally verified | Tie (open lane) |
| Institutional advantage | None | Eleven-year clarkcountynv.gov tenure | None | Goya |
Performance & Speed
How quickly howellshaw.com loads, renders, and becomes interactive on the devices voters actually use. Speed is not a vanity metric. It is a conversion variable and a Google ranking factor.
| Check | Status | What this means |
|---|---|---|
| Mobile Performance | Warning | WordPress with JetTheme typically yields a mobile performance score in the 35 to 55 range without optimization. Mobile is where most political research happens, and Google demotes slow pages in mobile rankings. |
| Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) | Warning | The hero image is the LCP element. JetTheme heroes without preload hints and without WebP typically render in 3 to 5 seconds on mobile. Above 2.5 seconds Google considers the experience poor. |
| Image Optimization | Fail | No WebP serving detected, no responsive srcset, no lazy-load attribute on below-fold imagery. Every image costs more bandwidth and time than it should. |
| Render-Blocking Scripts | Warning | JetTheme bundles jQuery, slider scripts, and animation libraries in the head that block first paint. The page cannot render until they finish downloading and parsing. |
| Font Loading | Warning | No preconnect to the font CDN visible. Web fonts load late, causing text to render in fallback fonts first, then shift when the real fonts arrive. Visual chaos that costs CLS. |
| Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) | Warning | Images without explicit dimensions cause the page to shift as they load. Each shift costs CLS, and CLS above 0.1 hurts mobile rankings directly. |
| Caching and CDN Configuration | Warning | No CDN headers detected. WordPress without object caching or a CDN front-ends each request to the origin, multiplying time-to-first-byte under load. |
| Mobile Viewport | Pass | Viewport tag is set correctly. Mobile rendering scales appropriately to device width. |
| JetTheme Plugin Audit | Warning | JetTheme builds typically include multiple plugins (Crocoblock JetEngine, JetSmartFilters, etc.) that each add scripts and CSS to every page. Pages load slowly even when the visible content does not require those plugins. |
| PageSpeed Insights Live Test | Warning | Live test rate-limited at audit time. A full per-page Core Web Vitals report is recommended as a Phase I deliverable to set the performance baseline. |
Local Presence
How the campaign and the candidate show up in local discovery surfaces. Google Maps, Apple Maps, NextDoor, local citations, NAP consistency. A local race is won by being everywhere local voters look.
| Check | Status | What this means |
|---|---|---|
| Google Business Profile (Campaign) | Fail | No GBP identified for the campaign. Voters who search 'Howell Shaw campaign office' or 'Howell Shaw Henderson' on a phone are routed to unrelated results. |
| Google Business Profile (Dwell AJC) | Warning | Dwell AJC, the candidate's church in Henderson, may have a GBP. The candidate's faith-leader presence may have stronger local SEO than his campaign. Whichever is stronger should support the other, not compete. |
| NAP Consistency | Fail | Campaign Name, Address, Phone exist on the website but are not syndicated to local directories. NAP consistency across data brokers is the foundation of local search ranking. |
| Apple Maps Listing | Fail | No campaign listing on Apple Maps. Approximately half of mobile map queries on iPhone route through Apple Maps, not Google. Major coverage gap. |
| Bing Places | Fail | No campaign listing on Bing Places. Bing serves DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, ChatGPT search, and a meaningful share of older desktop traffic. |
| Local Directory Citations | Fail | No Yelp, Manta, BBB, Henderson Chamber of Commerce, or local political directory listings for the campaign. Each citation is a small ranking signal. None are stacked. |
| NextDoor Presence | Fail | NextDoor reaches hyperlocal voters at the neighborhood level. Henderson, Anthem, Green Valley, Boulder City, and the Las Vegas suburbs are heavily active on NextDoor. |
| Local News Citations | Warning | Las Vegas Review-Journal, Nevada Independent, Nevada Current, and the Henderson Press cover Clark County politics. Today the candidate has one substantive news mention (Nevada News and Views, January, about the now-abandoned Assembly D22 run). Fresh local press for the Clerk race is missing. |
| Henderson Chamber and Civic Engagement | Warning | The Henderson Chamber of Commerce, the Boulder City Chamber, and the various town advisory boards across the unincorporated county are local credibility surfaces. Engaging publicly with them produces local signals that AI engines and search engines both weight. |
AEO · Answer Engine Optimization
How the campaign shows up when voters research the race through AI assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini). A separate game from traditional search, with different rules and rapidly growing stakes.
| Check | Status | What this means |
|---|---|---|
| AI Crawler Access | Pass | robots.txt does not block GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, or Google-Extended at the file level. Access is open. The problem is content and schema, not permission. |
| Google Knowledge Panel | Fail | No verified knowledge card appears for the candidate when his name is searched. The incumbent has institutional Google presence through eleven years of clarkcountynv.gov tenure. Branded searches show only blue links instead of the authoritative entity panel. |
| Wikipedia Entry | Fail | No encyclopedic article exists. AI engines weight Wikipedia disproportionately as a source of entity truth, and its absence reads as 'this person is not yet notable.' |
| Ballotpedia Profile | Warning | Listed in the 2026 Clark County candidates summary at Ballotpedia, but a candidate-completed profile is not visible. The strongest non-Wikipedia signal AI engines use for political candidates is underutilized. |
| Person Schema | Fail | The site never declares to a machine what kind of entity it represents. Even though AI crawlers are allowed in, they could not reliably identify the page as the candidate's official presence. |
| FAQ Coverage and Schema | Fail | The exact questions voters type into AI assistants ('is Howell Shaw Republican or Democrat?', 'what does the Clark County Clerk do?', 'when is the general election in Clark County?', 'where does Howell stand on the marriage license modernization?') are not answered anywhere on the site in a format AI can extract. |
| Cross-Profile sameAs Links | Warning | X @howellshaw1, the Facebook page, LinkedIn at /in/howellshaw, the Turning Point Action profile, the Dwell AJC site, and the campaign site exist as disconnected islands. AI engines cannot resolve the candidate's various presences into a single recognized entity. |
| Citation-Worthy Content Structure | Warning | Issue positions are described in marketing copy rather than declarative statements. AI engines reward declarative phrasing ('Howell supports X. Howell will deliver Y by Z.') because it is quote-ready. |
| Prior-Race Bleed-Through | Fail | On January 28, 2026, Howell announced a Republican primary challenge for Nevada Assembly District 22 against Melissa Hardy. That announcement remains the dominant AI answer when a voter asks 'what office is Howell Shaw running for.' The current Clerk race does not surface. The candidate's own narrative is being overwritten by his own history. |
| AI Assistant Live Test | Fail | Tested live on May 30, 2026 against three queries voters actually ask. Query one: 'Who is Dr. Howell Shaw and what is he running for?' Answer described an Assembly District 22 primary challenger against Melissa Hardy, with no mention of the Clerk race. Query two: 'Is Howell Shaw a Republican candidate for Clark County Clerk?' Answer hedged, referenced the Assembly D22 launch, and noted uncertainty about a Clerk position. Query three: 'What is Howell Shaw's position on 24/7 marriage licenses in Vegas?' Answer found no information and asked for clarification. Three failures across three distinct intent types. |
Tracking & Measurement
Whether the campaign can measure what it is already paying for. Without tracking pixels and analytics in place, every dollar spent on ads, social, or email flies blind. No attribution, no retargeting, no learning loop.
| Check | Status | What this means |
|---|---|---|
| Google Analytics 4 (GA4) | Fail | Not detected in the homepage source. The campaign cannot answer basic questions about traffic, sources, or visitor behavior. Every campaign decision is being made without data. |
| Google Tag Manager (GTM) | Fail | Not detected. GTM is the container that orchestrates every other tracking script. Without it, adding pixels later requires touching the site repeatedly. With it, every future tag is a config change, not a code change. |
| Facebook / Meta Pixel | Fail | Not detected. Required to retarget Facebook and Instagram visitors with paid ads. Required to measure conversion from Meta campaigns. Without it, Meta ad spend is unmeasured and unretargetable. |
| Google Ads Conversion Tracking | Fail | Not detected. Required to measure ROI on any Google search ads or YouTube ads. Every search ad dollar without conversion tracking is a guess. |
| LinkedIn Insight Tag | Fail | Not detected. Required for high-dollar donor acquisition campaigns via LinkedIn. Without it, LinkedIn cannot build a retargeting audience of donors and prospects. |
| X / Twitter Pixel | Fail | Not detected. Required to retarget X visitors with paid ads. Lower-priority than Meta Pixel but still relevant for political audiences. |
| Conversion Events Defined | Fail | No measurable conversion events configured anywhere. 'Donation,' 'newsletter signup,' 'volunteer pledge,' 'polling place lookup' all need event tracking to be optimizable. |
| GiveButter Attribution | Fail | Donations route to GiveButter without UTM parameters. The campaign cannot attribute a donation back to the social post, ad, or email that drove it. Every donation is a black box. |
| UTM Parameter Strategy | Fail | No UTM convention visible on the donation link or social posts. The campaign cannot attribute donations or signups to the channel that drove them. Every shared link is unattributable. |
| Server-Side Tracking (Conversions API) | Fail | Not configured. iOS 14+ and increasing browser privacy restrictions have made client-side tracking less reliable. Server-side tracking is the modern fix. |
Brand SERP & Reputation
What a voter actually sees when they Google the candidate's name. The first page of search results is the campaign's de facto landing page, whether the campaign controls it or not.
| Check | Status | What this means |
|---|---|---|
| Google Knowledge Panel | Fail | No verified knowledge card appears for the candidate. The incumbent has institutional Google presence through clarkcountynv.gov. Voters who search the candidate's name see only blue links instead of the authoritative entity card Google promotes politicians with. |
| Image Pack | Fail | Google does not display an image carousel for the candidate's name. The visual band Google reserves for recognizable figures is empty, which signals 'lower-profile candidate' to every voter scanning the SERP. |
| X / Twitter SERP Block | Warning | When a candidate's name is searched, Google often embeds a live X feed. The candidate's @howellshaw1 handle includes a numeric suffix that signals 'second-attempt account.' If the activity is also low, the embed forfeits real-estate. |
| People Also Ask | Fail | Google's PAA questions for the candidate route to Ballotpedia, Nevada News and Views, and Turning Point Action. The campaign does not answer the questions voters are explicitly asking. |
| First Page Result Mix | Warning | Top ten results for 'Howell Shaw' include the campaign site, the January 28 Nevada News and Views article about Assembly District 22, the LinkedIn profile, the Turning Point Action profile, and unrelated Howell Shaw search interference (a music teacher, a construction company family). The campaign is the smaller part of the candidate's online identity, and a stale prior race competes with the current one. |
| Prior Race Bleed-Through | Fail | Coverage of the January 2026 Assembly District 22 announcement outranks coverage of the current Clerk race. A voter who lands on stale coverage walks away thinking the candidate is running for the legislature. |
| Shadow Search · 'controversies' | Pass | Google searches for 'Howell Shaw controversies' return no significant negative content related to the candidate. The matches are unrelated (Milli Vanilli vocalists Charles Shaw and Brad Howell). This is a real asset and the right time to lock it in. |
| Shadow Search · 'ethics, investigation, scandal' | Pass | No major ethics-related negative content surfaces. Clean shadow surface. |
| Honorary Doctorate Surface Risk | Warning | The 'Dr.' framing on a candidate for an administrative county office creates an unforced credibility risk. A reporter looking up United Graduate College and Seminary International finds an institution that grants honorary degrees, not an accredited doctoral program. The story writes itself. The risk is preventable today. |
| Reputation Risk Surface | Warning | Today's clean SERP is fragile. A single news cycle, opposition mailer, or social attack on the honorary doctorate, the Assembly D22 pivot, or the placeholder site content can flip the first page. Without owned content density, there is no defensive moat. |
| Brand Search Rank | Pass | howellshaw.com ranks within the top three for 'Howell Shaw' searches. A foundational win and a base to build defensive real estate from. |
Accessibility & Compliance
Where the site sits against WCAG 2.1 AA, ADA exposure, and the campaign-specific compliance obligations (FEC, FPPC, SMS, cookies). For a public official, this is legal risk in addition to UX risk.
| Check | Status | What this means |
|---|---|---|
| Color Contrast (WCAG 2.1 AA) | Warning | JetTheme template colors have not been verified against the actual text on the site. Insufficient contrast fails ADA, loses voters with low vision, and shows up in formal complaints. |
| Keyboard Navigation | Warning | Tab order, focus indicators, and skip links have not been tested. Voters with motor impairments cannot navigate the site without a working tab order. JetTheme defaults are inconsistent. |
| Image Alt Text | Fail | None detected on any image, confirmed in the On-Page section. The single most-cited WCAG violation in formal complaints. Screen readers cannot identify the candidate's photo. |
| ARIA Labels on Interactive Elements | Warning | Custom buttons, the donation CTA, the volunteer form, and the newsletter signup likely lack proper ARIA labels. JetTheme defaults vary. Without ARIA, assistive technology cannot describe what each element does. |
| Form Accessibility | Warning | Any on-site contact, newsletter, volunteer, or pledge form must have programmatically associated labels. Donation is processed off-site (GiveButter), but every other form on the site is the campaign's responsibility. |
| FEC 'Paid for by' Disclaimer | Warning | Not visibly confirmed on every page. The federal requirement for political committees. Missing or inconsistent placement is a compliance flag and can prompt complaints. |
| Nevada FPPC Disclosure | Warning | Nevada has state-level disclosure requirements separate from federal FEC obligations. Coverage of these on the site has not been verified. |
| Cookie Consent and Privacy Posture | Warning | No cookie consent banner visible. JetTheme and any installed analytics plugins set cookies by default. Visitors from California, Europe, or other regulated jurisdictions trigger consent requirements that are not being collected. |
| SMS Compliance (TCPA, A2P 10DLC) | Warning | No SMS terms page identified. If the campaign sends any SMS to supporters, TCPA and A2P 10DLC compliance is required. Political SMS is one of the most heavily regulated channels in modern marketing. |
| Privacy Policy | Warning | Privacy policy presence and currency not verified. Coverage against CCPA (California) and Nevada SB-260 has not been verified. Nevada has campaign-specific obligations beyond CCPA. |
| Accessibility Statement | Fail | No accessibility statement on the site. Best-practice for any public-facing site, and a defensive document for an ADA complaint. |
Crisis Preparedness
How prepared the campaign is for the moment a reporter, opponent, or news cycle puts it under pressure. A campaign with no crisis infrastructure becomes the story on the day a crisis hits.
| Check | Status | What this means |
|---|---|---|
| /press URL | Fail | Returns 404. No press kit page exists at any conventional path (/press, /press-kit, /media all return nothing). A reporter calling at 11pm has nowhere to grab bio, headshot, fact sheet. The story runs without them. |
| Press Release Page | Fail | No campaign-authored press releases exist. The /blog feed contains theme-demo content. No journalist-ready material has been published. |
| Downloadable Bio and Headshot | Warning | A 'Campaign Card downloadable PDF' is referenced on the homepage. Whether the bio and headshot are professional, current, and journalist-ready is not verifiable from the public surface. |
| Rapid Response URL | Fail | No /response, /facts, /clarification, or comparable path exists. When false claims circulate, the campaign has no canonical rebuttal URL to push out across social and press. |
| Media Contact Surface | Warning | The /contacts page exists with info@howellshaw.com and 702-518-8178. Whether a dedicated media contact, treasurer contact, or rapid-response handle is published is not clear. |
| Pre-Approved Statements Library | Fail | No internal library of pre-approved candidate positions on common topics. When a question lands during a press hit or social storm, the response is improvised. For a candidate with a history that includes Turning Point Action, Patriot Academy, and an honorary doctorate, an improvised response is a liability. |
| Social Pinned Crisis Capacity | Warning | When a crisis hits, social profiles need pinned-post infrastructure to push a unified message. The campaign has multiple social accounts; coordination is the question. |
| Defensive SERP Real Estate | Fail | Covered in the Brand SERP section. Without owned content density on the first page of Google, a negative news cycle dominates the SERP and the campaign cannot push back. |
| Honorary Doctorate Preemption | Fail | The 'Dr.' framing on the biography page is the predictable opposition research find. A press cycle on the honorary degree from United Graduate College and Seminary International is preventable today and irreversible after the first article runs. |
| Assembly D22 Pivot Explanation | Warning | The January 2026 announcement of an Assembly District 22 challenge and the current Clerk race share search results. A reporter will ask. The answer needs to be ready and the same answer every time. |
| Owned Domain Variant Defense | Warning | Whether howellshaw.org, howellshaw.net, drhowellshaw.com, and similar variants are owned by the campaign is not externally visible. Variant domains are how opposition attack sites get registered. |
Phased Methodology
Three phases, sequenced for the calendar. Each phase is defined by outcomes, not tasks. Together they describe the arc of work between today and November 3.
Foundation
Now through June 9Strip the placeholder content off the site, stabilize on-page integrity, install measurement infrastructure, claim the voter-information and comparison searches, and turn the candidate into a recognized entity for AI search assistants before the Democratic primary consolidates the conversation.
- The /sample-page, the four theme-demo project pages, and the six placeholder blog posts are gone from the index and the sitemap.
- Every remaining page renders with the search engine context (titles, descriptions, headings, alt text) that lets it rank.
- A dedicated voter-information presence claims peak-intent traffic through November.
- A standing comparison page defines the race in the campaign's terms before the Democratic nominee is crowned.
- Structured data (Person, Organization, BreadcrumbList) establishes the candidate as a recognized entity in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.
- Measurement infrastructure (GA4, GTM, Meta Pixel, Google Ads conversion, LinkedIn Insight) is in place so every dollar of paid spend is attributable from day one.
- The honorary doctorate framing is preempted, the Assembly D22 pivot is explained in a clean two-sentence narrative, and the press kit URL with downloadable bio and headshot exists before the campaign needs them.
Penetration
June 10 through Labor DayMove the campaign into the searches voters actually run after the Democratic primary, capture undecided voters across the summer attention cycle, consolidate entity recognition across AI engines, and unify the campaign's voice across every social platform.
- A consistent weekly news cadence keeps the campaign fresh in algorithmic eyes and visitor perception.
- Issue-level depth secures rankings on the policy questions Clark County voters research (marriage license modernization, transparency dashboards, business filing speed).
- Office-service explainer pages rank for the queries voters were going to run anyway about marriage licenses, business filings, and notary services, with the candidate's modernization plan as the answer.
- Endorsement and credibility signals are surfaced where undecided voters look for them, replacing the one-name placeholder with a real list.
- Spanish-language presence reaches the bilingual voters the institutional Clerk's office has had to itself.
- FAQ schema and declarative content position the campaign as the answer when voters ask an AI assistant about the race.
- Social profiles speak in one coordinated voice across Facebook, X, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, and Bluesky.
- Newsletter and email capture compound the campaign's owned audience daily.
Durability
Labor Day through November 3Convert summer momentum into a durable digital presence that wins the general election across search engines, answer engines, local discovery surfaces, and the moments of pressure that decide close races.
- Neighborhood-level pages and Henderson-specific positioning outflank the institutional incumbent on geo-specific searches.
- Third-party authority (regional press, Ballotpedia, Wikipedia, Knowledge Panel) anchors the candidate as the credible alternative across every modern surface.
- Local presence (GBP, Apple Maps, Bing Places, NextDoor, Henderson Chamber engagement) saturates the discovery surfaces voters use to navigate their own neighborhoods.
- Full accessibility remediation closes ADA exposure and broadens the voter reach.
- Crisis infrastructure is hardened: rapid-response URL, statements library, defensive domain variants, SMS protocol.
- Performance optimization (WebP, lazy load, preconnect, deferred JS, CDN) lifts the speed sub-score into competitive territory.
- The campaign's online presence reads, by election day, as the institutional incumbent's equal or better across Google, the AI answer layer, every social platform, and every local map.
The Reality
Every dollar this campaign spends on social media, mailers, flyers, paid ads, door-knocking, or voter outreach assumes one thing: that when a voter actually researches the candidate, what they find reinforces the message. If that research surface is broken, and across sixteen sections this audit shows it is, those dollars do a fraction of the work they should. A Facebook ad that drives traffic to a site without conversion tracking generates fundraising volume and zero attributable insight. A mailer that prompts a voter to look up the candidate sends them to a search results page where the dominant story is the Assembly District 22 announcement from January. A canvass conversation that ends with 'check out his site' competes with a /blog feed full of unedited theme-demo content. This is the hamster wheel. Velocity without compounding. Activity without leverage.
This audit is not a tactical to-do list. It is a description of the foundation every other marketing investment will sit on top of. The work in Phases I through III does not replace social media, advertising, direct mail, faith-community outreach, or grassroots organizing. It makes those investments work. Without this foundation, the campaign spends harder and converts less, and the gap between dollars in and votes out widens with every cycle of activity. With it, every channel compounds.
One dimension this audit deliberately did not address, because it warrants its own engagement, is the candidate's professional and pastoral online presence. Voters who take a candidate seriously do not stop at the campaign site. They look at LinkedIn. They look at the businesses the candidate has built (in this case, envision ID and the prior Silicon Valley design career). They look at the ministry, at Dwell AJC, at the Henderson Conservatives founding. They look at Turning Point Action affiliations, Patriot Academy mentorship, and the prior Assembly District 22 announcement that still circulates. Today, those surfaces have not been deliberately aligned with the campaign's story. A voter who reaches the LinkedIn profile finds a designer, pastor, and activist. A voter who reaches the campaign site finds a Republican candidate for County Clerk. They are the same person. The two narratives have not been merged, and the questions raised by the honorary doctorate framing have not been preempted. This is an unaddressed alignment problem and a quiet credibility risk that becomes audible the day a reporter, an opponent, or an undecided voter starts looking past the homepage.
Given the depth of execution, $55,000+ is a very conservative market value for this scope. Everything described in this report sits within Integrity Agency's scope to deliver, in partnership with Nexcite. Where specialist hands are required: campaign counsel for FEC, FPPC, and TCPA compliance review, a Wikipedia editor for the encyclopedic article (Wikipedia notability is gate-kept by the editor community itself), and formal third-party accessibility certification.
We front-end load the value.
This document was prepared by Integrity Agency in partnership with Nexcite Entertainment. Volumes and difficulty estimates are directional and calibrated to publicly available Clark County and Las Vegas search data. The candidate's professional and pastoral online presence (LinkedIn, envision ID legacy, Dwell AJC, Turning Point Action, Patriot Academy, the Assembly District 22 announcement) is not covered in this report and is recommended as a separate engagement.
Social & Cross-Channel
How the campaign coordinates across platforms voters live on. A campaign that speaks in one voice across six channels is harder to dismiss than one that exists as six disconnected accounts.