Episode Transcript
Kyle James (00:01.282)
Hey, welcome to the AI Chronicles podcast. I'm your host, Kyle James. And today we're going be talking about how an SEO agency called Hello SEO is using AI inside of their own business. And we'll share the exact steps that you can take in order to implement AI for yourself. Now, before we talk about that, listen closely. Are you looking to implement AI inside of your own company? Or maybe just struggling to get your AI to stop hallucinating? Speak to GPT Trainer. GPT Trainer literally builds out and manages your AI agent for you.
eliminating hallucinations for good. Go to gpt-trainer.com. I promise you, it'll be the biggest time-saving decision that you've made all year. Trying to set up AI on your own is like trying to build a house from scratch. Sure, you could do it, but the time and frustration it's gonna take you to get it finished just isn't worth it. It's a thousand times faster and safer to hire professionals. Schedule a consultation today. Once again, that's gpt-trainer.com.
Today I have with me Jade Pruitt, who is the founder of Hello SEO, a boutique SEO agency helping small businesses increase visibility in traditional and AI search. Hey, welcome to the show, Jade. How are you doing today?
Jade Pruett (01:13.662)
Hey, I'm doing good. How are you?
Kyle James (01:15.662)
That's fantastic. So tell us a little bit, like give us some background. How did Hello SEO come to be and like what exactly are you like spending most of your time on with some of your clients?
Jade Pruett (01:26.45)
Yeah, so I started Hello SEO during the pandemic. I had a lawyer reach out to me on LinkedIn near the end of the year and just say, hey, you do SEO. Can you do SEO for me? And I was working full time in affiliate SEO for CNN and Business Insider. So I had a good job. But realizing that I could get people to Venmo me extra money every month was like, whoa, this is a whole new world. I am now an entrepreneur. Time to take this to the moon.
Kyle James (01:52.542)
Yeah.
Jade Pruett (01:55.594)
And then the challenge was like, how am I going to match my salary so that I can finally quit? I ended up transferring to a new job because I was able to during the pandemic and I ended up in the semiconductor industry, literally optimizing barcodes for SEO during like the semiconductor crisis, which was a wild time. And then in October of 2022, I finally matched my income and got to quit my job, which was super exciting. And then of course, three weeks later, chat GPT hits the scene and my life has never been the same.
Kyle James (02:25.516)
Wow. Wow. It's incredible. What was that like when that lawyer first reached out? Like when he reached out or her, he, her, whatever, reached out to you, like, and they wanted to pay you. Like, were you already thinking about, you know, maybe running your own kind of, I guess, you know, side hustle initially, or was that like the trigger point where it's like, wow, like actually I can make some money off of this.
Jade Pruett (02:45.13)
It's, I come from a family of entrepreneurs. They've always told me to start my own business. And I was like, absolutely not. I took a gap year before I started college and ran a coffee shop in my hometown. So I was 18. I was younger than all of my employees and everyone hated me. And I was like, I will never do this again. But I had just gotten my first real promotion at my job and just knowing like, Oh, an extra couple thousand dollars a year goes such a long way.
Kyle James (03:01.816)
Hahaha
Jade Pruett (03:13.392)
I can convince people to Venmo me that, like, let's go. Like, being in control of my own finances is really what drove me. And also just working with clients on my own and outside of like the strict SOPs of such a large publication like CNN really like showed me that I knew how to do this on my own. it, my confidence like went through the roof after a few months of doing it by myself. And then the sky was the limit.
Kyle James (03:39.99)
Yeah, yeah, I had a long ago I used to work at Tesla and there was a guy who came in and he was buying a Tesla and obviously the people who bought Teslas were they had had they had a little bit of money I would best way but he was in the oil and gas industry for such a long time and on the side he was selling like sidearms and weapons and things like that and he ended up when he lost his job in the oil and gas he went full-time selling you know like weapons and and guns and things like that and he just I mean just
completely blew it out of the water and skyrocketed. it was interesting because for him it was that one moment where he lost his job and it shifted where he's like, full time. But for you though, Jade, when was that moment when you're like, okay, I'm making a little bit of side hustle here, it's going good. But then when was the shift where you're like, okay, I'm gonna fully jump into it full time, not working for anyone else, gonna do it for myself. Walk me through what that, paint that picture for me what that was like.
Jade Pruett (04:36.744)
of the decision to do that or actually getting to do that.
Kyle James (04:39.052)
Yeah, when you actually made that switch, you're like, okay, here we go. I'm doing it.
Jade Pruett (04:42.09)
Oh my gosh. It felt like just jumping off a cliff. Like it was so terrifying. And I had matched my income and my husband and I were like, let's try to get, three months of a safety net put away. But I was working like 17 hours a day, you know, like something wild trying to maintain a demanding job in tech and also my client load and work was suffering on both sides. And of course I'm dying. I haven't taken a weekend off in two years.
So it was very scary, but it was like the best decision I could have ever made.
Kyle James (05:17.806)
Yeah, absolutely. So right now you're, you're using a little bit of AI at Hello SEO and like what made you decide to say, okay, I'm going to start implementing AI in the first place. And like what specific challenges were you, would you say you're trying to solve both maybe on the client side and maybe even internally with your own team?
Jade Pruett (05:37.706)
Totally. So the moment that ChatGPT came out, I just had this gut feeling that this is the new Google. We're actually going to see a massive shift in how people search. And there was really nothing to do with that information at the time. It wasn't happening yet. was like, OK, this is probably like, we have no idea how long it's going to take for us to get there. Of course, when ChatGPT came out, it only even had data up until 2021. So it wasn't even like,
It wouldn't have worked as a search engine anyway. And most of the things you put in were so wrong that I knew we had a little bit of time. But always keeping in the back of my head, people are going to adapt to this. We don't know how quickly. We don't know what the user experience is going to be. And I, of course, have no idea how to optimize for it at that time. So one of the main things I did was just keep an eye on it. I got really good advice early on to just stay curious and excited about AI.
which in my industry, it's mostly doom and gloom. I think it's finally starting to turn around, but we had a few years of just like, this is gonna kill the entire industry, we're all screwed, which is definitely not true. But just staying curious, staying excited, seeing what we could do with it was huge. And one of the first solutions that we really implemented at SEO is, I'm sorry, at Hello SEO is to use it to create.
content for our clients. And I know that sounds so simple. And there's so many bad ways to do that. Putting in one prompt and then publishing what comes out is an incredible way to, first of all, not put any new information out on the internet or showcase your expertise, but also probably to break trust with your clientele because everyone knows what ChatGPT sounds like. Like if your blog begins with like, in today's digital world, comma, or whatever it always says.
Kyle James (07:24.792)
Hmm.
Kyle James (07:29.006)
Yeah.
Jade Pruett (07:30.378)
That's a really great way to get people to click off of your content super fast. But the challenge we had was I worked with a lot of subject matter experts. Most of my clients are an expert in their field. And the choices were, I can write you content that is just going to be things I found online and repeated in a blog post for you, but it's going to be really well optimized. Or you can write your own blog post, and it's not going to have that structure it needs for SEO. Also,
You probably don't want to write your own blog post. You're an incredibly busy person. So we discovered ways to use AI to interview our clients, get a giant transcript of their expertise, and then use that to create blog posts that sound like them, have their unique stories and anecdotes and their actual expertise showcased in that. And we've discovered that these blog posts just absolutely blow up in Google. It's so much fun.
Kyle James (08:26.798)
Yeah, I think there's, Oh, go ahead. No, no, no. no. Cause I was going to ask, so like what, like, I think one of the things a lot of people do is like when they, when they see the power of like, you know, open AI and all these large language models out there and they're just putting in, Hey, create for me a blog post. then there are people out there just publishing that. Like what, what would you say is like, why, why is it not good to just basic prompt, put it in and then post it immediately to like your website? Like why, why would there be benefit that you would say that, Hey, we actually do this a little bit better.
Jade Pruett (08:28.276)
Go ahead, sorry.
Kyle James (08:56.94)
at Hello SEO by taking that, you'll walk me through that a little bit.
Jade Pruett (09:00.444)
Yeah, so one of my first jobs in SEO was just like being a minimum wage copywriter, content writer. And all I was doing for our clients who are mostly in the medical field was Googling and then coming up with what I needed to write about and just taking information that was already on the internet and just putting it back on the internet again. And that's what you're doing when you're putting in that one prompt. So it's not fresh information. It's also
not really optimize in any sort of way, even if you ask Chachaputi to optimize it. And it's going to have that tone and cadence that we all know is AI. So it's more likely to break trust with your clients and build trust, which is the whole point of having blog content.
Kyle James (09:46.124)
Yeah. What do you feel like, you know, like for some, like since you've been input, how long you've been, I guess, let me ask that for how long have you been kind of using AI, within like, SEO would be pretty good.
Jade Pruett (09:58.346)
I think our first big round of blogs came out in like spring of 2023. So it's been quite a while.
Kyle James (10:04.366)
Okay. Okay. And like since then, you know, obviously there's been probably a lot of testing that you've played around with different platforms, like specifically for like maybe your clients, like what types of results have you been maybe seeing so far that's maybe worth noting for some of our listeners today?
Jade Pruett (10:21.588)
Totally. So one of the first, we call it content hubs because we publish about 10 to 15 blog posts all at once and they're all interconnected, which is super, super fun. One of the first ones we did was for a plastic surgeon and she is such an incredibly technical person, of course. And we sat down with her for an hour. We got about 10,000 words out of her. And of course, all the questions we're asking are based on keyword data to begin with. So we know that what
we're getting from her is going to matter from a search perspective. When we published those blogs, within a month, her organic search had increased by 480%. And her business was making seven figures by the end of the year. It was wild.
Kyle James (11:06.306)
That's incredible. So all from this, that, that one interview with her for one, you an hour or so, you had, but you prepared initially where you took some of the keywords that you knew were important based on like, guess, like her industry and then went into the conversation. then, so what, what me through that blew my mind there for a second. I'm sure that people feel the same way. Like you said 10 blog posts at one time. Like how, how does that work? Like, tell me more about that.
Jade Pruett (11:18.663)
Yes.
Jade Pruett (11:33.13)
So most people, and it's kind of like an old SEO tactic that people say all the time is like, oh, you have to put out new content and put out a blog a month or whatever. And because we built them all at once off the same interview, we were like, why don't we just put them all up and see what happens? And it really worked because they were so perfectly interconnected to each other. We're creating this keyword cluster around everything that she offers. And of course,
so little content, especially in the medical field, unless it's formal papers, is actually from the perspective of the surgeon. So she could tell us things that no one else could even come up with. So it works really well. I will also say we did optimize the rest of her website for SEO. We didn't just throw the blogs up there. But because they ranked so well and brought in so much traffic, Google is getting that positive feedback loop of, OK, this is a really valuable source.
And so she ended up ranking for all of her other like service-based keywords in her area. Within a couple of months, she was number one for everything.
Kyle James (12:38.808)
Wow. That's, that's what a great story like that is, like, especially like just the, I mean, just talking about like prepping and then jam packing it. And all of sudden, getting that much traction within a short amount of time period, you know, that's, that's, that's a huge deal. So walk me through, you know, Hello SEO, obviously they're using AI right now and your team's using it. Like, what are some of those kind of visionary AI initiatives that are upcoming over the next couple of years? And where do you see maybe AI playing?
the biggest role in your operations next.
Jade Pruett (13:10.698)
That is a great question. We just hired an operations person to come in next month and fix everything. So I'm excited to see exactly what she is going to do. I started building out like formal SOPs and a lot of them involve AI in ways that was kind of surprising. I've been just dabbling and like seeing what it can do, but it's so good for creating meta descriptions for one.
and creating redirects, kind of like just doing those really annoying bulk SEO tasks so quickly and so well that I think over the next year, it's gonna be doing things that we haven't even thought about yet.
Kyle James (13:51.79)
Yeah, for sure. I, I for sure see that. I hope that operations person that you brought on is going to do as much good as your case study that you share with the 400 % with it. We increased it by 5,000%. No. So, and as we wrap up the conversation, AJ, definitely appreciate you having it on and where can people learn a little bit more about you and maybe a little bit more about Hello SEO that you would maybe recommend to them.
Jade Pruett (14:02.909)
Right.
Jade Pruett (14:17.852)
Yeah, yeah, I recommend my my LinkedIn. I'm Jade Pruitt on LinkedIn, the one who founded Hello SEO. That's where I do the majority of my my social media work, but also Hello SEO.com is a great place to get started. I have that free report card on my website. Kyle just filled one out. It's actually it's actually my goal for for July, depending on when this comes out to get 100 of those done this month. So I would love anyone to go for a lot of free report card. You get instant
Kyle James (14:35.926)
I sure did.
Jade Pruett (14:47.69)
results or like insights into your own SEO, but then I make you a Loom video afterwards explaining all of your SEO, which is really where the value lies.
Kyle James (14:57.198)
Awesome. Love it. Love it. Thank you so much, Jay. Appreciate having you on. And thanks for everybody listening in today. Remember, if you're looking to implement AI into your business today, don't try and do it yourself. The time and stress that the AI could cause, it may not be worth it. Schedule a call with GPT Trainer and let them build out and manage your AI for you. Once again, that's gpt-trainer.com. Signing off for now, have a great rest of your day, everybody. And looking forward to seeing everyone on the next episode of AI Chronicles.
