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- [00:00]
A
When you Google ethical genes, you get Banana Republic because they've shoved a bunch of words in the bottom of a page that just like, basically keyword stuff's ethical genes. And they have been around for, you know, decades. They have an incredible domain rating, so they're just, you know, going to dominate that keyword. But there's a company called Nudies that actually does ethical genes correctly. And, like, they won't even make a new pair of jeans unless they actually have to. But they're ranked like 60 something in Google for that term because they haven't invested, you know, tens of thousand and SEO. But when you go to ChatGPT and you're like, hey, I'm actually looking for ethical genes, they're the ones who show up first because they're the ones actually practicing ethical gene creation. Hey there.
- [00:44]
B
I'm Cody McGuffey. I'm a husband dad of three, and I'm the founder of Everbee.
- [00:48]
A
Ever Be.
- [00:48]
B
Ever Be Everbee, where we serve over a million creators across the globe, helping them grow thriving online businesses. I believe every single human is a creator, and I believe every single creator should own a business, a business that gives them the freedom to build the life that they dream of. Built online is where creators, entrepreneurs, and leaders get real insights, real stories, and the edge to build something that actually lasts. This is where the next generation builders get built. Hey, Jade, how are you doing?
- [01:19]
A
Hey, Good. How are you?
- [01:21]
B
I'm great. Welcome. Very excited to have you on the podcast. You are. Where are you at in the world?
- [01:26]
A
Just for everyone to understand, I'm in Columbia, South Carolina. Columbia.
- [01:32]
B
With it.
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A
With a U.
- [01:34]
B
With a U. What was the other. What's another option for Columbia? Is it with.
- [01:38]
A
Oh, like Columbia, South America? That's where everyone always thinks I am. And I'm like, no, unfortunately.
- [01:44]
B
Nice. Very cool. I want to start with a quote from you, and when we were doing some research, you said using AI the wrong way can hurt your credibility. But used. Right. It's a secret weapon. Do you remember saying this?
- [02:02]
A
Yeah. Yeah.
- [02:04]
B
And you're referring to SEO in this case. And that's kind of what we're going to be talking about today is SEO. But going back to that quote, what did you mean by this?
- [02:15]
A
Yeah, so that's so interesting because the AI landscape changes every 45 seconds. And so I feel like I said that a thousand years ago, but it was probably just earlier this year. And what I was referring to there is, especially when you are creating content for your website, anything that's like customer Facing using AI the wrong way can really break trust. We all know what AI sounds like now. So if all of your content is starting with like in today's digital landscape or those like AI cliches, people can just see right through that. And even if you have put in the effort to really get your expertise into your copy, if it still sounds like AI, it can, it can really break trust. But when used correctly, like I said, it can streamline your business, it can make your processes so much faster, and it can allow you to scale so much quicker as long as you're continuing to build that trust in.
- [03:15]
B
I completely agree. I mean, if you think about it like just the most fundamental layer of use case of an AI or using AI using ChatGPT is let's say that you are sending a, you're texting back and forth with your like wife or husband or wife, right? And you want to send something very thoughtful and like, you just want to like send a love letter to your, to your spouse. How about that? Or let's say your brother or sister, whatever you want to say. But the point was, is you're trying to send something thoughtful and you just like use ChatGPT. Hey, write this like beautiful message to my partner. It does it and then you just like copy paste it and you slap it in there and you just like throw it to them and we could all see the word that's going. It's like your, your partner is smart about AI now they're just like, they know that this is not you. It sounds now all of a sudden it turned into like this thoughtful gesture, which your intention was very thoughtful and you wanted to be like kind and you want to be like show your generosity and love. And then all of a sudden it turns into this. You're lazy. This is so lazy. And you did it the lazy way. And it's funny that that is the, that is an example, maybe a poor example of it being a. It could hurt your credibility. It's what it hurt. That's what it did just now. Does that make sense?
- [04:31]
A
Totally. Totally. Yeah. If my, if my husband sent me a, a long, incredibly thoughtful text, I would be like, who wrote this for you? Not that he's not great, but that's not how he communicates at all.
- [04:46]
B
Totally. But if he used it and if he used it and just use the same example, if he used ChatGPT in this case and then he had this long text but he tweaked it and made it his sound like him and actually put his own like maybe 5% of him in it. All of a sudden you'd be like, yeah, you probably used AI, but you also, like sprinkled some of your magic in there too. And now all of a sudden he turned from lazy or maybe not thoughtful to wow, you actually used a tool to actually make it better. And then you sprinkled your own magic dust on it. And now that's extra thoughtful all of a sudden.
- [05:21]
A
Totally. Totally. There was a TikTok yesterday that came out where this woman was talking to ChatGPT because she was angry at her husband because he wouldn't allow her to get this Chanel bag because their finances weren't good. And ChatGPT was like, is this really about the Chanel bag or is this about you being seen and valued in all of these things? And I was thinking about that, like, if you. I was mad at my husband because he wouldn't let me buy something I wanted, and he went to ChatGPT and it was like, you know what, maybe this isn't about the item, maybe this is about something else is going on that would be probably the best way to use AI in your. In your romantic life. But that's certainly not what this podcast is about.
- [06:01]
B
No, we can go back to the actual main topic, which is SEO and how a small business owner or a startup business or a maybe a scaling business can use SEO as a secret weapon and a powerful weapon. And let's just jump into that. So what are some of the most common mistakes that you were seeing right now amongst, like, online businesses using AI in their business? Like, what are the, what are the mistakes that you're seeing?
- [06:26]
A
Totally, totally. And to share a bit about my story, I started my agency, Hello SEO, as a side hustle in 2020. Like most side hustles, that was when they were born. And I built it up while I worked a full time job and then quit in October of 2022. And of course, congrats three. Thank you. But three weeks later, ChatGPT is born. And I'm playing around with this thing and realizing, first of all, it's going to totally change the way that I do my job. One of the first questions that came out about it was, oh, can I use this to write blog posts? That's what everyone wanted to know because it streamlines the process so well. But also, is this going to replace search or is this going to be a new search engine and how am I going to optimize my clients to show up in LLMs all of a sudden? So it's really been like, coming at the SEO world in so many different ways. It's like, is it going to totally change how we do SEO? But also, is it going to replace SEO, or is it going to replace Google down the road? But as for those first big mistakes, I think it all really stems from your content strategy. A lot of people thought they could be super savvy in the beginning and just put in one prompt and be like, oh, I suddenly have this post about whatever. Or you could even ask ChatGPT to create an SEO strategy for you and maybe that gets you somewhere, but it's not capable of doing thorough, nuanced keyword research. It's not going to be able to fully understand your user like you can, or like an expert can, as they're really digging into the data to figure out search intent and things like that. And like I said, it can break trust with your user if they can easily tell that you're using AI to create your content. But also if you just give it one singular prompt, it's not going to come up with anything new. The blog is going to be as good as hiring a cheap content writer online who's just going to go pull a bunch of information out of Google and create you something that has no expertise, doesn't reflect your authority, and it's not going to have those EEAT standards that are very, very necessary now for content on your website.
- [08:48]
B
So the mistakes that you're seeing people are making are just. They're kind of just simplifying SEO to a single prompt and copy and pasting that as a blog post, for example, and just slapping it up and just thinking that they're doing SEO.
- [09:04]
A
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think that happens with a lot of marketing. It starts out on this, like, very expert, strategic level, and then it just gets, like, reduced down to these boxes. You can check. It's like, oh, well, if I just put two blog posts on my website every month and maybe get some random links off the Internet, I'm doing SEO. And it'd be the same as just saying, oh, post every day. And that's your social media strategy. It's just, it's a little bit too, too reductive. There needs to be, I guess.
- [09:37]
B
Yeah, like, like Instagram, for example, if, like, I'm gonna grow my Instagram today, you know, like, starting from today, and then I just, like, take a picture of my, like, coffee cup and like, it just. Just because I'm taking action doesn't mean that it's, like, connecting to my Audience in an untieful emotional level.
- [09:52]
A
Totally.
- [09:53]
B
What do you see? So there's two things I really wanted to kind of get to the bottom of with this conversation that I personally have questions about, which is the search engine aspect of like, is Google being, you know, replaced? And then I don't mean just as a company. What I mean is like, are people search their behaviors, searching chat, for example, for products, and how do our business owners that listen to this, how do they make sure they're optimizing for, for the new way of searching for things and getting information, which is using ChatGPT and Anthropic and these other ones. So there's that and then two is like, how can people leverage AI to actually do it the right way? Do the things that you're talking about, but doing it the right way. So however you want to go first, which one would you like to tackle first?
- [10:44]
A
Okay, okay, I guess we'll start with the first one. So this is one of those things we've just been like, we have to wait and see how users adapt. Like, we know that you can use ChatGPT for search and the other LLMs for search online, but are people actually going to use it for that and it for a while? I guess like this first like two years of its existence, it's like, okay, like let's wait and see. And of course like early ChatGPT only had data up until 2021 or something like that. And so like it wasn't the best for online search. So there was all these kind of like unknowns in my industry. And we were thinking, I bet it's going to hit technology first. Like B2B SaaS is going to be the first that really needs to optimize for ChatGPT search and all that kind of stuff. And then April hit and I was doing my analytics reports for all of my clients and I have clients across a variety of industries. And what we saw was travel agencies, local coworking spaces, local plumbers, like places you just would not expect people to be using AI search to find were getting leads and like paid leads through these LLMs all of a sudden, not paid leads as in ads, paid leads as in they're actually like converting on the other end. They're coming in and actually taking action.
- [12:02]
B
And LLMs, for anyone that doesn't know what that is is large language models, basically it's chatgpt is an example of an LLM. What are some other examples?
- [12:11]
A
Google's Gemini Perplexity. All those guys.
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B
Perfect.
- [12:18]
A
So we're seeing user behavior actually change and change across industries. And also Google is dramatically losing market share at the moment. If you're on LinkedIn, I'm sure you've seen the graphs. Google has held over 90% of search market share since 2015. And in January of this year, actually Q4 of last year, they dropped to 89%. And, and that doesn't seem like a massive deal, but it's certainly showing that things are changing. And it's one of those things you can be terrified of or excited about. And if you can stay on the excited side of that coin, it's like a wild time to be in this industry or to be running an online business. So they're dropping dramatically. We're actually seeing search growing. We're still kind of in that wait and see, and we're learning new things every single day. Um, but one thing that is certain at the moment that we're really seeing is the way ChatGPT and like the other LLMs algorithms work are better for small businesses than Google's algorithm.
- [13:26]
B
How so?
- [13:27]
A
Why so? As an example, if you're in the wedding industry, if you're like a wedding photographer, something like that, you can try to rank on the first page of Google, especially for local results, but you're most likely not going to be able to outrank the Note and Wedding Wire and like those big conglomerates at the top. In other industries, it's like Clutch or Yelp, like those big, those big list situations that typically the only way to like outrank them is to like join them and pay money to be featured within them. And the LLM algorithms do not care about those. They go straight to the actual website and feature them instead of. So it's going to really, like diversify the results that you're getting in search and really serve people better. Another example that came up at SEO Week this year in New York was when you Google ethical genes, you get Banana Republic because they've shoved a bunch of words in the bottom of a page that just like basically keyword stuffs ethical genes. And they have been around for decades. They have an incredible domain rating, so they're just going to dominate that keyword. But there's a company called Nudies that actually does ethical genes correctly and they won't even make a new pair of jeans unless they actually have to. But they're ranked like 60 something in Google for that term because they haven't invested, you know, tens of thousands in SEO. But when you go to ChatGPT and you're like hey, I'm actually looking for ethical genes. They're the ones who show up first because they're the ones actually practicing ethical gene creation.
- [15:09]
B
How does, how does ChatGPT know that and that. How do they know that they're the one. Like, what information. Someone has to. They have to get that information somewhere, right?
- [15:18]
A
Totally, totally. It's going to come down to really good branding and making sure that, like, the actual context of what you offer is on your website. So they're, they're less looking for just like really high authority. And do you have those keywords on the page appropriately and more like a robust. Like, is this actually going to meet the client's needs the best?
- [15:41]
B
So it's primarily about the copy that is actually on the, on the marketing page, rather than just the metadata in the back in the background.
- [15:49]
A
Right, right. And we're still discovering all the ranking factors. This kind of goes into your second question. We're kind of in. Everyone keeps saying this is like the 2008 all over again. Like back in the day with standard SEO, you could just put white text on a white background and trick Google into ranking your website. I was still in high school at that time, so I missed that era. So I'm excited to get to be in the new experimental era with AI. But the ranking factors that we do know of now include schema markup is a really big one. This is a layer of structured data you can add to any page of your website that tells Google and now the AI crawlers exactly what it's about in kind of an abridged way. LLMs take up a lot of energy. We all know this. There's like a lot going on in that world as well. So anything we can do to make them lazier at their jobs is good. Any way we can conserve their energy. And having very clear, structured data that they can skim as opposed to reading your entire website is. Is huge. So structured data optimizing your meta descriptions, and this is a really funny one because that hasn't been a ranking factor in Google for like over a decade. But having very clear meta descriptions on every page of your site that do feature the keywords that you're going for is going to be really big. And ChatGPT especially, they pull their results from Bing at the moment. So Bing optimization is suddenly huge. So schema markup, metadata and Bing, which are all things that I've been in this industry over a decade, have never prioritized even once, are all very big in the AI space.
- [17:38]
B
So what everbee does. One of our products is Everbee Store, which is essentially, it's a website builder completely and also has everything like an E commerce or an online business needs for an online business. One thing that one of the missions that we have is how do we take all the heavy lifting off of a store owner if they're not an SEO expert, how do we get them as close as possible to at least becoming picked up by Google or Bing or from a crawler, from an LLM? But you mentioned. So these things are really interesting to me because I'm like, how do we build some of this stuff to where it's like kind of automated? We understand that we're not gonna be able to become an SEO expert and we're not trying to be that, but how do we get them to where they can hire the expert and we already have the structure kind of set up. Is that possible? Is that, am I, am I thinking in the correct way if I'm thinking about the online business owner?
- [18:38]
A
Totally. And I offer this thing called a power hour, where we just meet for one hour, do a screen share, you give me access to your website and I just kind of go crazy on your SEO for that amount of time. And we see incredible results from those because there really are just these foundational things you can do to like get your SEO going. And then from there it's really about building your authority, building those backlinks, and then building out content to have the most robust site possible. But what those things are, I'm not trying to gatekeep here. Submitting your website, your sitemap to Google Search Console and now being Webmaster Tools is huge. Like you're just handing over the map of your website to those two crawlers, making sure that you have good HTML structure on your website or header tag structure. So you want one big H1 at the top of each page. You want to make sure you have your target keyword in that H1. And then from there you know, header twos, come next, header threes, and then your paragraphs. Just make sure that it's really easy for the AI crawlers and Google's crawlers to read quickly and really understand what every page of your site is about. After that, meta tags, your meta titles, meta descriptions are huge. And then just double checking that there's nothing holding your website back from ranking in Google. So you can go into Google Search console, see what 404 errors are coming up, see what pages are not indexed in Google. And then if they're pages that need to Be indexed, figure out a path to get them indexed. And that's, that's really like your foundational, just like where to start. But it goes a very long way.
- [20:19]
B
Sure. And that stuff is what I'm hearing is that if you don't even have these things, then you also don't have a chance to be picked up from the LLMs either because they're actually going to Google and Bing, I guess you could say, to actually pull this information anyway. Right. So LLMs actually need this information too, like all your technical SEO to be set up properly, is that correct?
- [20:40]
A
Yes, yes. And now you can optimize your robots text to allow those crawlers in and you can allow them in in different ways. Like you can allow in the crawlers that are going to train the LLMs. So like the ones that are actually like teaching it new information or the ones that crawl you from like a search perspective. So there are a few little things like if you're going to hire an expert, getting the tech aligned well and maybe doing the keyword research or are the pieces that you can spend a lot of time on and still not get quite right. But then from there like you can DIY your own SEO to a point, sure.
- [21:16]
B
But it does take, and we're talking about some technical things here that you've spent like your career actually thinking about and talking about. For an online business owner, typically, at least for the people listening to this, they are creators primarily. Like they're passionate about their subject, they're passionate about their niche, they're passionate about their audience, they're like passionate about the, the offering that they bring to the world. They're not passionate about SEO, you know.
- [21:39]
A
Right.
- [21:40]
B
So I could, the. I want to be really clear to anybody listening to this too. You don't. There's, there's experts in SEO that do this stuff like, and they think about it all day. You're, you didn't start a business to become an SEO expert. You started a business to like sell your product and get your product out into the world. So Jada, anyway, I don't mean to sell you too hard here, but like the power hour seems like a very low hanging fruit to just go and have spent some time with you and probably get that stuff going and the foundation laid.
- [22:12]
A
Totally, totally. The first time I tried to set up Google search console for my own website like a thousand years ago, it took me, you know, five, six hours to finally get it in there. And that's one of those things. Like we can have all of your Technical stuff, set up sitemap, submitted robot text, checked, you know, keywords, found all that stuff in one hour. It's like, it'll. It'll save you weeks of your life.
- [22:36]
B
That's really, really cool. Beautiful. So pausing that for a second, I did have a question. I. I lost it. Oh. So when people talk about technical SEO, is that those are the things that they're referring to, right? All like the schema markup and the robot text and all this stuff that you're kind of mentioning, Is that what they're referring to?
- [22:55]
A
Typically, yeah, yeah. And optimizing your site map, making sure that your website is crawlable correctly and is being crawled correctly, site speed, things like that.
- [23:06]
B
And if someone doesn't want to like take advantage of Power Hour or they. And they, they're just like, actually, I really want to learn SEO this year. It's been on my okrs list, my goal is list for 2025. What's the first thing that they would do? Let's say they have an ever be store and they're just like, okay, I want to do this myself. What they would do is go to Google Search Console. And step one, probably.
- [23:29]
A
Yeah, yeah. I would say Google set up Google Search Console. It's totally free and it will give you all the data that you need to get started. It'll even tell you what keywords you are currently showing up for, where you're ranking for them, and which ones are getting clicked on. So setting that up, give it a few weeks to collect some data. It says it needs 90 days. It never does. And you'll at least start to see, you know, oh, these are. This is what Google thinks my website is about. This is what I'm showing up for. Even if I'm showing up in the 99th position, it's still helpful data to know. And from there you can, you can start to kind of play around and, and see what's going on and what needs to change.
- [24:08]
B
Perfect. And for anyone that's not familiar with Google Search Console like me, you know, seven years ago, I had no idea what Jay would be talking about. It would be search.google.com search console. Like, that's. That's what it is. You could Google Search. Google Search Console and it'll take you there and it's like a start now button start. You just go through the steps and you'll kind of like set it up. At the bare minimum, start doing that. Right, Jade?
- [24:33]
A
Right.
- [24:35]
B
Perfect. I have a couple questions for Everbee and I think our audience could probably learn from this because everyone here listening to this, they're probably very familiar with ever be and it's, it's been a conversation that's happening inside of our team about SEO and I wanted to kind of run about you, almost like, maybe you can consult me and then other people can learn from it. Does that sound cool?
- [24:59]
A
Yeah.
- [25:01]
B
So off maybe I'll lay out the problem. Everbee I.O. is our site. We are, we, we launched this site four years ago about that and we have been. We launched on WordPress using Elementor as like the, the builder. So that, that's what we did. Since then, we have now our own web hosting service that we've built for all of our customers and we now want to switch over to our own product. So which is going to be really, really cool. It's gonna be like a pivotal moment for us. Like, oh, wow, we're actually using our own product and we have hundreds of thousands of visitors per month. I think that our SEO is decent. It could be better, I'm sure. But my point is like, we already have SEO built in. Like, we've already got this stuff kind of going and we're at this like pivotal moment now. It's like, okay, let's actually transition from WordPress over to our own which is ever be hosted. But now the questions come in from our team of like, oh, we have SEO and like domain authority. We have to think about, like, there's a lot of things like at risk here. We need to make sure we do it properly. What are some things I and our team should be thinking about when making this transition over?
- [26:19]
A
So it's good that you're thinking about it now. A lot of people like to think about it after and it's, it's kind of a mess after they've already made the big transition. The first thing is, even when it's done really well, you're going to see a dip in your SEO. So I always recommend that you choose like a down season to do this in. We did one recently for like a bike rental company in Miami and it was like, let's choose, you know, the dead of winter to do this so that you're not missing out on like a ton of customers coming in in your, your high highest season. So choosing the right time, give it, you know, two, two to three months, it shouldn't really take that long. You shouldn't be seeing like a flat line of organic traffic. But just give yourself a little bit of wiggle room, set good expectations and then use it as an opportunity to really clean up your SEO. At the same time, do a big audit on which pages are performing really well, which pages are not performing as well, that could be improved upon. What's bringing in traffic, but bringing in a completely unqualified traffic. So as you're building the new website and doing the transfer, just think about how, what you can do better. And then when you get to the end and you're ready to transfer everything over, just make sure you do very clear redirects that you're not creating redirect loops where it's redirecting to, like, three different pages at one time. Set up the new site map, get everything, you know, structured perfectly before you. You go to launch.
- [27:53]
B
Okay, cool. So what I'm hearing is that we need to do it at some point, but just do it kind of in, like, in a slow period. Set the expectations properly. It's your. The organic traffic that we get are getting now, it will take a dip. Does that mean it'll like, like, literally go to zero, or do you think it'll just, like, reduce some?
- [28:12]
A
It doesn't typically go to zero, but basically Google and now all the AI bots have to figure out every page again. So they have to crawl your entire website, figure out where it needs to be ranked. Sometimes pages do way better. Like, they rank way higher after they've been rebuilt. Other times they rank way lower. And so it's like you just kind of have to. To be able to weather that storm for a second.
- [28:37]
B
Okay, cool. And the second question is, do you think that are there people that do this? Like, this is kind of like a project. This isn't like a quick little thing. Right. This is kind of like something that somebody's, like, overseeing, kind of, like see and pay attention to. Or is it not that I'm making it way more complicated than what it actually is? What is your experience?
- [28:57]
A
This is actually one of the main services that I do with people throughout the year is I come on as they're rebuilding the site or they're going through a rebrand, just to make sure the SEO is baked in from the beginning. Like, you want to make sure, like I said earlier, you have your headers correct, you have the right keywords on each page. You can get into the weeds of how do we want to structure these URLs on the new site, different things like that. And then, of course, just making sure the transition is as seamless as possible. So I often do, like, jump in at the very beginning of these projects and then just Work with them until they're ready to launch.
- [29:32]
B
Super cool. Okay. I just learned a whole bunch there, so thank you for that. I think it's a good time to probably switch over to rapid fire questions. Are you ready?
- [29:41]
A
Yeah.
- [29:42]
B
What's your favorite business book?
- [29:45]
A
Oh, my gosh. Lost and Founder by Rand Fishkin and Scott Galloway just wrote the Algebra of Happiness. Oh, wait, the Algebra of Wealth is fantastic.
- [29:58]
B
Awesome. I have not read both of those, but I have heard of the Scott Galloway book and I've heard really good things. What's one thing that you wish that you knew before you starting your business?
- [30:07]
A
Oh, that's a really great question. I knew nothing going into starting my business. I was serving clients before I had a website or a name or certainly an LLC or a correct bank account. And I'm really happy that I did it that way because I think if I was starting a business now, I would get so caught up in all of the details. So I think I'm happy knowing absolutely nothing.
- [30:32]
B
I love that. So I think one thing that you're happy about is you just took action and you just did it. And you serve customers. You focus on the right things, which is serving customers, not like your structure and all this other stuff that people think is really, really important, but it's not the most important thing, which is actually like solving a problem for people.
- [30:49]
A
Totally, totally love it.
- [30:52]
B
What's the worst advice that you've received about business?
- [30:56]
A
I think just pick a niche. It's really bad advice. Like, like choosing a niche. Before you do any sort of market research, just be like, oh, well, I really like working with this type of person. Let's just go for it without, you know, knowing, you know, do they even have a demand in, in your field? Like, what's it going to be like to work with them? If you're starting off and you're a side hustle like me and you just, or like I was and you, you know, have a lot of room for trial and error, maybe that's fine. But you know, if you need to have built a million dollar company in six months to stay afloat, don't just randomly choose a niche.
- [31:33]
B
I love that. Who do you think should be a business owner?
- [31:37]
A
People who are bad employees. That's something from the, the Scott Galloway book that I just mentioned. He was like, it's, it's better if you can just be a good employee and, you know, follow the rules. But obviously there's a lot of opportunity out there if, if you're not that type of person.
- [31:54]
B
Hmm. Do you think that you were a good employer, bad employee?
- [31:56]
A
I was a really bad employee. Really. I, I needed growth potential to, to stay excited and if I, you know, I got to the level really quickly where someone was going to need to retire or quit for me to even be considered for a promotion and I got very apathetic about my job.
- [32:17]
B
Interesting. Where can people find you? Where can people learn more about you, sign up for your power hour and, or figure out your services and all that stuff?
- [32:28]
A
Yeah, you can find me@helloseo.com and I'm very active on LinkedIn. I'm just Jade Pruitt on there.
- [32:36]
B
Beautiful. I meant to ask you this earlier too. What stage of company do you typically work with? Like hello SEO, like what is like the bread and butter? I know you talked about niches a little bit too stage revenue wise or maybe stage in the business. What kind of business like niches do you do serve. I want to make sure that's clear too. That way if anyone is interested, they know that Jade is a potential option.
- [33:00]
A
Yeah. So I currently work with just about everyone, which is probably not the best, best way to go about it, but I've just been having a lot of fun and it's been successful. So lots of service based businesses with like a national reach but also some local businesses really like the best clients. I find it's more of just like a culture fit, like we get along really well than like a particular niche. However, I am in the process of starting an actually niched SEO business that's focused just on aesthetic medicine and plastic surgery. So if you're in that particular niche, we can absolutely blow you up.
- [33:37]
B
I can almost guarantee we don't have anyone listening to that. I figured a lot of our listeners are product based like E commerce and like let's say they, they sell to pet owners and they sell like apparel to personalize pet apparel to personalized apparel to the pet owners about their pets as an example. Or they make handmade soap out of their living room and they, they want to sell it online or they, they make handmade candles or they do print on demand stuff. Do you serve any of those folks?
- [34:13]
A
Definitely. And I, I will clarify. The reason I started doing the power hours is so that I could serve like those very, very small businesses. Like maybe they don't even have a site yet and they're just like trying to get everything together. It's like the lowest like entry point SEO service you'll find out there that really like gets you off the ground. But we can serve, you know, the, the newest of startups all the way up to, you know, businesses in the, in the mid seven figures.
- [34:44]
B
Really, really cool. Okay, cool. And then what do you typically charge for any of those things? Um, and then how do you charge essentially is probably the better question. Cause it probably ranges between the size of the client and the work and all those things. But just so everyone can have an understanding.
- [34:57]
A
Yeah. Power hours are 2:47 for an hour. You can just book them right on my website. Retainers start at 1800 and that's where we're, you know, taking over your SEO on a monthly basis and really building you up. And then we have a few just like, like the, like doing consulting during a rebrand situations. That typically depends on like the size of the website, but they start at 3,000 and that's just like a one time thing.
- [35:24]
B
Got it. And then for the retainers, because a lot of people, they have ongoing product launches, they have ongoing listings, all this stuff. What is usually the 18, the retainer usually, what does that kind of COVID Obviously it's the setup, which is the technical SEO setup. But then what, what else should they be expecting from something like that?
- [35:42]
A
Yeah, it's all of your on page and technical setup. So typically within the first three months you have like a fully functioning SEO optimized website that's showing up in AI search and also in Google. And from there we build backlinks every month with a digital PR agency doing that work. So you get really cool placements that serve you outside of SEO as well. But they're building up your authority and your visibility online. And then we build out content from there so that could look like more landing pages if you need them. Blog posts or if you have new products coming out, we can just make sure that the new product pages are as optimized as possible.
- [36:21]
B
Is there like a certain amount of content that someone should be posting after they kind of the foundation set? Is it like once a month or once a week? Is it a blog article or is it like a landing page? You're talking about like what is, does it matter?
- [36:34]
A
It doesn't matter from like. And I'm sure other SEO people will, will disagree. It used to be like you needed to post I think twice a month, like a blog post just to like keep your website fresh. And that's just not really how it works anymore. But building out new content, answering more questions that your users are asking to show up in more searches is, is always going to be helpful and, and content can benefit any marketing plan in a thousand different ways. Like, if you're creating a new piece of content, you should be sharing it on all of your socials and putting it on LinkedIn and in an email and different things like that too. Like, I think the days of, you know, just writing a blog for the SEO benefit, quote unquote, are over for sure.
- [37:21]
B
Beautiful, Jade. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate you sharing all of your valuable experience and knowledge with us and look forward to having you on again. It'd be fun to kind of get an update maybe in the next six months or something like that of kind of where the SEO and AI and all that stuff. Really? What actually happened?
- [37:37]
A
Yeah, definitely. This was awesome. Thanks for having me.
- [37:40]
B
Cool. Thanks, Jade. See you.