Combining SEO and AI to Create Effective Content and Land More Customers with Jade Pruett

Are you spending hours, if not days, creating content such as writing blog posts, shooting videos, posting on social media, and maybe even using AI marketing tools, only to feel like no one cares and your customer acquisition strategy just isn't working? You think you're doing everything you're supposed to do, but your content isn't connecting with your audience, nor does it drive any results. Here's the reality: using AI the wrong way can hurt your credibility and waste your time. But when used right, AI-generated content can become your secret weapon to scale your marketing, build trust, and convert your traffic, aka visitors, to actual customers. Stick around because we're about to explore how to make AI marketing work for your business and get actual results. Welcome back to Mastering Tech Growth, where we interview industry leaders to bring you actionable insights and inspiring stories. I'm your host, Mike Sirius, and today we are joined by Jade Proett, an award-winning SEO specialist and a founder of Hello SEO. With over a decade of experience, Jade has helped brands like CNN and Business Insider dominate search rankings, and she has mastered the art of using AI to create authentic and effective content. She's here to teach us how to turn AI from a shortcut into a secret weapon for building trust and winning your first customers. Jade, welcome to the show.

Hey, thank you so much for having me.

Whew, I felt like I just ran a mile. I hope you hyped, because I'm hyped. Right, so we have this question we like to kick off the show with, which is in the spirit of the show. When I say mastering tech growth, what comes to mind?

I feel like the key to mastering tech growth is to really understand who you're selling to, really understanding your user, what their pain points are. If you're in my field, exactly what they're Googling, what they care about, and then go from there.

I love that. So how do you go about understanding the real pain points of your potential customers?

That is a great question. And I feel like this is one of those things in marketing that we want a hack for. We want some easy out. We wanna use a SaaS product that's gonna help us, you know, like build our little target demo.

Yes, please.

But yes, yes. But the best way to do this is to just be very honest and interview your users. Find a few, really just like let them know what you want out of them. Be like, hey, we're trying to make a better product. Can you help us out? And ask them genuine questions. Genuine questions and have a real conversation with them about exactly how they're using the tool, what exactly they need, you know, why they're using it, all that kind of stuff.

Where would you go to actually source your, let's call them, you know, your dream 10 first customers? Like, is that as simple as going on LinkedIn and doing a search?

It could be, it could be on LinkedIn, it could be at your tech incubator. It could be at a networking event. Anyone that aligns with what you're trying to do is a good person to talk to. And sometimes just getting it in your head, like, I'm going to find X amount of people to talk to, they'll just start showing up in your life. They'll be in your LinkedIn. Someone will make a connection for you. Let other people know who you're working for as well, and they'll find their way in.

Okay, I actually love that very much. So what we're saying, just know where your customers stand, go there, have a chat, understand their pain points, try to solve these pain points, because otherwise no one really going to be buying what you're selling. So that's a couple of multiple steps. If I would rephrase the question, Jade, and I would say you can choose only one, which in your point of view is, is the most important when it comes to scaling any tech venture, would you still stick with understanding problem space?

Yes.

Okay.

Because that's the whole business.

Yeah.

You're creating your piece of tech or your product to solve a problem. So you need to understand what the problem actually looks like in the real world, who's experiencing that problem, and then what a perfect solution looks like to them.

Okay. Would you phrase this as a finding? Product-market fit then?

Yes, exactly.

Okay. So it's a, it's an old one. There's a lot of guests. I mean, at this point in time, I think we interview like 60 industry leaders. I want to say half of them are saying it's a product-market fit. So it's a very, it's a very interesting question we have in the show to kick this off is just, you know, to give our listeners and ourselves, you know, that understanding from people who achieve success in the tech industry with various tools, you know, mentoring or coaching or whatever you're actually selling is like, what is the key for you? And product market fit just always comes on top. So it's not surprising you chose that as well, Jade. Okay, let's jump into our today's topic of AI and SEOs. So SEO was, is, and likely to remain an essential for business to grow their audience. Currently, AI as a tool is playing a significant role to sort of shortcut a little bit of all of that output. And according to BrightEdge, 60% of marketers say improving SEO or growing organically is their top priority. So Jade, what first inspired you to focus on SEO and how was your unique voice and unique approach into SEO adjusted with, in this current day with AI?

That's a big question.

It's a big question.

So I got into SEO because I was a freelance content writer out of college. I have a degree in literature, so I was from a totally different world and I was seeing that I was getting hired by a lot of SEO agencies to write content with titles like SEO for Husky and, and things that weren't even proper English. but we just needed to get those target keywords in there. And most of the time I would find myself working in a coffee shop, like literally I'm the barista in the coffee shop. And when there aren't clients or customers coming up, I'm sitting there typing out a blog post about something I know nothing about. I'm just researching, pulling from the internet and creating, creating something that's new, but really isn't anything novel to, to what's already out there. Um, and then how I got into full SEO was about over 10 years ago now. I just realized that the people who were a little bit above me, who were the ones assigning me all this content to write, had way more stable careers than I did.

Hmm.

And I didn't expect for it to take off as much as it has. I, I wasn't planning on owning my own business one day or, or being like a subject matter expert, but it just happened. Over time. But a really big issue that I saw in the SEO world that I hope still sets me apart is there's just a lot of kind of scammy SEO going on, especially historically. It is getting better, but most clients who come to me are always like, heads up, I've been burned by an SEO agency before. Mm-hmm. They charged me an absurd amount of money and I saw no results and I had no idea what they were doing and there was no transparency there. And my goal from the very beginning was how can I educate my clients to the extent that they want? I want them to feel like they're in good hands. I want them to know what's going on, but I also don't want to be overloading them with information that they don't care about. My journey with Hello SEO has, that's kind of been my fine tuning, my interviewing clients. It's like, how much do you actually care? What do you actually want to know? How do you want this information presented? All that good stuff. AI came into this when I was trying to figure out the best way to create content for my clients. 'Cause I needed their expertise. There's a thing in SEO called EAT. It's E-E-A-T. It's experience, expertise, authoritiveness, and trustworthiness. And that's what Google is looking for in anything that you're putting online. They want to see that you are actually an expert. You have authority, you're a trustworthy source, and you actually have experience in this field. And also that your website is providing a good experience to whoever is coming to it. Uh, so I I knew at that time that I could just ask AI to write a blog on whatever topic I wanted them to rank for, and it was gonna be just about as good as what I was writing in the coffee shop for them. Like, I'm not an expert in this. It's just gonna be what, what's already out there. So I wanted to use AI to basically interview my clients, get their expertise. They're the one who actually knows all this stuff. And then I can take that and create the content for them. And the first person I tried this with, they were a cosmetic surgeon, very, very technical person. She's, she's like a full-on doctor. And I did keyword research. I found out the questions that I needed to ask her. We pulled it up in Riverside, actually, and we just sat down and I asked her questions for an hour. I think I walked away with about 8,000 words of a transcript, and then I was able to use that to create her about 12 blog posts that increased her traffic by over 400% within 2 months.

That's so powerful. I love that. So effectively what we're saying, and I will sort of rephrase it how I understand you, correct me if I'm wrong, Virjit. So you had an interview with the client you're trying to help to increase organic traffic to their service or website. You ask the questions to understand the topics, understand the keywords. Then you had a huge transcript which you dissected, did the keyword research on it, used ChatGPT to come up with some type of structure for blog posts, iterated, did a little bit of writing, gave back to the client. They sort of improved it to some extent to, to express that experience they have within the topic, and that resulted in 400% improve in the traffic.

Yes.

That's a good one. I love that. People listening should copy this. This is powerful. Okay, so, so you started as a copywriter then, right? Like your approach— not approach, but how you end up with SEO is that you were able to write things, right? Because of your background. And by default, back in the day, writing was actually a lot more laborious, a lot more expensive than right now because you can just spit out content with, you know, with the AIs. So you were doing the writing, it was going well, and it sort of slowly, you know, took you into SEO. And right now, how you use AI is to effectively allow you to give you like a draft. And as I understand, like, you just, you know what you want to get because you have the keywords and you just use that to get a some type of setup of initial blog post, but then you still run this by the client who actually understands whatever you're writing about and they can expand it to just take it deeper on that topic. Is that, is that correct assumption?

So a little bit in a different order. So I'll do the keyword research and kind of discover what we need information on. And then I'll go to the expert with a list of questions, typically in Riverside or another interview tool. And hit record, just ask all of the questions. They will provide answers. Typically it's a conversation. Mm-hmm. So I'll also be getting anecdotes and stories and kind of different things coming in. And then when it's over, I can just export that giant transcript out of Riverside and pop it into an AI tool, say, hey, only pull information from this particular thing and create the content that way. So the blogs turn out with the right prompts, sounding like the expert, having their stories and their anecdotes, having all new information that you can't find anywhere else online. Mm-hmm. Uh, so it's truly a new piece of content that's actually going to build trust with anyone who reads it. They're going to feel like they're actually getting to know the cosmetic surgeon or the expert or whoever it is. And they're getting new, fresh information, real stories, which whenever anyone reads a story, their brain lights up. Like, we love stories as people.

True.

So it's just connecting on a level that going to ChatGPT and saying, hey, write me a blog about X, is just never going to be able to do.

Yeah, that's what we sort of opened in the introduction as well. That could just hurt your credibility. Just destroy the trust and as well just has no results. Like I've seen people online bragging about results of just sort of like spitting out content and putting it out. And I actually, in a podcast industry, I subscribe to many newsletters and I can, because I'm a power user as well of like ChatGPT and AI tools, I can literally tell you which newsletters are generated with ChatGPT and which are not, or at least, you know, they better. It's very, very noticeable when content is AI, just like, blah, it's just like right there. And that really puts me off as well. So I have no doubt other people reading this, they're just not getting the depth of a topic and a value attached to it. And it's just very like surface area. And you know, it's like you read it maybe once, twice, and just leads nowhere. Right, so I got a couple of things which I want to ask. So one, do you prepare the questions and do you have an approach to the questions you ask in these interviews, or is it just purely like, let's just have a chat like we would be, you know, having a coffee and catching up?

Right. Okay. So there's a lot of different ways to kind of start. I like to do keyword research because I'm writing them for SEO purposes. Mm-hmm. Uh, so we'll kind of know the topic that we wanna talk about, or we'll just start by analyzing the competition, seeing what they are ranking for, kind of what content they're creating. Um, one, one example is I recently did this for a, a LinkedIn profile manager. And so of course, first we just need to identify what are people searching for when they want someone to manage their LinkedIn for them.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, and then we can discover tons and tons of keywords around that niche. Uh, you can also go to things like Reddit, uh, and other just forums online and see what questions people are asking. Um, that's just another level of getting to know the user. One thing I really like to do, if the client will do it with me, is just sit down and write down as many, uh, questions as you can that your clients are asking you all the time.

Mm-hmm.

So even if there's no search volume around it, if your client is asking you this, or, or clients are asking you constantly this one question, clearly it would be a good thing to put on your website and have a, a clear answer to. So sometimes I like to branch out even if it's not perfectly, you know, aligned with, with an SEO keyword. If it's still gonna benefit the user, why not create it? Um, and. Especially now people are so like, they will, they will search for things that no one has ever searched for before. Like people have gotten very conversational with Google and other, and other search engines. So sometimes you'll discover that you're showing up in more searches than you expected with a blog that had no SEO keywords behind it to begin with.

Yeah, the surprising success nature of unpredictability Okay, I love that very much. Do you use, research-wise, do you do that manually or do you have favorite tools when it comes to, you know, getting the questions? So for full transparency, this is how we prepare for the show as well. So, you know, we have a topic, we go source the questions people care about as well, and we add them into our conversations. And the questions we, you know, I'm asking right now or for any other episodes, we'll look at Reddit, we'll look at Quora, we'll look at the questions people ask when they put in YouTube and search, you know, the autocompletion things. For that, I use tools because I feel like manual labor would be a lot of time. From your perspective, do you do that manually or do you have some type of research tools?

If it's an expert that I just, I can't even begin to understand what they do, sometimes I'll even ask ChatGPT and be like, hey, I'm interviewing this type of expert. Here's their website. What are some good questions to ask just to even get me started on where to begin looking? And sometimes I'll ask them those exact questions and sometimes I will use those to springboard more research. But it really, you know, it depends client to client on, on exactly what we need to be going after.

Okay. I actually love that. I really love the fact that you ask them to just list all the questions they know you know, the clients or customers asking and just sort of pass that as a, you know, to feed the, to feed the either further research or conversation itself. That's very powerful. You mentioned prompts as well. You said if you use correct prompts, blah, blah, blah. So is that something you developed yourself or, you know, did you just got the prompts online? It's like, what's your approach in like prompting ChatGPT in general?

That's a great question. And it changes all the time. Uh, especially like you were saying in 2022, you could totally get away with just prompting ChatGPT to write you a blog and it's gonna begin with in today's competitive environment and, and like all of the AI clichés.

Yeah.

And that would be fine. And now it's like you have to really make sure this, this is unique content and sounds like it did not come from a robot or it, it is absolutely going to, to break trust. But, uh, what I like to do is have a conversation with ChatGPT or whatever AI I'm using. We'll draft the initial blog post. I'll give it feedback. We'll make changes. We'll probably do that about 10 times. Mm-hmm. I'll even pull the blog post out, edit it myself, put it back in, and then show AI exactly what I'm looking for in this blog. Yep. And typically you can like season a chat. Really well. There's one chat that I have that I've been using for months now because it just creates really good stuff. Um, and, and kind of go from there. Like, give it time. I don't think there is— actually, I know that there isn't— there's no like one prompt you can put in and get something great. Um, and you know, it's, it is time consuming, but at the end of the day, you're either going to create something that's going to have an impact on your business or or not.

Yeah. I actually had this post on LinkedIn where I opened up saying ChatGPT is a waste of time, and then I explained why I think that. That was a sort of like controversial take on it, but it just went semi-viral. People really sort of felt similar, but that's my experience with ChatGPT. There's a, there's a real limit of how much data you can put into and expect a consistency with your results. So if you use a certain prompt, let's say, you know, you spend like a day or half a day to develop a very big and strong prompt and you're feeding, you know, some documents like transcripts or maybe multiple, and you run the same prompt and you say you run it like a couple of times, every single time it's going to be different results. So there's—

totally.

It's very hard to get a consistency for a prompt so you can just reuse it all the time. Which just comes back to that conclusion which you said, it's really conversational and it's just almost like, you know, case by case. But if you season well, as you mentioned, it sort of develops, that chat develops its own sort of style which you can trust, but it's a style, it's not like consistency within the results. So, totally.

And I'll also say I do have a team that I work with and we then go through and edit everything that we're sending out to clients. My clients are not receiving anything that came out, just came out of AI and then is going on their site. But it is incredible for like getting words on the page, getting the draft, getting it to sound as much like the person as possible. So you're not sorting through a massive transcript, but human touch at every point of the process is, is still very important.

Yeah, I love that. So for our listeners who potentially didn't pick up the The uniqueness and authenticity with that content comes from the transcript itself because we had this interview, we asked these questions, we have the raw answers from our clients. So that's the unique angle, right? So, so once we're gonna generate the blog post, we will tell in the prompt, you know, use that language, take that information, put it as an answer to whatever topics we're doing or keywords we're targeting. And that's where that uniqueness and authenticity is coming from compared to just write me a blog post on X. Is that correct, Jade?

Yes. Yes. You want to be pulling from your own information. Otherwise, you're just getting information that already exists online.

Exactly. All right. So many businesses though, and professionals and people actually misuse AI. So they're creating content which is just, you know, impersonal and it just fails to connect with audience, which This is, I think, like we delivered, like why that happens. So the Deloitte report found that while 94% of businesses believe AI will transform their operations, only 35% actually have a clear implementation strategies. So where are the biggest mistakes you see businesses making when it comes to AI content and how they can avoid that?

Oh man, don't fire your content writers. I think it's a really big one. They can use it as a tool, as like an assistant, but it's not going to replace an actual person going in there and writing your content. I was Googling something the other day around AI and a Forbes article came up first, and within a second I knew the entire thing was written by ChatGPT. Like it had all of the clichés, and even if you are not familiar with what those are, like, as a business owner, your readers probably know what they are, at least a fraction of your readers, and that's only going to increase over time. Uh, so, and that instantly breaks trust. Like, of course I'm like, I'm not reading this and I'm gonna go find another article to read on whatever topic I'm Googling. But it's, it's frustrating. And, and, you know, I'm talking about it now, but it's like, that was Forbes. Like, they're, they should really know what they're what they're doing.

Yeah. Did they, did they have somewhere this was generated with AI transparency sentence?

Not at the top.

Maybe like a small print somewhere covered with ads so you can't even see it. But I get you. Like, I smell that. Like, I almost like, I want to say it's like a gut feeling I developed with time where if I go to the article, I'm like, that's cool. That's written, you know, that's research that has weight and that has depth. And then you read something else and go like, "Jajit B, Jajit B." No, no.

Like your brain just knows. Like even if it doesn't have the clichés, you're like, I'm somehow not learning anything from this. Like I'm not connecting with this at all.

Exactly. It's just like very surface area. Almost every line feels like an ad or something like that. Like there's no real value add of you reading that. Which leads me to this question. If that's the case, in the sense of we as a power user, we can sense the content which is AI generated. If you think from technology perspective, like Google indexing content, I mean, if people can sense it, the algorithms know it, right? So if Google really knows that this was not human written, how likely is that they will penalize this?

So they have actually come out and said that they are not penalizing AI generated content. Uh, they want to index the best answer to questions and what's gonna be the best experience for the user. It all comes back to the EEAT that I mentioned earlier.

Mm-hmm.

And actually ChatGPT came out early December, late December is when Google cranked up their EAT kind of specifications. They're like, we wanna make sure we're getting the best out there. So. If you are using a tactic like mine to put your own expertise into AI and using that as a tool to, to build out your content just so you can be a bit more efficient, that's not gonna hurt you. But if you are breaking trust with your users, you have a crazy high bounce rate because people are bouncing off of your article the moment they get there, that is going to hurt you in the rankings for sure.

Okay. So effectively what we're saying is the Google guidelines emphasize creating content that serves the audience needs. And it doesn't matter if it's AI or humans, as long as people find value in it. It's, it's high quality, you know, it's user-focused. I'm coming in, I'm reading clearly because I'm not leaving. We are basically saying Google will be, I know this is AI, but Because people liking, I don't care, that's fine. I'll give you the priority, you will go up in the rankings.

Right, exactly. They mentioned that back in the day, and I was one of these content writers who was writing about things I didn't know anything about. They were like, that's about as valuable as an AI-generated piece of content. So we're not going to penalize you for using a robot. We're basically just going to penalize you for using a robot. Poorly.

Yeah. Okay. So we can safely use it, but we need then to effectively look at some metrics to make sure that whatever our customer acquisition strategy or, or SEO strategy is, we're not getting these bad metrics coming out. Because if we feeding our, you know, left side of our pipeline, which is the content coming in, and then we're looking at the metrics and they all poor, we probably should stop like right now, right? Because, because the end results might be that, you know, we can get penalized. And as far as I know, Google is very harsh when it comes to unpenalizing your content.

Right, right. And I might be using, maybe using a penalty too, too loosely. I don't think that you're going to actually get punished by Google. I think you're just not going to rank very well. You're going to be in the 100th position as opposed to on the first page for doing things like this. Things like duplication and things like that are far more likely to get like a true, like, you're taken out of Google situation going. But I mean, in either situation, it's not serving you at all. So if you've been, you know, cranking out a ton of content using AI and you're like, why isn't this helping me out?

Yeah.

It's probably something to think about.

So you mentioned duplication being a big one. So if I'm— and this is me right now— so I got a website, a Medium account, a LinkedIn newsletter, and an actual newsletter. So there's like multiple sources of information which is getting pushed out, social media as well, right? So when it comes to writing blog posts and what we do, you know, we take an episode very similarly to what you do with the clients. We take a transcript to to get the, the guest's message out. So we have that authenticity and uniqueness, and we try to feed that into actionable way. But once this is written, you know, it goes first to our, you know, subscriber base. We get the unique content. After some time, it just goes everywhere as a copy. Am I doing a mistake over here?

So you probably don't need your newsletters indexed in Google and things like that. So it might just be a thing where you put some of it kind of behind your robots.txt or just deindex it. So the one version that's intentionally written for Google or for users to find in Google or in search, just make sure that's the one that's out there. But I imagine in this instance that the, the content on each one is different enough that you wouldn't get penalized.

No, it's literally the same. Usually when it's copy paste.

Oh, they're exactly the same.

It's exactly the same. Yeah.

Okay. Okay. Nevermind then. Yes, I would say. Just, you know, de-index a few of them. Don't let them all be available to Google.

Okay. What if I use canonical links? That was a tip I got from other guests on the show. He was like, it's sort of fine, but just make sure the canonical links are there and they're sort of pointing to the source. Is that fine or is that still a problem?

That is fine.

That is fine. Okay.

So if you have a canonical link on your Medium, so you have it in two spaces, that's okay.

I do forget sometimes to add this though. Ah, I'm gonna find myself in problem with this. All SEO, it's, it's so much more complex than people imagine. It's just not the keywords and spitting out content. There's a real science behind it. So seeing real examples of success can inspire businesses to adopt AI tools because they develop effectively confidence in the return of investment. So according to PwC, companies that integrate AI tools into their marketing see a 30% increase in the return of investment. Can you, Jade, share a success story where AI tooling transformed a client's SEO strategy and helped them grow faster?

Hmm, that's good. I was going to say for my own, my own company, my own business.

Yeah, go for it. That's an excellent use case.

Right. Like I am able to spend less time creating content because I'm able to kind of use this process that I've created. Um, I can also hire people who are not full-on experts with multiple, like, 10 years experience in creating content to help me because I can kind of teach them the SOP quicker. So we're definitely saving a lot of time and creating better results for our clients. So the ROI on that is, is huge. But also because I'm able to create 12 blogs or however many it is in a big hub for clients at a, at a lower rate because it costs me less to create it. They, they can get a much higher ROI on, on things like that. Um, and for the one client that I mentioned, the cosmetic surgeon, I think I mentioned that, uh, within 2 months they had a 400% increase in traffic to their website because of the blogs we created. And they actually fired me last week, which is really messed up because we've been working together for 3 years.

And they're like, bye.

Exactly. Yeah, I know. They were like, we've Googled literally everything we want to rank for. We're ranking number 1 for everything. What are you even doing over there anymore?

It's like, you've done your job. Thank you very much. That's such a bad nature of like B2B and B2C relationship is like This is going to be controversial now, but this is how pharmacy thinks, right? So it's like, if you, if you heal, fully heal your customer, which is, you know, someone sick, like, you lose a client, right? Yeah. So, so the business model just doesn't work. Like, you want them to be sick all the time, right?

Right.

So it's one of these situations, like, you, you do your best, you deliver your service, and you achieve the best results. So instead of expanding your business to more opportunities You just get thank you for your service. Bye.

Exactly.

So messed up.

Right. But it's nice to actually be helping businesses and typically they will then refer me to their friends. So it all works out. But give you a review. It is a bummer to get fired.

Yeah. It's always a bummer to lose a client. I get you. So I really love what you just put out there for teaching employees or virtual assistants on how to do that initial, initial setup, which is a lot more cheaper than it used to be when it comes to actually producing valuable and effective content for the clients. That's 100%. I experienced that myself. Which then leads me to this question: if it's cheaper for you, did the market pricing actually go down when it comes to SEO services, or did the pricing stay the same? And the margins for the business doing SEO actually increased?

It really depends, and everyone structures their business differently. My advisor is constantly telling me to structure it on the return on investment the client is actually getting, as opposed to, you know, how many hours am I actually sitting down and working. The first big thing as an entrepreneur is how to stop exchanging, you know, money for time. Yeah, but for me, It's been an experiment and I'm now able to create a lot more content per month for my clients. Back in the day, it would be like one blog or two blogs and they would take hours. And now we can create 4 or 5, or we can create a big hub of 12 all at once and put 'em out instead of like rolling them out over the course of a year. So it's more about, I guess, efficiency and, and seeing results. It's better at the beginning of a SEO contract. To just go ahead and get all the blogs out there so they can start gaining traction as opposed to taking a year to get 12 or 24 blogs out. I kind of forgot the initial question.

It's all good. So it was a question about, you know, the pricing, if the market of SEO actually decreased their pricing. So that means, you know, it's just overall everywhere for companies is cheaper to hire SEO experts and, you know, SEO content strategies and rollouts or the pricing stayed the same, which means if you're making it cheaper, the margins for the businesses doing SEO increased, which means they're just making more money. I think you answered that one. It really depends on the business itself and their pricing model, which leads me to the follow-up. So SEO takes time, organic SEO takes time, and you mentioned in 2 months achieving 400% results. That in my book is actually excellent and quite fast. Results. Overall, I would say, you know, you probably want to give like 6 to 12 months to actually, you know, see those results, organic results actually taking place, which means the clients coming in doing SEO, they need to be patient, which then leads to this question of how they actually judge the value they get from you. Like, when you start working with them, like, how do you explain to them, like, that's going to take time, this is what we're going to be doing, and, you know, you'll see the return on investment after some time. Like, How did you actually receive that message?

I have to be very honest with each individual client. Typically I'll do some competitor, competitor analysis moving in. If they're in a very competitive space, it's gonna take a lot of time. Yeah. And so it is a matter of, this is my monthly retainer, uh, how much are you gonna be making off of these leads that are coming in? Like, is there an ROI here for you? And going from there. There is a lot out there that is, how do I say this? I actually get results for people a lot faster than you might expect, which was even surprising to me when I first got into this. 'Cause it was like, oh, you're not gonna see anything for months and months. But I sometimes even just do like hour consultations with people and they'll be on the sec or on the first page of Google the next week, things like that. Whoa. And it's all a matter of, of going after keywords that are already kind of in their realm of possibility. They might not be like the biggest keyword, but if they're a small consulting firm, they don't need hundreds of leads a month. They need like 2 leads a month or 5 leads. And we can typically make that happen with a niche keyword as opposed to, to going after something that will literally take them years. To rank for if they ever can rank for it.

And it has this long-running results, right? Because when you were talking leads, I was thinking, okay, well, if I would be coming and talking about getting into SEO, I would probably compare the pricing against just buying leads. I guess, you know, maybe I go to lead generation company and I go like, I'll give you $2,000, how many, you know, 'calls you will add to my diary,' which is— would filter down leads, versus 'I'll give the same money to do organic SEO.' In some extent, these are not comparable, right? Because once you do SEO, once you get— start getting traffic, you get promoted in Google, that has much longer benefits in the future. Where comparing to buying leads, you just get them right now, it finishes, it's done, you need to pay again. With SEO, you're going to be reaping those benefits for quite some time, isn't it?

Right. And it's the same thing with, you know, buying ads in Google as opposed to doing SEO. First of all, the trust that comes from like a lead generation service or from ads is just different than organic results. But also the second you stop paying for those things, they go away. And with SEO, it sticks around, which is why I get fired sometimes because they're doing really well and they don't need me anymore.

So after some time though, Jade, it will disappear, isn't it? Like if you stop producing content as good as the content took you into those places, which is the first pages, the Google will slowly start demoting you because you're not producing content or you're producing content, but it's not as good as it were. So they will come back to you and go like, what's happening, Jade? Like, why are we dropping?

Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah.

That's what I was just saying. Typically, you know, you, you can coast for, 6 months, maybe a year, something like that. But new competitors are always popping up. Yeah. If they're investing in SEO, there's another SEO expert out there who's now figuring out exactly how to knock you out of the first spot. There are more SEO— I'm sorry, Google updates, uh, than there are days in the year at this point. So an update could hit and suddenly you're off the first page and you have to do something different. So it's It's always, you know, in my best interest and also the best interest of the client to keep an SEO around when these things come up. Um, but sometimes you can coast and it, it depends on your industry and where you're trying to rank for and all that kind of stuff. I did an hour with a physical therapist in, in like a small town in Michigan 2 years ago. Literally in the 1 hour we got her ranking number 1. She's still ranking number 1. She's still number one. It's going great. Like no one's come in and stolen her spot and that's her entire lead gen is that one thing. But for more competitive markets, it's going to look very different than that.

Yeah. So once the company comes back, the one you just finished the relationship because they will fall off the first pages, will your rates be the same or will you just go like, nah, it's going to be double now?

That's a great question. I guess we'll cross that bridge when we get there. They were, because they had been a client for so long, they were already on such a tiny retainer that it was like, uh, it's probably best to cut this loose.

But yeah, I think that was a mistake on the other part. And unless strategically something is, you know, is changing, maybe the cash flow is not as good and things like that, but you never want to stop maintaining your SEO. Processes because it's, you know, it's, it's like watering a plant. You just have to feed it all the time to expect—

Totally. And if you're making changes to your website, there's always going to be things that you need to keep an eye on.

There you go. So you mentioned preloading content, which, um, I wanted to pick on this one a little bit. So is there a difference in, in what success we could expect if we very quickly load up a set of articles and blogs versus feeding at cadence. So giving you an example, starting SEO strategy, and we're saying that we're going to do 2 articles a week and we do that for 6 months versus we do the same amount of articles, which would be around 40 in a week. How Google will look at us?

Oh, 40 is a lot.

Yeah.

My, my thought is if, if you have this backlog of blogs already created, like why not just go ahead and, and get them out there? Google used to really care about cadence and it was like it needs to see blogs coming up every month or something being updated on the website every few weeks for them to know that you still cared about the website. But they, they're kind of prioritizing other ranking factors at this point. And if you can create a bunch of blogs that are all internally linked and they go together and it's a big hub, put it out there. Just go for it. There's no reason to roll it out slowly.

So we're saying we're not going to teach algorithms something wrong here. If we go in and preload like 40 a week, we're not going to send the signal to Google. You should expect 40 every week now. That, that's, that's not. Like, that's not going to happen. We can load up our database very quickly to big amount and then continuously teach Google about our cadence, which could be like one blog post a week.

Right, right. I would say get them up there and then focus on building backlinks instead or do something else to build your authority. And you'll see those blogs just rise in the ranks over time.

What's your approach in giving advice regarding backlinks? To your clients and maybe how you do it yourself? Well, you know, coming on a podcast is definitely the one, but maybe there are some other go-tos you would recommend for clients who actually think they do have a good base of articles and they do have traffic and they want to just solidify their authenticity and authority around these topics by doing backlinks.

Right. There is no quick fix to backlinks. People, you know, want to buy them online or try to set something up that's going to be super easy. And I have certainly been tempted by those things before, but the only way to build good backlinks is, is kind of boots on the ground effort, essentially.

Okay.

Uh, digital PR is big. So normal PR, traditional PR is incredible for backlinks. It's very expensive. Digital PR is typically a little bit more affordable and it's basically just a specialist getting you into different blogs across the internet. Um, it's not cheap, but it's, it's a little cheaper. I love guest posts, which is like the oldest trick in the book.

Mm-hmm.

But I find when I do guest posts on other people's websites, I typically get leads just from the guest post outside of any SEO benefit. But it also really benefits your SEO and it's, it's like authentic backlinks as opposed to, to me suddenly showing up in a bunch of stuff in a country that I don't live in or or something like that.

Yeah.

Uh, I had one more. I can't remember. I'll come back to it.

So digital PR, can we expand on this? What's a digital PR?

Digital PR is essentially like traditional public relations, but it's just the kind of the media online component. So they are getting you into guest blogs. They're getting you onto lists online. Like if you are a product-based company and it would be beneficial to be on like a, you know, top bamboo pajama sets or whatever it is, they can get you onto those lists that are already ranking really well online, different things like that.

Okay, so effectively we're saying that there are companies who specialize in that and you can go and effectively hire them, provide all the content you have, your name, your brand, service you do, They will just spread you online. You will still need to participate then, potentially write some blog posts, you know, come on the podcast, do an interview and various things like that. And that's a good link building because you're getting a link back once that content goes out. Old school guest posting. Do you have approach to guest posting? Like how do you get yourself on something like Forbes or like, you know, other huge publications as a guest post?

That's a great question and I don't have an answer for that one, how to get into Forbes, otherwise I would've done it.

Okay.

But using your own network, like if you know a ton of people who are in similar fields to you, just reach out and ask for a guest post. I did that one afternoon and I think I have 50 on my, my list now. But also I'm in a bunch of different like Slack communities, things like that where there are journalists or other content writers who are just like, hey, we're looking for a quote on this thing. Just kind of like, I guess, using your network again, very similar to market fit. It's like use the people that you know to kind of get it going. But the last one I was going to mention was podcasts. Podcasts are great for backlinks and they're almost better than they should be at this point because sometimes you'll get backlinks from like Spotify and the other big publishers when you are on, you're a guest on people's podcasts and that's really like inflating people's domain ratings right now. But I'm all for riding the wave and, and eventually that won't be happening quite as much. But like, I'm on your show right now. I'll obviously be linked in your newsletter and all these other places that are like true authentic backlinks that will be helpful for my SEO.

Okay. Yeah. Podcast is still growing. Podcast is still, it's been 5 years is getting bumped up from like 15 to 20% when it comes to people choosing podcast as a medium of information digestion. It plugs well into daily lives of people, especially the working classes who go to work and commute to work because they just plug in, you know, the show. They have like half an hour in a car or on a train. It's getting consumed quite well. But podcasts from a creator perspective is probably the longest effort to put in before you actually see the value coming out of it. It takes like a year to 3 years to actually reach a point where you have enough listener base, enough interest, you know, enough experience as well to filter down the topics and things like that to actually live from it. So just, just a side note to anyone listening and thinking about podcasts, it is quite challenging, right? So measuring the right metrics helps business understand if the AI strategies are working Or they're not. So according to HubSpot, who interviewed a lot of business owners, tracking engagement rates see a 20% higher retention rate compared to those who don't. So effectively what they're saying, do track your engagement rates. From your perspective, Jade, what metrics people should be tracking around their AI-generated content production to understand if they're doing well or they need to do adjustments. So say, you know, track engagement. If it's down, you're not doing well. But let's say you're looking at engagement and it is something, but it's not as good as you would want. How would you approach, you know, the adjustment part? Like sort of like, you know, slight adjustments to not kill it but improve it, right?

I would say the things to look at are engagement rate. HubSpot is right. Uh, as usual, uh, keyword rankings. Are you ranking well? Are you ranking for anything at all? Things like that. Um, also if there's a, if there's a call to action, if there's like a, a lead gen that's kind of coming out of this, how is that looking? Are you collecting email addresses? Are you expecting people to jump over and like schedule a call with you? Are those things happening from this content? And you can even like do heat maps on things, see how long people are reading. Are they making it all the way to the bottom? Are they scrolling and just reading the headers? I wouldn't be too offended by that. That's just how people read things online. But different things like that, like, is this content serving you and is it serving the audience or is it just kind of there?

So when it comes to understanding these metrics, engagement, Being the first one, any tool you recommend to, to, to our listeners and your client? Is it just simple as Google Analytics or anything in your toolbox which you want to give a shout out?

I love Google Analytics. I think it's, it's great. HubSpot's awesome if you want to get a lot of data, but for the average business user, Google Analytics is going to give you more than you need.

And it's free, isn't it?

It's totally free. Yeah, you just— it's easy to set up and then it's collecting data in the background for you.

So the simplest setup is just add the JavaScript and you know your traffic coming in. But if you want engagement, such as maybe understanding your call to actions, if they're getting clicked and stuff like that, it does require an additional setup, right?

Sometimes, uh, typical like GA4, Google Analytics 4, will track form submissions or form completions, different things like that. So if you're looking at, you know, are people filling out my contact form, you can sometimes just get that information automatically. Sometimes when we're really like grassrootsing it, we just create a thank you page that you land on after you fill out the form or, you know, put your email in or whatever it is. And then we can just track how many people got to the thank you page and where they came from, different things like that.

So if I'm simple, you know, mortal, non-tech-savvy person who has a website and listens to this and go like, oh man, okay, well, you know, I'm investing some money into SEO, but whoever I'm hiring right now, you know, never said anything about tracking too much. So I want to really go ahead and do more. How likely is that I can do this myself?

Honestly, today, pretty, pretty likely.

Okay.

I was thinking with e-commerce websites too, like if you have a Shopify site and you just plug your, your little tracking code from Google Analytics in there. It's going to track all of your products. Um, it might just be worth learning how to gather the information that you want. Like when you actually go into Google Analytics, how, what, what questions do you have? And then how can you find those answers? Um, you can probably discover that if you have the time to, to, you know, get into YouTube and ask a few of the correct questions. Or, you know, ask another SEO expert. They can help you out really fast.

There you go. So it's just a question of time, your willingness to learn and understand if you actually have time for it, or you just hire someone who will do that for you. You will know what's up, but you'll see the numbers coming up, right? One of these things you mentioned as well, understanding or tracking your keyword rankings. So is that something which again just exists in Google Analytics, or is there another tool if I want to really understand to understand how I'm ranking. Actually, you know what, let me rephrase this. I have no idea. So we just launched a bunch of articles because we had them in a, you know, Google Docs somewhere in our business local hub or whatever. We just put them online, no SEO strategy, no content strategy whatsoever, just put them online. Now I really want to understand how they're performing and what keywords I'm ranking for. How I would go about achieving that?

I would start in Google Search Console, which is also completely free. It's usually integrated into your website when you add analytics, so you can just pull it up and it will give you all of the information you need. It's not the most user-friendly, but you can see which of your blogs are actually indexed in Google, what keywords you're showing up for, which ones you're getting clicks for, where you're ranking for them. You can compare it to, you know, 28 days before or a year before to see if you're going up or down, different things like that. Mm-hmm. The problem with putting a bunch of content up and then seeing what keywords it's ranking for is of course you're probably missing out on some opportunities, um, that you, that you could have otherwise if you had just done a bit of keyword research ahead of time. Uh, but you know, it's a good place to start. Just see where things are at now.

Okay. So effectively we, we, we not advising to just spit out content online without actually doing some thinking. What are you targeting with this content? So it's not about the, the quantities, it's more about the quality of, of the put, of the things you put online.

If, if SEO is the strategy that you're going for, if, if you have other plans for these blogs and SEO doesn't matter that much to you for some reason, then obviously you can pay attention to other metrics. But if you're like, I'm, I'm going to try to rank really well in Google, but you have no idea what keywords to rank for, it's going to be an interesting experience.

But why else would you put the content online then? It's like, if, if you're putting things online and you have no SEO strategies, like, what was— like, why are you putting the content up there?

That's a great question. It's just like, maybe you have a great email list or something like that. Um, from my perspective, I only see websites through the lens of SEO, and so I'm like, I have no idea what— why else you would even have a website.

Yeah, exactly. Like, yeah, my brain just went in the limbo somehow. I just checkmated myself in my head. It's like, okay, so, so that was excellent, uh, Jade. So we got a couple of questions, uh, from, from our live audience, which I'll just put it on the screen. I'll go from top to bottom. I didn't read them. So we got the first one, which effectively goes like this. Has there ever been a time when you couldn't actually tell whether the content was AI generated?

I'm sure, but I wouldn't know. And, you know, hopefully, like, if we use AI to create content, by the time it's complete and it's gone through human hands, you can't tell that AI had a part in it. That's kind of That's the goal.

So effectively, yeah, it's hard to answer that question, isn't it? So if you're looking at the content and you go like, this is not AI content by default, you didn't recognize if that was AI or not. Do you have some type of like a filter when you generate content for your clients when you go through your process where at the end you go like, can I somehow verify if that's AI? Generated recognizable or something like that? Like, are there any tools where you can feed in your content and go like, hey, do you think this is AI or not?

There is one that I played around with recently, but it wasn't very good because I put in something that was definitely not written by AI at all. And it still, you know, raised some red flags. And then vice versa, something that came right out of ChatGPT, it's like, oh, maybe it's like, you know, 20% AI generated.

So Okay. So from your experience, you didn't find a tool which you can use to validate the content against and judge it if it's AI or not.

Right.

Okay. Excellent. All right. So I'm gonna pull up the, this one. As we evolve and shift from predominantly SEO and going towards AEO, I don't know what that stands for. Relevance, recency, value, and recency, value, and quality are key for the future indexing within the knowledge base and LLM. I'm trying to digest. Let me put this on the screen one more time, Jade, because I'm like, all right, so as we evolve and shift from predominantly SEO and going towards AEO, relevance, recency, value, and quality are the key for future indexing within the knowledge base and LLM. So effectively what the question is saying that SEO is moving to something called AEO. Does that ring a bell to you, Jade? AEO?

I'm guessing they're meaning AI. Yeah.

Okay.

Engine optimization.

All right. Right. Okay. So I get it. And then the quality, recency, and relevance will be the key indexing. So it's not another question. It's probably a statement, an opinion expressed by one of our guests where effectively It says that the indexing of content will be driven by AI itself. So, you know, Google being a powerful search engine, likely using AI engine to understand the content. So they will rank the recency of information and the quality and value of information as a, you know, as, as top, I guess. So we'll take that. I'm not sure if we dissected that well, whoever asked that question. So we got Another one which goes like this. Do we think that LLMs, e.g., ChatGPT, will outdate Google Search?

Maybe someday. And obviously things are changing within search at the moment too. Within Google, they have their own generated AI answers to a lot of questions. I really like ChatGPT's search function, like where you can just search the internet and the the results that they serve are actually better for small businesses than what we're seeing in Google right now. But it's going to take a long time for people to fully adapt to a new search engine. Um, it'll probably, you know, take decades. Uh, but I don't know, there are some early adapters who are into it from an SEO perspective right now. It's really hard to track exactly what's going on in there the way that we can with Google. There's so many tools to track. Exactly where you're ranking in a Google search. So that'll be an interesting challenge for SEOs. But I'm excited to see what happens.

How likely in your view, Jade, is that Google will just become, you know, Gemini? As in, you know what I mean? Like you go to Google and go like, hey, here's my query. So instead of this homepage of Google we have right now, it's just going to be like a chat box and it's just going to be Gemini. You'll use exactly the same search queries you use right now, but instead of, you know, this being sort of like pages listed right now, you'll get the same pages listed, but then you just continue sort of chatting and iterating through those pages without actually visiting the pages.

That it would work more for like blog content and like just informational keywords.

Mm-hmm.

But if you're looking for a plumber or a service or something like that in Google, you are gonna need to eventually go to their website to, to fully vet them and, and do all that kind of stuff. Um, it is frustrating to a lot of businesses right now that clicks to their blogs are seriously going down because people can just find the answer in the Google search.

Yeah.

Which prevents them from, you know, doing anything else or collecting any data on that. Client. But I don't know, I don't know exactly what we're going to see in the future. I think we're a long way off, and I think that people aren't quite sure how, like, who to trust in the, in the AI world just yet. Um, you know, and we're relatively young. Imagine, you know, uh, like an older person who has just kind of gotten used to Google is now probably not going to immediately adapt to AI.

It's too confusing. Yeah, it's not com— yeah, I mean, maybe for non-tech savvy person. And you're right, I think it's, um, you can think of the world where you just go in, in a, you know, Google and you go like, give me the best plumber who lives around me in this range and has that certificate and, you know, works for that many years. And, and ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever the tool would be just boom, you know, gives you a couple of results and you go to website. So saves a lot of time on research, but it requires a huge trust to get such process adopted by people because like ultimately, you know, you're not doing anything, you're just taking what's given to you. So that requires a huge amount of trust. All right, so we've got the last one, uh, which is this. Hello, I have a question. What is the best thing for someone who is just setting up a website to increase SEO? Basically, first thing to do Set up Google Search Console and submit your sitemap.

That's the big one. And then, and then go after, you know, figure out what keywords you want to rank for and stuff. But just making sure that Google can read your website as easily as possible is step one.

And a sitemap is, uh, is effectively an XML file which just lists all the links you have in your website and just feeds to Google and go like, visit all these links. That's where my content is. And, uh, you know, you don't need to do that manually, isn't it? Like, that should be something a tool does for you.

Yes. So depending on what platform you've built your website in, you most likely have a sitemap. Like, it's probably already there.

Yeah.

But you just need to create your Google Search Console account, and then there's a tab where you can just pop in the URL of your sitemap. Most likely it's the URL of your website slash sitemap.xml, just pull that up, pop it in, and then it just makes Google be able to read your website easier.

So that's the very first thing. If you have a website, you get Google Console, you get sitemaps, you put it in after some time, and that's— that doesn't take a long time, right? We're talking like a couple of weeks. Google will index your website and you will see keyword information in your Google Console, after which point you can think about your keyword strategies and your content strategies.

Is that right?

Yeah.

Yes. And of course you can start your keyword strategy before your website is even up. I consult with people who are, you know, months out from actually building the website just to make sure all the keywords are in the right place and things like that. But that's where it gets a little bit more complicated. If you're just trying to DIY this yourself, submit your sitemap, see what's going on, and then kind of react from there.

Okay. Last one. If I'm using ChatGPT to help me with these processes, how trustworthy is that? Like, you know, I'm going like, hey ChatGPT, what's my first step? What do you think it would say? Would you— it would say— would it say what you just said?

I doubt it would say what I just said. I'm curious to know what it would say now. I know that back in 2022 when this all was first coming out, people were like, oh, SEOs aren't going to have jobs anymore because ChatGPT is just going to tell them what to do. And that, that has not been the case. ChatGPT doesn't know your users the way that you know your users. And it also isn't going to calculate in your domain authority and the age of your website and your tech health on the backend and all of these things that come into play when we're even deciding what keyword to rank for. It would probably just tell you to rank for, like, if you're a plumber, it would say rank for plumbing or something. Something that's too vague. I think you still need kind of human discretion to really make good calls on these things.

That's a good shout, Jade. My experience as well, it doesn't have any connection to real-life data unless you tell it to go to sort of online, but then it only has websites and some information it has around websites, which is effectively, you know, behind it is Bing if you're using ChatGPT. If using Gemini, you know, there's Google behind it. But if I ask anything about keywords, it has no ability to know that because it doesn't have a service such as, you know, Semrush or any other service who actually does keyword research or Google Ads. So you still need to use a separate tool to really get into a keyword research. You wouldn't be able to get a good answer from ChatGPT around what is ranking right now, you know, what's the trend right now, what keyword actually people looking for, like it doesn't have that knowledge. It can give you only what it does with natural language processing, which is just a density of words online. So that's a very good shout.

Okay.

So fantastic conversation today. Thank you, Jade. A lot of information, a lot of actionable tips. I really love what you just put out there around your process. Have an interview, get the questions, you know, get the raw transcript. That's where authenticity is. Go do a keyword research. And then use ChatGPT to write authentic articles. I love that. That's a gold— that's a golden nugget. So if people want to understand more around Hello SEO, the services you provide, just in general bombard you with some SEO questions, where can they find you?

Yes, go to helloseo.com. A really easy way to get started is I have a free report card on my website. You can just fill out a little bit of information. You'll get some instant insights to your SEO. But the best part is that I will then make a video for you explaining your SEO to you and then send that over. So you kind of have like instant expert advice on your SEO.

There you go. Excellent. And if you're listening to this on audio, Spotify, Apple Podcast, or anywhere else, just scroll down show notes. You'll see all the links. Same if you're watching this on YouTube or anywhere else, just check the show links. And for our listeners, if you found this episode valuable, please keep the momentum for us. Subscribe, leave us a comment, we love a conversation. And as always, until the next time, stay safe and see you online.