We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jade Pruett a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Jade, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you share a customer success story with us?
My husband once told me that he loves basketball because it leaves open the opportunity for “tiny miracles”, and that’s exactly how I feel about my Power Hours. A Power Hour is when I sit down with the business owner, and we do whatever we can to help their SEO in one hour’s time. That can be digging into their data to identify some quick wins, looking into keywords we can optimize their website for, or analyzing the competition to see what they are doing that we can do better. Clients often walk away with a content calendar and few pieces of homework, or they just get to wait and see if we put keywords in the right spots and need to see what Google does with them. There have been a lot of wild success stories that have come out of just working on someone’s SEO for an hour.
One of my favorites is when I sat down with the owner of As Told by Agency, a video production agency in Columbia, South Carolina, where I live. We sat down, chatted, and saw that his website was not showing up in Google for any of his target keywords. We also identified that the main keyword they could rank for quickly, which people were Googling in our area, was “video production agency”. We decided to optimize their homepage for this keyword and also their Google Business profile (the way we optimized their Google Business profile has since been deemed “keyword stuffing,” but they decided to keep it up because it was working so well). After just a week or two, they were ranking on the first page twice for their target keyword, once in the Google Business profile snack pack and then again in the traditional SERPs. It’s really cool to see how quickly they ranked, but the amazing part was that within a month, this brought them $10,000 worth of new business. Because a Power Hour is only $150, this meant they were getting over a 12,000% return on investment. That was just in the first month. They are still ranking for this keyword in our area, meaning their return on investment just keeps growing and growing. I love when I can make such a real difference for a small business with just an hour of my time and expertise.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
My name is Jade Pruett, and I’m the founder of HelloSEO. We are an SEO agency focused on service-based businesses and subject matter experts. Our goal is to help our clients boost their online visibility to better connect with their target clients.
I started my career as a content writer, but I knew I wanted so much more. When I landed a job as a content writer at an SEO agency, my world opened up to the realm of marketing, especially SEO. I immediately dove straight in and tried to learn as much as I possibly could. At that time, the only way to learn SEO was through reading blogs and experimenting. There weren’t nearly as many resources available, and there certainly weren’t any classes that could teach you the ins and outs of SEO. I had to be a self-starter, and fortunately, I landed some really cool startup jobs that provided me with incredible experience in the craft.
In 2020, I acquired my first freelance SEO client, but it wasn’t until 2022 that I was able to quit my full-time job and pursue HelloSEO full-time. Since then, the company has experienced rapid growth. I now have a small team of marketing and PR experts who help me provide exceptional services to my clients. What I believe truly sets us apart is how we approach SEO. The SEO specialists we have here all have at least 7 years of experience in the field and are at the top of their game. Additionally, we create all of our content through expert interviews with our clients, ensuring that we are genuinely building their authority as we publish blog posts and content on their behalf.
We publish content at an aggressive rate compared to other SEO agencies. While many agencies may only publish one or two blogs per month for their clients, we build out extensive content pillars packed with unique, authoritative information. Our clients typically receive around 12-24 blog posts per month on their website. We also have an in-house digital PR specialist who is constantly pitching new ideas to the media for each of our clients. This means that all backlinking comes from media placements.
I’ve designed all of our SEO packages with the aim of significantly enhancing the visibility and authority of our clients. Our SEO strategy revolves around establishing them as subject matter experts in their respective fields.
How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?
HelloSEO is completely bootstrapped. It began as a side hustle in 2020, and I loved that I just had a little extra money coming into my Venmo every month. In 2021, I realized I wanted to pursue it more aggressively, but I still had a full-time job. I still had a demanding full-time job doing SEO at A startup that did all of the SEO for CNN and Business Insiders’ coupon sections. Needless to say, it was a demanding job. I knew that if I wanted to pursue HelloSEO full time, I just needed to meet my current salary. As if trying to recreate your salary while working full-time isn’t hard enough, I ended up getting recruited into an even better SEO position at a semiconductor company. That came with a big pay raise. This allowed my husband and me to buy our first house, move closer to family, and achieve a lot of our financial goals. I’m certainly not complaining, but suddenly I was in the position to meet an even higher salary. It was the epitome of champagne problems, but I did begin to worry that my dreams of running my own agency were not going to be realized.
At the end of 2022, I ended up meeting some amazing people who propelled my business to the next level. The first was my advisor, Agata Chydzinski, who helped me make incredible connections and also reframe my business to be more profitable. I remember her asking me, “Are you going to be willing to leave your job if we can get you there?” I said yes, but deep down, I still didn’t believe it was possible. I had a very demanding job and could only handle a client or two at a time. I worked every night and every weekend. I had no idea how I was going to be able to pull this off. Then my advisor introduced me to Pam Foley, a brand agency owner who owns a fully woman-operated agency for woman-owned businesses. She invited me to come on and white label the SEO for all of her clients. This gave me a massive boost in revenue and allowed me the opportunity to quit my job and finally start off on my own. She and I are still in partnership to this day, even though my business has grown exponentially.
Any fun sales or marketing stories?
Despite running a marketing agency, marketing has always been very intimidating to me. Outside of the SEO realm, I don’t have an incredible amount of experience with other marketing platforms. I was especially afraid of social media. As you might have guessed, SEO is not the most exciting topic. It’s often very complicated, and people don’t fully understand what you’re talking about. To at least have an online presence, I brought on a social media manager to assist me. I didn’t have high hopes initially. However, we finally hit our stride when I started explaining SEO through pop culture references, particularly Taylor Swift. I wasn’t sure if it was going to work, but we decided to explain domain ratings using Taylor Swift’s ex-boyfriends. The post gained significant traction. Everyone found it hilarious, and the feedback was amazing.
What I’ve learned about marketing is that authenticity is key, but it’s often not the authenticity you might expect. Meeting your clients where they are and incorporating elements of your own personality can make your marketing efforts much easier. When you stop pretending to be someone you’re not or trying to appeal to someone you don’t truly understand, and instead produce content that resonates with you, that can often be the catalyst for reaching the next level in your marketing. At this point, I think I’ve become the person on LinkedIn who talks about Taylor Swift and SEO. And I’m completely happy with that title.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.helloseo.com
- Instagram: @jadefromhelloseo
- Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/jade-pruett-helloseo