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James Dooley and Stuart Vickers discuss the real value of mentorship in SEO, business growth, and personal development. Stuart Vickers explains how mentorship accelerated his career, corrected years of trial-and-error, and helped him compound results faster. They cover lessons learned about link building, testing, SEO myths, and how mentors stop you chasing shiny objects. The conversation explores AI adoption, qualities to look for in a mentor, choosing specialists, and why ODYS has built a powerful mentor network. Stuart Vickers shares insights on content, links, market selection, and the true ROI of mentorship calls. James Dooley closes by outlining Stuart’s strengths in parasite SEO, off-page SEO, link building, website recovery, and advanced digital strategy.
Creators and Guests
What is James Dooley Podcast?
James Dooley is a Manchester-based entrepreneur, investor, and SEO strategist. James Dooley founded FatRank and PromoSEO, two UK performance marketing agencies that deliver no-win-no-fee lead generation and digital growth systems for ambitious businesses. James Dooley positions himself as an Investorpreneur who invests in UK companies with high growth potential because he believes lead generation is the root of all business success.
The James Dooley Podcast explores the mindset, methods, and mechanics of modern entrepreneurship. James Dooley interviews leading marketers, founders, and innovators to reveal the strategies driving online dominance and business scalability. Each episode unpacks the reality of building a business without mentorship, showing how systems, data, and lead flow replace luck and guesswork.
James Dooley shares hard-earned lessons from scaling digital assets and managing SEO teams across more than 650 industries. James Dooley teaches how to convert leads into long-term revenue through brand positioning, technical SEO, and automation. James Dooley built his career on rank and rent, digital real estate, and performance-based marketing because these models align incentive with outcome.
After turning down dozens of podcast invitations, James Dooley now embraces the platform to share his insights on investorpreneurship, lead generation, AI-driven marketing, and reputation management. James Dooley frequently collaborates with elite entrepreneurs to discuss frameworks for scaling businesses, building authority, and mastering search.
James Dooley is also an expert in online reputation management (ORM), having built and rehabilitated corporate brands across the UK. His approach combines SEO precision, brand engineering, and social proof loops to influence both Google’s Knowledge Graph and public perception.
To feature James Dooley on your podcast or event, connect via social media. James Dooley regularly joins business panels and networking sessions to discuss entrepreneurship, brand growth, and the evolving future of SEO.
James Dooley:
hi so today I'm joined with Stuart Vickers who is one of the OD Y mentors and Stuart I'm going to jump straight in and I'm going to ask you the first question with regards to how has mentorship changed your career path and personal growth
Stuart Vickers:
I suppose compounding is the ultimate word uh I was grinding away for years you just on the sofa with a laptop same as many other people and I think you look at that that progress that graph from probably the first four years to the final two years and you realize just how much it's spiked in the last two years or so and it all comes down to getting out and talking to the right people so in my case it was a very slow progression but now with the Odis mentors program you can just jump straight in and get one of those mentors straight away
James Dooley:
yeah it's great it's great so when did you first realize the importance and of having a mentor in your professional journey
Stuart Vickers:
I guess early on it would be a case of literally just running into various people at conferences and it's always either that quiet drink in the bar or in the back of the cab and they basically say you're doing it all wrong um certainly in the early days of running the running the agency coming down to uh what I thought was a good back link and then you get all these other insights uh plus how you actually build that into a service so yeah you might only be 20 30% off but if you keep going down that path you're going to compound that even even more whereas when you meet the right people who have been doing it uh for a long time as well and they can put you on the right path then you know that over the next five years you're just going to grow and grow
James Dooley:
yeah I think that's very important on what you said like Lally even just the incremental kind of improvements that you can do just the 5 10 20% improvements or what you can even 1% improvements that compound day after day is is key so with regards to like what lessons have you learned that you feel like obviously if you was testing yourself in the algorithms today it would cost you a lot of money so what kind of what lessons have you learned from mentors along the way that you might not been able to learn on your own
Stuart Vickers:
ah so much um set the in workings of agencies and running a service business in terms of testing very quickly things like um yeah some of the myths you might here so you know we know about link building there's a lot of uh hysteria in the market that if you build the wrong link you're going to get completely de-indexed now that's not entirely wrong as such but people get much too cautious about that therefore they never build a link whereas a lot of the time even if you build a bad link it's probably just going to get ignored uh you have to work really quite hard and be very aggressive before you get into the actual penalty territory so suddenly that changed my whole mindset where actually I can go much harder on my sites go much harder on client sites and the result has just been growth because you're no longer hesitating
James Dooley:
yeah for sure then with regards to Innovation and obviously we're at the Realms now of artificial intelligence and some of the best jobs that you can be doing now is like prompting the AI to kind of do quite a lot of the work what role do you think a mentor could have to help people that might not be using AI to be able to start using AI now
Stuart Vickers:
I think people everyone in now good grasp of chbc but they stick with the basics they don't really push themselves because you need that flash of inspiration that actually can go to this much greater level so perfect example someone bought my CTR manipulation course the other day and came back saying how do you check that your locations aren't over water over the sea I said you just put them into chat gbt and it will tell you where the major cities are in your radius and that way you get an idea of the actual Circle you're covering and again it was that I never thought of that so yeah I think just being Sly thinking outside the box a lot of people they use the AI they get it but they're just using for a bit of writing they're not really thinking data analysis or constructing things
James Dooley:
yeah so with regards to anyone that might be watching this now who might be looking to hire a mentor what qualities is it that you look for Stuart specifically if you're looking yourself for a mentor like let's say you let's say you don't do very much on Facebook ads and you want and this person and the Mente wants Facebook ads kind of help like are you trying to get someone that's that's kind of within the oldest platform that's been and done it so it could be like let's say man management you might be say lucky if I was you I'd go to Mad singers for that like what qualities do you normally look for do you always look for someone that might have crushed it in the same area that you're in or do you just say do you know what these have been around the houses and they know everything related to SEO and development of digital marketing like what qualities do you look for for a mentor
Stuart Vickers:
yeah probably the L so you want the absolute specialist of the problem you're trying to solve and um would love to be industry specific or product specific you're probably unlikely to actually get that but if someone's as you say been in the game long enough and has got demonstrable proof in that particular field then I don't think you can really go wrong
James Dooley:
yeah and why did you decide to become an oys Mentor yourself
Stuart Vickers:
uh I really like the Odis brand I think uh theyve built that up over the years and years I've been a big customer of them in the past um so I really like everything they stand for and so when they went out literally collecting um some of the top names in the industry uh of course I couldn't say no
James Dooley:
yeah for sure and and what would you say your main strengths are so if someone's look watching this now and they say Okay I want a mentor what do you think that you would be able to help them with so is it like website recovery is it parasite SEO is it link building is it technical SEO is it content optimization is it a collection of everything related to that like what what would you say your main strengths are
Stuart Vickers:
I'd say I always say 99% of SEO is the content and links and people do tend to over complicate that we've said before that people tend to look for this magic Silver Bullet um doesn't really exist so actually I think a big part of the the mentorship is reassurance so are they doing everything right in which case just getting clarification on that is huge so don't get distracted don't chase a shiny object and go the wrong way uh or if they're not then what is that final 20% that they're actually missing that could still be quite fundamentals probably to do with content or links uh could be a simple technical holding them back um not forgetting the overall the market economics of it are you actually targeting a product with demand that's desirable so there are some of these broader business Concepts as well making sure you're in the right Market
James Dooley:
yeah for sure and what would what advice would you give someone who's first seeking maybe to hire a mentor so obviously like the main one for me would be people need to stop procrastinating or you just mentioned then shiny objects in your own but like what advice would you give someone who's first might be looking to go do you know what I might hire a mentor like what advice would you give to them
Stuart Vickers:
as you say don't hesitate and go for it the fact that the the whole pricing model with the mentals has changed now that you can literally get a 10 15 minute call with the mentor now which is insane value because as we know it's only a few questions back and forth that you really need of do this don't do that do this instead uh and that doesn't need to be a full hour long call so especially when you see beginners in the industry it's normally these really simple things like are you actually targeting if your average commission is only $5 then why are you bothering with that market why do you go for the $500 Market really simple things like that but you're not going if you overthink it then what do they say if you stay in your head you're dead so just get on the call and then start taking action
James Dooley:
yeah for sure and if you could go back in time and actually 16 tell your 16y old self something to do with m ship what would it be that you would tell that person
Stuart Vickers:
H so much uh don't mess around with academics and University and doing the established path find someone who's crushing it in a particular industry a modern industry could be SEO could be add something else um but I know people in the early 20s who got four or five years ahead of me just because they were focusing on monetization not on following the done established path so if I had more exposure early on to those types of people yeah
James Dooley:
for sure and then with regards to so there's a bit of a it's a crazy one that which kind of splits when someone's not yet hired someone on the mentorship program with oys some people seem to say oh it's expensive like to go and book that call with this specific Mentor is expensive but then after it anyone who's kind of seems to be that's paid the money and had the mentorship call basically turned around and go wow that was the best investment I've ever done the return on investment that I had from that call has been 50x what I've actually paid it's been absolutely unbelievable it sent me down that path I was going down this path here and it sent me down that path and it's been unbelievable so what can you kind of expand on that with regards to anyone that thinks that costs quite a lot of money to being you knowing yourself you've had quite a lot of feedback from people you've done calls with that have said it's been the best return on investment that I've done
Stuart Vickers:
so I think if you just flip it around and you look at if your dishwasher breaks and you get a plumber out that's going to be a good couple of hundred if you have a doctor or a lawyer if you're buying a house you know you've got several thousand in fees there but you don't really think about that because you're buying this to $300,000 property um yeah in my case recently I've had a back issue and so that's probably cost me a good couple of hundred just going to a physiotherapy uh consultant and getting that sorted out but he did fix it within a few weeks so these are all curing a paino I think in our case not only can we cure a paino we can save you and also make you a lot of money in the long term that could be that one call that sets you on the right path that could make millions of dollars potentially so yeah $500 to $1,000 something like that it's really not actually that much when you look at other Industries come on if we were one of these more established bricks and morar type professions then you wouldn't quipple that and those bricks and morar type professions don't really do fractional so we can charge by the minute if you are concerned and you don't think you're going to get value on it then just start with 10 minutes and if you want to extend it then that's fine but there's a very low barrier to entry there
James Dooley:
yeah for sure I think with regards to the cost it's not just the knowledge bombs that you can provide it's showing them where you can save money so some of these people are spending anything from two three 5 10 20 even 30,000 a month just on B links if you can educate them what good back link and a bad back link looks like then that could make a massive difference in saving them money not only going out and building and making more money so if anyone's looking to book you as being a mentor on audio how can they get old of you
Stuart Vickers:
straight on the Odis mentors page otherwise if some reason you can't find that then obviously find me on my socials and we can point you in the right direction um but I think Odis are the best to help out there
James Dooley:
sounds good well it's been a pleasure to have you on Stewart I highly recommend Stuart he's very very good on the link building side of things off page SEO parasite SEO it is ahead of the curve he's in quite a few private masterminds he's definitely an advanced SEO out there so if anyone's looking to get a mentor for SEO and search engine optimization check out Stuart Vickers on the oyss mentorship program great thank you very much