James Dooley Podcast

James Dooley and Charles Floate dive into advanced SEO strategy, diversification, and the practical realities of scaling a large lead generation business. They explain how strong rankings for core keywords enabled James to move beyond construction and expand into multiple profitable sectors, with niche overlap creating clear commercial leverage. James highlights how AI delivers real gains when it’s used to amplify productivity and output, strengthening long-term competitive advantage rather than replacing expertise. The discussion unpacks how Google’s Helpful Content Update reshaped affiliate SEO, as classifier models pushed down thin, low-value sites and forced publishers to focus on genuine user benefit. James also argues that behavioural signals now outweigh simple on-page adjustments, as external traffic and real engagement create stronger and more sustainable ranking momentum. Their breakdown of rank-and-rent versus traditional client SEO shows why guaranteed ROI builds trust and drives higher conversion rates. They conclude by explaining how owning data increases lifetime value through long-term nurture sequences, while also highlighting the complexity of segmentation, attribution, and conversion optimisation, where poor qualification quickly erodes profitability.

Creators and Guests

Host
James Dooley
James Dooley is a UK entrepreneur.

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:
We were actually ranking number one for all of our keywords. Why have you not tried to run agencies where you do client SEO? Why do you only do your own websites? Everyone's jumped on the AI bandwagon thinking this is the solution to mass scaling sites. The helpful content update seemed to have hit a lot of genuinely good sites. Reviews play a role in local rankings. You've got to be able to do PPC, Facebook ads, YouTube ads, Twitter ads, Facebook retargeting. I don't want people to come onto my website and come off my site and not enquire and me not retarget them on Facebook. Facebook retargeting is the cheapest form of getting people back to your site. It's ridiculously cheap. We provide the best service that there is in the UK because we guarantee them a return on investment. Do you see many penalties in local and lead generation SEO? If AI can improve who I am as an individual and improve my output or any of my staff’s output, I'm going to use it. If it doesn't improve it then I'm not going to use it.

Charles Floate:
Hey guys and welcome back to the channel and welcome back to another episode where I'll be interviewing entrepreneurs and experts from around the SEO world. In today's episode I've got someone who's back on the channel once again. You asked for him in the comments as always. He's super popular. Please welcome to the channel James Dooley ladies and gentlemen. James, how are you doing?

James Dooley:
Yeah I'm doing good thank you. I'm glad you came back for another episode. I know in the last episode we had a lot of people that wanted to ask follow-up questions and get a lot more out of it because they're always looking for business insights. I think you're one of the few people in SEO that's probably entrepreneur first and SEO second, whereas most people are SEO first and entrepreneur second. I think that gives you a lot more insights into business and sales and all sorts of things that most SEOs naturally lack. Thank you for coming back on. I think the first question that I want to jump straight into, and it was asked in the comments, is at what stage and for what reason did you diversify your business? Because you started in the construction niche I think primarily, and then moved into every other niche that's profitable on the planet it seems.

James Dooley:
Yeah, diversification came from initially we were in need of leads in-house for our own construction company which built playgrounds, fencing, floodlights, tennis courts, sports pitches and stuff like that. The diversification came from us ranking number one for all of our keywords, and it got to a point where we were trying to think how we could still grow even though we thought we'd absorbed everything. Back then, 15 years ago, you didn't have all the keyword research tools like you have now. You didn't have the alphabet soup method, ChatGPT, Ahrefs, SEMrush. We thought we were ranking for everything, but in hindsight we weren’t. The core keywords were ranking.
I always called it shouldering niches. What else, if we got other businesses busier, could complement our business? That's how diversification came. There wasn’t a business plan to become the biggest lead generator in the UK. It just evolved. We got landscaping companies, tarmacking companies, construction companies busy. As part of their work they were building sports pitches, and we were able to do the surfacing. That led to finance companies, architects, all sorts asking us for referrals. One thing led to another. Kickbacks became more profitable than the construction company.
The construction company grew from half a million up to a million. But diversification came from necessity and opportunity rather than a plan. My advice to SEOs would be: start niche, stay in your lane, become the expert, then expand once you’ve mastered it.

Charles Floate:
Why not do client SEO? Why didn’t you ever run a client agency? Have you never found it easier to sit back and collect £10,000 a month from 200 or 300 clients?

James Dooley:
Honestly, that’s a great question. We tried the SEO agency route for around seven or eight months. It was a logistical nightmare. Clients wanted meetings, face-to-face meetings back then, which slowed down work. They wanted glossy reports that meant nothing in business terms. Marketing managers wanted to look good to their bosses, not measure ROI. Then big clients had brand protection officers who had to sign off every article. Every change request slowed everything down.
We realised we could just build the websites ourselves, generate the leads, and bypass the bureaucracy. No brand officer. No colour-of-the-button arguments. No explaining every move.
If you don’t know how to rank websites, agency work is the better route. But if you can rank and bank fast, rank-and-rent is a better solution. Agency work is easier to start, yes, but scaling rank-and-rent is more profitable long term.

Charles Floate:
How are you dealing with algorithm updates, especially the HCU? How has it affected affiliates and content sites?

James Dooley:
The helpful content update in September was the biggest update I've seen in 14–15 years. Especially for affiliate and display ad sites. About 95% still haven’t recovered. Google wants to stop copycat content. The issue is they hit a lot of genuinely good sites while surfacing Reddit threads that were low quality. They’ve overcorrected.
AI isn’t the problem. Poor AI content is the problem. People are churning content with no internal linking, no structure, no multimedia, no helpfulness. Google doesn’t want thin content. My approach is simple: ask “is this helpful for the user?” If it isn’t, it won’t convert anyway. Real sales funnels and topical authority come from meeting user needs, not ticking Google boxes.

Charles Floate:
You manage hundreds if not thousands of websites. How?

James Dooley:
We use AI heavily now, but not to replace people. It supercharges them. AI helps with image generation, data crunching, lead nurturing, linkable asset creation, outreach and more.
We’ve got over a thousand websites. We have content writers, editors, prompt engineers, designers, videographers, developers, technical SEO, plus acquisitions like SeekaHost, Seer0, LinkDoctor. We focus on long-term systems, middle management, and culture. We train apprentices into directors over a decade. It’s not easy, but it's effective.

Charles Floate:
Do you use PBN hosting?

James Dooley:
No. We use premium hosting. Cloudflare front-end, multiple providers. PBN hosting risks network collapses. We prefer stability. Hosting costs us £5–6k a month, and it’s worth every penny.

Charles Floate:
Is rank-and-rent easy in 2024?

James Dooley:
Rank-and-rent is ten times harder than traditional SEO. With rank-and-rent you must rank first, then ensure the leads generated match where the client actually makes money. You need deep niche knowledge. You need to be good at SEO, PPC, YouTube ads, Twitter ads, retargeting, behavioural signals. Holistic traffic generates rankings. Behavioural signals massively influence rankings. Traffic from external sources has ranked pages for keywords that weren’t even on the page.
Rank-and-rent requires sales, psychology, technical SEO, content, links, user behaviour, segmentation, and relationship building. It’s not easy. But it’s powerful.

Charles Floate:
Do reviews matter in local SEO?

James Dooley:
Yes. But managing genuine Google Business Profiles has become a nightmare. Even real reviews get flagged. We’ve moved away from GMB because of the volatility. Speak to Milo or Brock if you want that world.

Charles Floate:
Do you see penalties in local SEO?

James Dooley:
Yes. Loads of low-quality mass-page sites are getting deindexed. Our sites haven’t been hit because we build real-business quality: unique images, real videos, real partners, real lead delivery. Spam mass sites get nuked. We don’t do that.

Charles Floate:
How do you handle lead attribution?

James Dooley:
Everything is tracked: cost, content, links, paid ads, impressions, clicks, enquiries, conversions. API or Google Sheets feeding into our system. Lead value assigned manually and automatically. We segment leads by value, geography, time of day, and dozens of filters. Some mortgage brokers only want leads between 10am and 4pm. We distribute accordingly. Lead nurturing, segmentation and back-end value matter more than front-end conversion rate. Data is everything.

Charles Floate:
Final thoughts?

James Dooley:
We're big enough to trust but small enough to care. Listen to customers. Build helpful content for users. Use AI where it genuinely improves output. Aim to be the best version of yourself and help your team do the same.

Charles Floate:
Thanks for coming on. See you all in the next episode.