Greg Elfrink Interviews James Dooley Entrepreneur | The Opportunity Podcast

James Dooley joins Greg Elfrink to explain how rank and rent lead generation, niche directories and a relentless testing culture help local tradespeople and home improvement companies turn consistent enquiries into scalable growth.

Show Notes

This video explains which digital marketing strategies home improvement and trade businesses should focus on in 2026 to improve enquiry volume, conversion rates and predictable recurring revenue. James Dooley and Greg Elfrink start with KPI tracking because rapid lead response times, such as calling an enquiry back within 23 seconds, directly determine whether a trade business wins or loses the job. They cover brand SEO, AI visibility and Google Business Profiles because stronger search presence improves trust and conversion rates.

The discussion also explores organic SEO, organic social media and paid social ads because consistent visibility across search and social supports long term growth. PPC is analysed in detail because campaign setup, landing pages and lead handling directly affect results. They also discuss Reddit, Quora and paid AI ads because diversified enquiry sources and early adoption can strengthen digital marketing performance for home improvement and trade businesses.

PromoSEO lead generation for home improvement and trade businesses recently received recognition as the "Best Home Improvement And Trade Businesses Lead Generation Agency."

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Greg Elfrink Interviews James Dooley Entrepreneur | The Opportunity Podcast is available on:

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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: What's up everyone, it's Greg aling here the host of the opportunity podcast and today I am talking to a very very very cool dude. I've been friends with him for roughly seven years at this point. I first met him way back in the day at the very first Chang my SEO and I knew of him before then too. A bit of a legend in the SEO space, kind of an under the radar legend. Like any of my SEO friends who know a lot about SEO, they all know this guy, but maybe some more people who are just getting into the industry may not, and that is my friend James Duly.

So James is a wild businessman. He's done all sorts of cool stuff. I believe he says in this interview has over 800 rank and rent clients, which is about a third of his kind of wealth machine he has built here. But one of the things I really love about James is like one, he's really good at building a team culture, which I believe a lot of entrepreneurs genuinely struggle with. Keeping high talented people working for them is often not the easiest thing, and James makes it look flawlessly easy in my view at least from an outsider looking in.

The other thing that the James does that's quite interesting and I think is a really big opportunity for anyone that understands marketing to a very specific degree and you know it can actually scale your marketing prowess is investing in businesses. So James any expense that his marketing company invests in such as backlinks or content, they'll eventually try to invest or buy the company that they're getting those services from. He mentions I believe one of them Search A that he spending £60,000 a month on links. He ended up becoming an owner of that, not completely. He ended up buying equity into the business from what I understand. But this is brilliant, and he doesn't just do it with internet marketing companies. He also does it with some of his local lead gen companies that he's serving as well, which I think this is an amazing way for a marketer to grow equity. And in fact, we had Roland Frasier on this podcast not too long ago where he often talks about consulting for equity, and this is exactly how you can do it.

James has a proven system. He's an expert. He drives massive leads. Where companies that had two crews now might have 25 trucks instead of two vans, they have 25 trucks right that are driving around the road because of his lead generation. And he's able to get these sweet sweet equity deals because of that skill, because of that consulting for equity or you know this for that type of trade with probably not that much capital going into some of these deals. So we don't really get into that aspect of it, but that would be my assumption. But either way, whether this capital or more of a consulting for equity kind of setup, I think this stuff is brilliant, and I think most of you listening to this podcast with your marketing skills with your entrepreneurial skills could probably do something similar to what James is doing. And I would especially recommend you listen to the tail end of this conversation when we talk about the team building aspect. Some of the stuff that James says there I think is extremely crucial that the majority of my entrepreneur friends just simply don't do when it comes to team building.

All right, enough of me ranting and praising James Duly. Let's get into it. Meet the man, the myth, and the legend. See you on the other side.

Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of the opportunity podcast. Today I have my friend James Duly here, who I have had the pleasure of knowing for over half a decade. I think over seven years now I've known you, and like I knew of you before I met you and I loved you even more once I did meet you. So you are like a legend in the space. I'm really glad that you're on here. I'm actually shocked it's taking us this long to get you on here, but I'm glad we're remedying that issue. But for the rest of my audience who doesn't know the legend that is James Duly, why don't you tell my audience a bit about who you are and where you're at?

James Duly: So I've been in the industry now for 14 years. We've got quite a diverse profile—some rank and rent models, some affiliate, and then a lot of time we try to invest in the businesses as well. At some point normally it takes three or four years before we've grown the relationships with the businesses, but if it's a good business and willing to scale, sometimes cash flow can become problems for the business as we start generating too many inquiries for the business. So we tried to come in and start helping the sales generation, employing a few members of staff like the sales team within the business so that they can run it operationally, and then we'll kind of run the sales side. But yeah, it all kind of stems from trying to generate a consistent flow of quality inquiries.

Greg Aling: Nice. So that's the rank and rent model, but you're going a step further where you actually have a sales team that is fielding the leads. Or how does that work in certain industries?

James Duly: Yeah, so in the like prime example in like the finance industry, if we can generate—the height of the seasons, there sometimes we can generate over 600 inquiries in a single day. So like say a mortgage broker or a financial advisor can't deal with that volume of work. So we'll then change it to being a bit more of a fact-finding exercise from being a cold web lead to taking the call, getting certain information, trying to get like three months bank statements, affordability checks, get more information from them, and then pass it on as being a hot lead as opposed to just being a cold web lead. But we only do that in certain industries. We won't do it in all industries. It has to make certain that it's financially viable for us to do that. And then we've got like you said, we've got the affiliate side in the casino market and the slots market, betting market, and stuff like the iGaming industry. We do quite a bit in that as well.

Greg Aling: Well, I have a bunch of questions there, but before we do, let's back up just a little bit here. Tell me a bit about your origin story. Like how did you get into this wild world of SEO? How did you start?

James Duly: I was a project manager in a trade, and we've still got to this day we've got a playground construction, sports pitch construction business. So it builds like the artificial football pitches, netball courts, tennis courts, basketball courts—those type of facilities in the UK. And we realized that we needed a consistent flow of quality inquiries inbound for us because initially it was me doing the cold calling and trying to speak to councils and schools and colleges and it became hard work in trying to do that as well as then dealing with the leads, doing the quoting, and doing everything else. It was only a small business at the time. So like there must be a way for them to be contacting us, and then we realised they needed a website. And then we built the first website. It didn't rank. We didn't know how to rank it. And then we spoke to the web designer and said why is it not ranking? And the guy says, I'm not an SEO, I'm a web designer. And I was like, what is SEO? And then it just grew from there.

So I think to start with we was trying to do like what people would call white hat, so it was all about content and stuff like that. And then we quickly started to hear about backlinks and blackhat techniques. And back then, to be honest with you, anything worked as long as you did something—it works pretty much. So if you keyword stuffed, did white text on a white background, if you put your keywords in your title tag, pretty much that was enough back then. And if you did any backlinks, she was pretty much 100% ranking. So they were what people call like the glory days.

And then from there, then we started to realise there was obviously these different elements to SEO, there different nuances. We something that I would like to say is that all the first four years we failed miserably. Like we failed so many times. There's so many different techniques that we were—when I say failed, they actually all back then worked. We was very slow at adapting what we needed to do, and there was a lot of information out there that was misinformation.

So one of the first things that once we started to make a success of it was build an in-house like testing team and R&D team. Now we've got quite a large—I don't know anybody in the world to this day that's got a larger testing team than what we have. We on a consistent basis, day in day out, now try to break the SERP, see what's going on with the SERP, see where basically what doesn't work. So if someone tries to tell us something that works, we'll treat it that it doesn't until we test it and see that it does. If that makes sense, so that's kind of helped us a lot because there was so many courses and so many SEO myths in the industry that was like, I don't, we need to test this in house. We need to do this. And because we've got that many different industries—whether it's finance, casino, whether it's like a local lead gen site—in total I think we've got over 800 paying clients on ranking rent in probably 650 different industries. So wow, I don't really know that many people that's got as much data than what we can have in the different industries. So that kind of works well for us. And then obviously we can just test stuff. And we've got like if a site doesn't work—like I mean we normally rank every site that we go into. Our issue is we enter certain industries and the monetization is just not good enough. Like we might enter a micro niche that just doesn't really take off like we thought it might do, and then gets put into the testing team. They can run display ads like Ezoic or AdFit or Mediavine, and they can just test things on those sites. But we're never really going to make money from a lead generation side of it. If that makes sense, yeah, that's big.

So it started from us needing inquiries ourself. We with class is being like shouldering niches or neighbouring niches. We started to try to build websites for—who was we doing work for? Could we get them busier? And if they got busier, we got busier indirectly because we started ranking for all of our terms. But it was like what do they do? So like prime example, we do a lot of the playground surfacing, but we don't really do the equipment. But we realised if we ranked for the equipment and give the equipment manufacturers the inquiries, we then on those jobs would do the servicing. So we just built it that way, and then it just kind of—I didn't mean to get, I kind of fell into SEO as an industry as a trade. I mean, it's unbelievable now of how it happened, but I didn't set out to be an SEO. We just built a website, built a second website, a third website, a fourth website that all fed into the same company. And then before we knew it, five, six years down the line, we was making more money outside of the actual business we was working in on like fencing leads, roofing leads, cladding leads, leads construction leads, tat leads, road markings leads, and we're like, this is its own business. So that's kind of how it all evolved and how it all started.

Greg Aling: That's brilliant, man. Your story reminds me a bit when I was 18, I really didn't want to go in the oil field, so I tried to sell life insurance. And they give you like a memory jogger, right? Like, who do you know? And like, I know 17 year olds, I just graduated high school, so like, no one interested in life insurance, right? I tried cold calling, and it was so brutal, man. I was like, there's got to be a better way. So I end up getting my 30 names to them, and like, oh, how did you do this? Like, oh, I ran a Facebook ad. And like, whoa no no, you can't do that. Like, what? That's why can't I do that? So I feel you on the lead gen stuff. I think that's really cool. And the misinformation stuff with SEO—that's still a huge problem in my view. I see it all the time, especially on LinkedIn, where you have these white hat knights that are like proclaiming stuff, and they have like a sample size of one that probably works mainly because of the authority of that site.

James Duly: Yeah, more so than anything else.

Greg Aling: So I think that's cool you have a research and development team. I know probably like five SEOs who could say that. So you're definitely one of the rare few. Tell me a bit about how you do that. Like how did you structure the research, the R&D team? Like what's their frameworks? Like how do they know to go about breaking something? And with like lead gen for example, like are they setting up like a puppet lead gen website? How does that work with things like GMB, I know that's important with local? So bunch of questions there.

James Duly: It kind of fits into models of where like, do we think it's a false positive? Do we think it actually works? Because if we think that it actually works, I know that's a good idea and I can see why Google would do that—we won't build a new site and do like single variable testing like let's say like what Kyle does and stuff like that. We'll test it on a real site. We'll test it on a site that might be earning 10, 15,000 pound a month that might be ranking for 30, 40,000 keywords. And we might go, I don't know, minute. We think this is going to work. Let's test it. The new tests and stuff from one niche to niche, a different niche, is difficult to track. So we use like SEO testing dot com as being like we set the test up, and then we check in a month, three months, six months. The issue is that it is a live SERP, and sometimes within those testing dates an algorithm update comes along, and it's kind of skewed the data. But we kind of look long term as well of like what's happening.

So like something there's not many people talk about is the random ranking factor. So when you first do something, let's say you go and build a really strong link, when you first build that link, your site could go down before then it jumps up. Or if something happens where they don't really like it, could go up before it goes down. It's called the random ranking factor. They've got a Google patent for it and stuff like that. So it's so difficult to look at it short term. You've got to be looking at things long term. And these times where we've kind of—we don't really like single variable testing. We don't really like just looking at one individual thing. We kind of look—because we've got that many sites, we look at that plus that plus that plus that equals success. OK, why is that not working as well as that one? Because we've got certain sites in certain industries that compete against each other. So we might like, why is that site beating that site when this site's got a better backlink authority or like higher DR? Why is this site winning? And then we might go ahead. We wrote all this content in Market Muse, we wrote all this content in Surfer Pro, we wrote all this content in Page Optimizer Pro, or we cover the topic in its entirety using Keyword Cupid or Keyword Chef or HBS for keyword research, and what gaps are in the content and what internal linking structure we done, a reverse search or done a physical site like we go deep into what's working, looking at a lot of different factors, cuz it's just strange that it's sometimes the what a big bug of mine, which what you mentioned before, was in this industry—what's frustrating for me is the people that are very very good at content try and go down the route of saying you don't need links, content works right? And the people that are really good at links cheap out on the content. And you're like, you need quality content, you need quality links. Stop arguing against each other. It's really simple. These free pillars of SEO: build a site technically well, do good quality content, cover the topic in its entirety, and build links. Stop having this argument that links don't work and you don't need good quality content. Just hit it with links. You do need good quality content. You do need topical authority. You do need a good site structure. But then you need backlinks. Now, yes, there's caveats in certain industries in an easier niche. You might just need content, and you might not need the backlinks, but some people write good quality content they naturally start to acquire links and stuff like so I've seen a lot. Like I'm a big advocate of, let's say Nick Jordan and stuff like that. He builds a lot of sites. My issue sometimes with it—he's building on an existing domain that's already a DR 60, and he's then going writing a lot of great quality content, but it's already on a powerful domain so he already got the link.

Yeah, what I mean. So it's like so this is kind of the pain points for us when we say no, I don't understand why people need to have this argument. Is it this? Is it that? And another one is, what's a stronger signal? I'm not bothered what's a stronger signal. Is it a signal? If it's a signal, I'm going to do it. Just do all the signals holistically. Do everything right, as opposed to but is having this keyword in the H1 more important than the H2 or in the introduction? Well if you get it in all three, as long as you're not over optimising it, get it in all three. Do you know what I mean? Like it's like some people try to overcomplicate things to be, well this works better than that. I'm like, yeah, but if you do that and that it works even better again.

Yeah, I know, but that works better. I'm not bothered like I just want to get to the end goal of ranking number one in Google and don't overcomplicate it. And that's kind of our model within the business—basically let's get it done as quickly as possible and get the number one rankings and then move on to the next site. And then just speed's important especially because the amount of sites that we have, we need to get as quickly as we can to that number one site to the number one position for the keywords that we want. Move on to the next site. We'll track that if ranking start to drop. We'll go back to it. If it doesn't and it remains number one for majority of the keywords we want it to, we just keep it rented out and that's fine. The client's happy to rent it, we're happy with the rental. We don't really—it's in maintenance mode. So there might be little bits of—they might have an occasional backlink here and there. They might have a new article being done, but it's just going through the motions. It's already got the backlinks. It's already the strongest domain that there is. And yeah, that's the model.

But there's still a lot of myths out there where there's still a lot of people have been honest with you Gregory that are selling backlinks that are toxic. People don't even understand what toxic means. People just talk about traffic and HFS and I'm like, right, OK, you want traffic and HFS? I'll tell you what I'll do. So we had a really big client and he was obsessed with traffic and HFS. So I says, give me a domain name for me to buy. So you give me a domain name, I'm not going to share it publicly, but you give me a domain name, and we went and got written 500 AI content, 500 articles that was all error codes on cars right? And telephone numbers. And we got the domain within six weeks to a DR 72, right? This domain—is it crap? I would not want to link from this site, DR 72, and it got a loot of traffic. And I showed him it and I showed him what we'd done, and I says, now will you stop obsessing over traffic and DR? Because this is what the guest post providers are doing. A lot of them are manipulating the traffic, and a lot of them are manipulating the DR. Stop obsessing over it. And he was like, right, OK. Well, tell me what we should do. He ended up spending links and was getting some—there was some links that we'd done was like DR 25, but it was really relevant and it was a trusted link. Did get natural traffic that did send traffic through to his site. It was ranking for certain keywords that he wanted to rank for, and he seen massive gains. And he was like, I cannot believe for so many years I've chased DR. No, don't get me wrong, I love HFS. I'm not talking badly of HFS. It's a good metric to look at as well as other metrics. But when some people just solely look at DR and traffic as being this is my goalpost for links, it's like, well, that's probably why you're not ranking. So that's kind of yeah.

Greg Aling: That's great, man. I love that. I agree. I think DR should be a starting point, but yeah, a lot of good stuff you just said there. I feel like SEO is one of those things as people learn more about it, they overcomplicate it. Like I was in a mastermind at the Chiang Mai Summit earlier this year, and there was this lady she's in the make money online niche like one of the most competitive spaces out there right? And she's making like £188,000 a month from this blog. She knew nothing about SEO. Like the only thing she knew about it was I need good content and I need relevant backlinks and that was it. She treated it like a normal business. Like any of our SEO friends would walk circles around her, and she would freely admit that—that's why she was at the event trying to learn. But I do feel like a lot of SEOs as they learn more, they overcomplicate it. Like you said, you just need good quality content and honestly, if you don't care about making money, you don't need good quality content, like in the example you just gave with the with the DR site, but and then good backlinks, right? So I agree wholeheartedly.

Let's talk a bit about the rank and rent model. So I'm curious on how you get your clients and then maintain them. So you said you have about 800 clients—walk me through a bit of that sales process. How it goes.

James Duly: So it's not as complex as what people try to make out. So many people when they ask me the question or so many people when they're trying to get into this model overcomplicate it now. A caveat to this model that we do is that it costs quite a lot because we enter a lot of niches that don't work. But our model is, or how our model started, was when we used to do a lot of works for schools and colleges and universities. So we started to look what does a school pay for? Like what do they need a service for? It could be windows, building a classroom, roofing, tack, fencing, plumbers, electricians, joiners. We started just kind of thinking, all right, what do they want? Because we wanted to stay in the commercial market, not in the residential. What do home improvements? Now we have moved into home improvements, but initially we wanted to start in the commercial market. In the commercial market, you generally get paid a little bit more than when it's somebody's house. When it's someone's house, a lot of it is about price, and they like quality control needs to be absolutely—but more quality control obviously, I want all my clients to do amazing jobs. But when it's someone's house, they want it to be absolutely perfect, and they want it really cheap. So commercial market I would recommend getting into the commercial market to start with.

But we go broad. So let's say a plumber, and we build the website going like, OK, let's go and build a plumbers website. We know that everyone needs a plumber throughout the UK. So we'll build a site out, and we'll try and build a very big site on plumbing right? Knowing that further down the line we're going to be building micro sites out after it. So we build the site out, and then all what we do is we go anyone who's paying on PPC. So they already know the value of marketing. So anyone who's paying on PPC, let's go and reach out to them, and say, say we're generating leads for what you want. Are you interested in taking the leads completely for free? Or what you need to do is give us a kickback if you secure any jobs. If you don't secure any jobs, you pay us nothing. Well, who's going to say no to that? No one. Everyone's going to say yes to it. So our success rate of when we start speaking to him is like 98% success rate of everyone saying yeah, I'll take the leads all day long.

So then we've got them on board. It's almost like the Twtter wire marketing technique. So you've got them on board. You send them through the leads, and then they start to come back and have a bit of a moan about the quality of the leads because the leads might—but the leads might not be specific for what they do. So it might be like, oh, we go fix a tap and it's up in Scotland and they're based in London and they've got a four hour drive, and they're like, this isn't kind of what we want. We're not competitive enough for this. So then we start to say, where do you make your most profit? Right, because it's fine people doing the traditional keyword research that doesn't tell you where they make profit. And it's fine looking at stuff that get search volume, but that doesn't tell you where they make profit.

So we speak to them and say, where is it that you make profit? So we start building then. We try and build a site that more local to them because we're going on—these are on the ball. These are speaking to the clients. These are dealing with the inquiries. Let's build a dedicated site for products that they make good profit on. And then they start then looking to go, OK, we're interested, but we want exclusive leads. Because initially when we're saying you can get the leads, we'll send it out to 20 different companies. We've never once said it's exclusive. We send it out to as many companies as we can because we want the cream rises to the top. So we want like two or three of those 20 to come back to us with like reports of where it's all up to. Some of them just don't even respond to you. So you're like, we need to get rid of these right? But then we might then from the 20 that vote weeks to start dealing with two or three of them. They might be in different parts of the country. One might specialise in one part of plumbing. Let's say it could be boiler replacement, and they might specifically do boiler replacement. Where another one might be really good at let's say building wet rooms or shower rooms right? So we built a site out for a shower room. And what happened was the plumber was doing these jobs, and he was paying us like £2,000 a month, and he was happy. Pays about £22,000 a month. And then one month he came to us and says, here's £4,500. I was like, who, what's this for? And he says, we've just—that's a fantastic thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Says we've just done a wet room for a guy, and it was 16 different wet rooms that we did. And I'm like, what's a wet room? I don't even know what a wet room is. It was like, it's a shower room, but commercially. So like it's like a big glorified shower. So I was like, right, OK. I didn't even know you did them. So let's build out a site all that specifically if they make more money. Let's build out a site specifically for that. And what you find is like wet rooms—like I'm giving a niche—you, like they're commercial shower rooms. So a plumber generally gets more money for it. So then further down the line, we started to realise that these was very good at DDA compliance like disabled access compliance and stuff like that. So it led them further down the rabbit hole. Then we built out a site for disabled wet rooms, which need like a pull cord, and they've got a few kind of hold on, and it's got to be a wider door or I know they're the experts at doing that. So what you start big, and bit by bit you niche down, niche down, niche down. But you niche down when you've already got the client knowing that they're good, knowing that they deal with the leads, knowing that they're wanting to grow with you, and they're happy to pay like a backend. And that's kind of how we've grown the business.

So we start broad and then bit by bit narrow it down. And here's something for you Greg: if you ask me now the top 50, the top 55 niches that we get paid on, I would not have guessed one of them. Way goes they saw like, I would have started out going roofing, heritage roofing, fencing, joiners, electricians—I would have gone down that route, which is what we did. And it's until you start doing it over a long period of time you start to realise where is it that they make money. It's normally a sub-niche within what they do. And then when you can micro-niche that down, all the videos are about that, all the images are about that, everything is about that one single product. When they actually inquire with you as well—if there's a plumber and there's a disabled wet room supplier and they want a disabled wet room—if they close on price, they'll go with the disabled wet room supplier even though the plumber just does exactly the same job because they feel you're an expert at doing just all your videos are about your images are about everything that you're saying is about, we are an expert disabled wet rooms. We don't do anything else. We just do disabled wet rooms. And then they go, we want to go with you because the expert. And it allows you to actually get away with charging a bit more as well.

Greg Aling: It does. I like this because uh, I'm sure you've heard this in the agency space but the way to build an agency is niche down right?

James Duly: Yeah.

Greg Aling: I have a friend he niches down to dentists, and you know, you think dentist is like, all right, free teeth cleaning or whatever. But he refuses to do anything but one service for dentist, which is I think it's like all in four or something like that. That were like it's a surgery that costs like £105,000. So his dental client like, hey, would you—yeah, yeah, yeah, it's like implants in the teeth. His dentist be like, oh, why won't you run this teeth cleaning ad for me? And he's like, nope, I only serve one client and one service of that client. And is the thing that makes you the most amount of money. If you want to do a teeth cleaning ad, go hire someone else that's not me. So he like forces his clients to also niche down with his paid media, which sounds similar to you.

So let's talk about this. So you start big. You start with one big website. Is this website kind of like a directory website? Like what's the composition of this website that gets things going? How's that set up?

James Duly: That's a great question because we actually start—we initially just started as like a big informational article to see—like obviously there's a lot stuff off at Semrush notes talks a little bit about zero search volume keywords, and it's probably one of the most under talked about things in the SEO industry in my opinion. Like we build out certain sites, and we've got certain keywords that get two, three thousand monthly searches that don't even show up as a keyword in Semrush, and you're like, this is crazy. Like when you start looking at—when you properly niche down, you're like, wow, this gets way more search on than what I ever thought it could get. And some of my sites that are earning 20, 25,000 pound a month you'll load it into HFS and it says it's got zero search traffic value, zero. And it's like a DR 10 search traffic value. But like I won't buy that site for one pound. Do you know what I mean? Like, and it earns—some of them earn like 21, 22K a month. And you're like, what, you know what I mean?

So if you see—we use that at EF. Actually, one of my director of operations, he looked at a new keyword research thing I came up with. He's like, this looks good, but I'm bit concerned about all these keywords with zero search volume. Like, trust me man, if it's best in Google's mind, there is search volume.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So but now we've started to do the directories as well. So what we'll do is we'll load them all—because with the directories you can start ranking for the plural, like best plumbers, not just like the singular ever being best plumber or plumbing company. You can rank for the companies, which also gets quite a bit of search volume. So you could rank for like best plumbing companies in London, and like Clutch do a good job of it, and a few of the directors and stuff, they do a great job of it. BrightLocal do a good job of it, and some of these are earning eight figures a year. Do you know what I mean? So I mean Home Advisor, Angie's List is basically just a fancy directory website, right?

Greg Aling: Same.

James Duly: A lot of people I hear like, oh, directories are dying. No one goes there anymore. But I, like I mean, Home Advisor and Angie's List are massive companies. They're still doing really crazy numbers. What I would say on that is that again, we got told, don't do a directory, it's dead, and like no, it's doing almost better than ever. But here's a caveat: when we did start to look into it, certain very broad topic directories they are dying. So the ones that like, let's say like a Yellow Pages, where they do everything, but then they're not really a master of anything, and the topical authority is not great, they are seem to be dropping down. The ones that literally just say we are a bricklaying directory, they're flying. A plumbing directory, they're flying. When you start going like, we do, you list your site—it doesn't matter what your site is, you can be an SEO agency or an electrician—it's too difficult for the site to have enough backlink velocity going through to how many pages that they have, and it's so broadened all over the place. Those sites do seem to be dropping slightly. But the niche down directories then, yeah, they're doing better than other.

Greg Aling: That makes sense. I like the directory play because one of the issues with rank and rent, like with the individual sites, like there's a bit of that income ceiling, so when it comes to like trying to sell the asset, like really the only person you can sell it to is another rank and rent person, which they're often like suspicious of I'm sure you've seen seen that. Or the actual end client, right? Because like that's the strategic buyer. And like the new buyer can't exactly like, I'm going to drill up these leads way crazier, unless they have some kind of other offer. But a national directory, like that is like no real income ceiling on how you do it, right? So like that has some real valuation value there in this model.

James Duly: Yeah.

Greg Aling: Talk to me a bit about how you do the directory in terms of like, OK, I got this national plumbing directory in the UK or you know, whatever it is. Are you selling like direct listings on that to the end buyer? Or are you using this as just kind of like your top of the funnel lead generator that will eventually get those guys that come in to build a more specific niche site for?

James Duly: To start with, we don't give that much time and effort to it. So we've got our own in-house GMB scraper. So it goes and it scrapes every single GMB that there is for the keywords that we want our niche to be in, um, the industry to be in. We're going extract all that information like the opening times, the telephone number, the address, the name of the company, and the last three reviews if they've got any reviews. If there's any photos, we'll pull the photos in. And we just do basically pull all the information from the GM, the Google Business profiles. We create a dedicated listing for every single one that there is in the UK. And then wherever they're based, we kind of categorise it underneath the counter. So right, OK, they're in greater London, all these are in greater London right? OK, they're in Essex, all these are in Essex. We don't do any unique content. It's just 100% just scrape data and put onto the site.

But then what happens is we've kind of set up our own kind of display ads type market like advertising on the platform of being, do you want to add your personal bio to this page? Which obviously then adds unique content. So it's good for us if they do want to do that. And so once the that part—I would—you want inquiries for? And then we find out what their main services are, so it could be plumbing, our electricians. Do you want free inquiries on your page for plumbing? Would you want us to send it through to you? Now obviously they're going to say yes, of course we want you to send it through to us. Because we normally end up—it's called like brand jacking—we'll now end up ranking like number three or number four behind the brand. So they say yes. We'll write the bio. Also, they write the bio. So now we're getting unique content. And then this sales team then are going back and forth saying, all right, what else is it that you want? Is you got any newer pictures? Have you got a video? And then some of them start saying they're all like no-follow backlinks, or can you change it to a do-follow? And you're going, well, we can't. No. But why do you need to do follow backlink? You're looking for strength. And then we can then try and cross sell them backlinks to our one of our link building agencies and stuff like that.

But then from there, then it just gets the foot in the door to get speaking to him. And then what we do say is, look, I tell you what. If we build you out a lead generation site, we'll make that a do-follow backlink. And it's kind of incentivised in him to say, right, OK. But then also on that page we'll link to this other page as well. And then we'll use that GMB listing on the site. So all of our rank and rent sites are legit businesses that are on the site. We've got a real—we don't fake any address. We don't fake any telephone number. A real business is put on onto the site. So whoever is going to get the exclusive leads, we want to use their address or the home address. Or sometimes they might have three or four different offices. We want to use one of their offices. We want to say this website is going to this company, and we put all their—so we're ticking all the boxes for E-A-T. If they want to complain about anything on the website, they can complain. It's going to go directly through to the company. If the company don't like—yes, the wording is incorrect, you shouldn't be saying this, this is misselling, or whatever, obviously we'll change it straight away. But then we're ticking the box. A lot of people try to build lead generation sites. There's no author. There's no company behind it. There's no no address. There's no telephone number. There's nothing. And Google now is starting to clamp down more and more on the E-A-T signal. So years ago we went down this route of being we need this to look like a real business. Like you've got to treat every single website like a real business. And to be honest with you, we didn't do it from a Google ranking point of view. We did it from a conversion would you inquire on this website, not knowing who you're inquiring to? No. Would you inquire on this site? You've got all the information. Yes. You've got previous jobs that they've done, testimonials, case studies. Yeah, I'm going to go with this site, not this site. So that's the kind of route that we went down, and yeah, it still is in good stead.

Greg Aling: That's awesome, man. I have one more question on this business model, then I want to move into a bit about what you talk about with investing and team building. But you mentioned earlier that you have clients are doing like this pay-per-performance thing, like you only get paid if they make a sale. I personally love this model, but I've always been curious on the logistics of how it works. Like, I have a friend he does e-commerce, like he's an agency owner for e-commerce businesses, and for there it's very clear with the data of like how many sales you're making, it's all in the dashboards. But with these more local businesses who often aren't good with sales and their own processes in general, it's often chaos. Like, how do you go about tracking that? How do you build the trust with that person that they're going to pay you? Because I have another friend, he had a rank and rent website, and he generated this massive pool deal that it should have been like £150K to him personally, and the guy sent him like £2,000 and blocked him, never talked to him again right? So how do you go about securing these kind of deals in a way where you know it works for both parties?

James Duly: So believe it or not, it's not like again, it's not as complex as what people think now. I'm not saying this is the right way, by the way, as well, Gregory, because some people can bite the hand that feeds them, right? So like you're saying there, how naive of that from that swimming pool surround company—is it the lead generation company just got him a lead that he made £50,000 on? He could generate that every couple of months. So why is he paid him £2,000 and then blocked him? His commercial suicide, do you know what I mean? Like, why would you do that? Like you only have to pay on a back end, pay what he's worth. And that's the kind of route of what we go down is being when we first start, we go out to 20 companies, maybe even 30 companies. All 30 companies get the inquiry, right? And it's at that point where we start to realise who's the best company at the conversions because we might speak to the 30 companies as being, did you secure it? Where is it up to? And if someone turns around saying no, they've gone elsewhere, we'll try and fact—you know who they went to? Because then we know which one within the 20 won the job. Yeah. And then and then we can ring them up and say, oh, how did it go? And if they say, oh yeah, we didn't win it on this occasion, you're like, yeah you did, you know what I mean? Then we just going to switch them off. But do you know what? It's so very rare, very very rare that someone doesn't pay you. But what I would say is this is the main argument—not that they don't pay you, but they want to pay you obvious the least the possible can, right? So some might say, we'll pay uh, we won the job with zero pound. And you might go, you've just made 10 grand on that job. Like 10 grand net profit. I think you should be paying us two, three thousand pound. You're still making seven thousand pound that you would not have had. I don't feel that that is right. Any—if you want to pay us that, that's fine, but we're going to switch you off. And now we're going to just now send all the leads. And we'll try and look at the two closest competitors to them and go, we're just going to send it to them. And then straight away they're like, oh no, no, no, OK, yeah. So the sales good at making certain that we get the most out of them. But what's important is that we get a sensible figure that it still keeps them hungry to want to work out our leads. So if we say let's split profit 50/50, sometimes they're doing more work than what we are. I mean, they still got to do all the work. Always in the trade.

Yeah, a lot of them do a 60/40, 70/30 kind of profit share split because they're still making 70% of something that they wouldn't have had, right? And a lot of them now start to understand that. They happily pay it. But the ones that don't are only like small clients that we've not really got the site built up yet to a stage where—because what normally starts to happen is it's a pay on performance model until they've been with us for a while. And then what we end up saying is, look, in the last 12 months you've paid us £50,000, right? The year before you paid us £40,000. I'll tell you what we'll do to keep the model really easy: pay us £3,000 a month as a rank and rent. So it doesn't matter what you convert, pays £3,000 a month. That saves you £14,000 if you do the same as what you did this year next year. And I'm hoping you're going to grow again. And then obviously they snatch our hands off and say, yeah, that's fine. Now we've got them on a monthly recurring revenue stream. So we know exactly it's predictable of what we're going to get paid. And it works well for them because they can budget in knowing what they're doing. And it works well for us. And then it's best of both worlds.

Now obviously some might say, well, why would you do £3,000 a month when you made £50,000? It's just the model of being it's guaranteed, need monthly recurring revenue. Because sometimes you can have it that you don't get paid, don't get paid, don't get paid, you get paid £15,000, you don't get paid, you get paid £20K variation, and it's difficult to know what we can spend on the sites to keep growing it or build a second or a third or a fourth or a fifth site for the client when we've got a monthly recurring revenue model. It's like, right, OK, everything's predictable. We can now move into this. Yes. If they're paying five, six, seven thousand a month, we can build them a third, a fourth, and a fifth site. And it works well for them. It works well for us. We make certain that all of our clients are getting a return on investment. They have to get a return on investment because if they're not, I don't want to work with them. I want them to make certain that when they ring us they enjoy working with us, that it's a good business model for them. But then we know for us that we're good at what we do. It might cost us let's say it cost us £50,000 a rank a website in total is generally where it's at. If we can get three thousand pound a month—well, you tell me any other business model that's going to get you 80% yield, and within 14 months you're going to get your money back? And then after that, you're going to be earning £3,000 a month? There's not that much work after it that needs to be done. It's one of the best business models that there is. I've ever come across, if not the best business model I've ever come across. There is one better business model, and that's when you decide to spend all your wealth buying a business—I, uh, Empire Flippers. But we'll get—yeah, yeah. I'll get on the sales call with you.

Greg Aling: Yeah. I like that, man. I think that switching from performance to retainer makes a lot of sense just from like the logistics of like 800 of these clients to track down all those leads seems like quite the hurdle. So that's cool, man. I want to switch gears because we're getting towards the tone of the show. I still have so much to ask you. You mentioned earlier that you often invest in the businesses you work with. I know you've done that in the internet marketing space. I do. Are you doing that also with the more local lead gen clients as well? Tell me a bit about that side of your business.

James Duly: Yeah. So anything that's an expense to our company from an SEO standpoint of building the content and building the backlinks and technical and stuff like that, I want in on that company. So we were spending, I think it was like £60,000 a month with Searchtrue. We went out to market, and we was using Get Me Links and a lot of other link vendors and stuff like that, but we were spending a lot with Searchtrue because I've invested in him. I'll only invest in a company that I feel generally are the best, and I generally mean that. So we was using them and spending a fortune with him, and I was like, Tom Phillips at the time was like, I'm all right kind of having out. So I bought his 50% share with Kyle Hudson. I wanted to improve quite a lot the quality control in house because then it meant that I got better backlinks for myself, and they still use that model. We still spend 60,000 a month on content and backlinks, but now I feel like the content and the backlinks are better than they ever have been, and I get a cut of the profits of what that business makes as well. So that model works pretty well, and yeah, these like Autoblogging, we've invested into a lot of like other SEO-related industries that we've invested into that we use.

So that's on the acquisitions from internet marketing side of things. And then what starts to happen on the lead gen side is the business owners start to become a little bit uncomfortable because they feel like they've built their business on quicksand, and I can kind of understand it because I own the website that's generating them all the inquiries. And at any point I could, if I wanted to, switch them off. So I've started to get a little bit of a problem where one or two clients have started to come to me. And I've started to realise that with a lot of power comes a lot of responsibility. And it's not about me, and the way I work. It's me instilling into my team the way they work, that have to do business with honest trust and integrity. You can't just expect because someone comes along and says I'll pay an extra £2,200 a month, and someone says, oh, well, they're getting £3,000, I give you £3,200, to switch them off when they've been with us for five years and they've built up a big team relying on them inquiries.

So what starts to happen is some of these starts come a little bit uncomfortable. They might have gone from two vans on the road to 25 vans on the road, and they might have 60 members of staff that they would need to get rid of if we stop the inquiries. And that's 60 potential mortgages, families that could be destroyed. So a lot of the time, they end up saying, would you be interested in becoming an investor or shareholder within the business? As long as you give us exclusivity. I'm like, we already give you exclusivity of the leads. I mean like that, you won't switch us off. I'm like, I told you we're not going to switch you off. And they're like, I know, but let's just get something contractually down. So I'll look at their business model, and that's sometimes then when we start to say yes, I will, as long as I can employ someone to initially deal with the leads. Because something that we've got within our businesses, when an inquiry comes in, we have KPIs to get back to that inquiry within 23 seconds. And that's what I want for the businesses.

So we own a call centre as well, like in the finance sector. So like an inquiry comes in, 23 seconds. If we do not get all of them within 23 seconds, and let's say it's a mortgage broker and they're speaking to somebody else, that lead's gone. We run our test on it. The minute goes past a minute—this isn't for all industries obviously—but the minute goes past a minute for financial advice or mortgage brokers and stuff like that, you've got 50% less chance than what you had to convert that inquiry.

Greg Aling: That's so wild. It's so true. I see it with leads like lead forms for example. Like if you don't call that person back right away, they have completely forgot they even filled out a lead form. They have no why are you calling me? Like you literally filled out the form.

James Duly: Yeah. Also what happens as well is that let's say in PPC, they'll fill out the form three times. And once you've spoke to an independent mortgage broker that says to me I can go to any lender you want, and I can get you the best rate, and I've been speaking to you for 40 minutes, when the next mortgage broker rings me up, I'm like, I've already had it sorted, mate. I'm done. So the first person to get hold of them wins. Now there's times that we might not want to be on the bidding process—this is a away for Messi on PPC—we might want to be showing position number three or position number four because it's cheaper for the clicks that we might be want to be on there. But then try to go, soon as that inquiry comes in, we get it, and we kind of get in touch with him before the number one company who's ranking number one in Google. So we're all—we've got him on the phone, we've won it, and we've realised if we ring him within 23 seconds, nine times out of 10, we're the first person to ring him, which—beat being number one in the SERPs like on pay-per-click. PPC is funny in that way. It's like one of the rare forms of marketing you don't want to be at the top of sometimes.

Greg Aling: Yeah, yeah. That's cool, man. About the call centre and everything. I feel like that opens up a whole new can of worms, but we're coming up on the final about 12 minutes or so. And I did want to talk about your team building structure, so I've met a lot of people over the years in SEO, with my time at Empire Flippers—you know, most of them are really bad at managing teams. Like that's the number one advice I always give to entrepreneurs: get better at managing teams. But you—you're like the outlier. Like I don't think I know someone who has so many talented people working for you. So talk to me about that process. How did you do that? How do you incentivise them to stay with you? And all that good stuff.

James Duly: So I've had some very, very, very good mentors over the year. So let's say like Matt Singer. Matt Singer is a great manager. And sometimes I'll speak to him, and he might only be a different conversation—could be in the pub when we're talking, and he could be saying, you should be trying this, and you should be doing that. But in my opinion, the best investment you can do, the best investment I have done, is in the people that work with me. That's the best investment I can do. Forget the content, the backlinks, the websites, the businesses we work for. If you get good quality people around you and encourage you, give them enough space for them to kind of grow and feel like they're growing and they're doing their work thing, they will do everything for you. They will honestly. They'll work 14 hour days, seven days a week, if you ask them to. Now I don't expect that, but if they wanted to do that, if there was something like an algorithm update comes along, that's what they'll do. And investing in that, in the people around you, in my opinion, people like you were saying in the industry—they don't do it enough.

So when we first started out, rolling back and now try and do it as quick as we can—so when we first started out, we employed SEO gurus, SEO experts. Nah, it didn't work. The um, you can't teach an old dog new tricks. It's a classic saying. They think they know best. You try and educate them. They don't listen. No, didn't work. So we started out with just hiring apprentices that didn't know. They knew very little, but they listen to you like a sponge. Everything that you said was driven by data that we had from testing. And we said, you do it this way. And when they're seeing results happening, they don't need to spend loads of time doing research himself or watching videos about how do you rank? And it's like, we don't need to do that. We're telling you, we've got the blueprint. This is how you rank. And we, like, right, OK. So at that point then my kind of role now within the business is being a cultural architect. So keeping the culture, keeping the people around me happy, making certain that if they're too busy, they've got enough vas or staff that can fulfil the day-to-day jobs to do the work. Let them blossom. Let them build their own assets. Any b within the company that comes up with a new idea that builds out a site, they get 25% of the site. Even though they don't pay anything towards the site and the content and on the links. So they're growing their own asset value up. And yeah, that's kind of the model between it.

And what I have been different 14 years ago when I was skin in doing this model, I might have been a bit like, oh, I'm going to give you 10% or something. But I feel like now I've made a lot of money in this industry, and I feel like I am a little bit of a philanthropist where I'm giving back to others, and I want to elevate others, and I want others to do well. And sometimes I get more of a kick out of one or two of my directors or one or two of my members of staff or one or two of my business partners growing out of sight with me as well. But grow out of sight and then being so happy makes me even happier. If you get what I mean. Now I don't—that being grained in the heart and the way being brought up, I don't know. I don't know the psychological mindset behind it, but it's almost like when you're at Christmas, I prefer giving a present than receiving a present. If that makes sense. And it's the same kind of model as that. And I love seeing the people around me do well. I love elevating others as best I can.

That was another reason why I didn't always like going on to podcasts and doing stuff like this because I wanted to make certain before I did anything I elevated my own team. And my own team—they won't go anywhere. They might go and do their own things as well, but they'll always work with me. And I know that they always work with me because they're well looked after. They can do their own things if they want to. They can go flock the nest and do whatever they want to do. They're happy. They understand that money isn't everything, and it's more about the journey and the happiness that comes with it. But they do want to see growth, and they see growth every single year.

Greg Aling: That's kind of amazing, man. I'm also very similar to you on that front. Like I loved seeing—from my own perspective, like as when a seller sells like a seven-figure business with us—like the life-changing story that comes with it's amazing. I'm also like you in terms of I prefer giving gifts at Christmas than receiving to the point now where like my sister, she got a brand new iPad for my parents, and my parents gave me a pair of double A batteries because they're like, well, we know you just don't care. Like, oh, thanks. I love these batteries. I actually needed it for for my remote controller. So thank you.

Yeah, so I'm very similar in that regard. There was something you said there that I think is extremely important to kind of double click on, which is letting people feel like they are growing. And I think part of that is having that feeling of agency. So like at EF, for example, like obviously Justin was my mentor. I was his apprentice, and a similar setup of what you guys had going on. Eventually though, like just kind of backed out—not that we don't talk anymore. He's like one of my best friends. But like he just kind of lets me do my own thing. And I think that gives me and probably other people in your team that sense of agency, of control, which is way more valuable, as far as like management studies go, for retention, like employee retention. Like you found compensation is like good, but it's like brushing your teeth. As long as the hygiene is good, that's all that matters. Anything over that is kind of like overkill usually. But that sense of agency is really important. I think a lot of entrepreneurs are afraid of that though. Like an entrepreneur who's say he's building out an affiliate site or e-commerce store or whatever, yeah, this person wants to go do their own project. I think the general tendency is the entrepreneur is like, no, I need to stop this from happening. Like, what do you recommend to the entrepreneur to get over that kind of anxiety of letting their employees kind of—

James Duly: I think the hard thing is I think it's ingrained into certain personality traits. If I'm being honest, certain people are better not having a team. And people might not like me hearing that, and some people go, oh, like, you need to have a team to grow big, and stuff like that. But some people generally speaking, the people that feel—when I speak to people, majority of the time, when they don't want to elevate others within the team, is the worried that they will go off and nick all the processes and systems and go and do it himself, right? That's what they're worried about.

But they're worried about that because that's probably what they did. And it's like, kind of—if you keep claiming that your mum is cheating on you, it's probably because you're saying it because you're cheating on her, do you know what I mean? Kind of. If you actually educate the people, if they are—let's say you're an apprentice, and you educate them about honest, trust and integrity, and look, if you want to go and do your own thing at any point, go and do it. But the grass isn't always greener. Why don't we roll ask lead up together? And why don't I do everything I can for you to do better? And it means that the business will do better, and it means that everyone does better, and we enjoy the journey. That's what life is about. You go do your own thing and make five million quid. That's fine. But you know what, in 10 years' time, you'll regret it because yes, you've got a lot of money, but you'll start going, do you know what? I trampled on a lot of people for me to make my money. And I've known some people sell up for 30, 40 million, and within six months they've killed themselves because they've realised it was almost like dirty money of what they made, and it was like, and they didn't feel proud of it. They felt a massive hole in what they was doing. And it's sad because certain people chase success from a monetary value, and it's the worst thing that you can do. Because if you try and chase success by money, it's just wrong. Like, you need to enjoy trying to achieve goals and just keep celebrating those little mini wins. And that's that's what the team do as well now. The team do at as well go slow. Oh yeah.

Greg Aling: I 100% agree. I think chasing money is kind of a fool's game. It's the newbie starting out like, oh, I want the Lambo. Versus like the richest people I know, like I have a friend who sold his business for £200 million—completely bootstrap, no VC, nothing. And the dude is just like a really chill, normal guy. Like he was like, I man, I thought I was going to get into wicked shape once I sold £200 million. Turns out I can just go to McDonald's a lot more often, you know, like, really just a really cool dude. But it wasn't ever about the money for him, like, obviously that's great, but it was about the value. And I think that more artistic side of entrepreneurship is probably the healthier side versus our grind set hustle core culture that some of our entrepreneur friends have. Like, you know these people too because I know we're mutual friends with them. I won't bring up their names, but I'm sure you've met many people like this. But I have friends in our space who won't even like go see a movie or play a video game because like, no, I have to be productive all the time. Like, well, you know, you're telling me this right now at 2 am in a bar in Bangkok, right? What do you mean? Like, go enjoy life, like, what are you talking about? So like this quest for money is sometimes a foolish errand versus a quest for value. I think is more important.

All right, James, we're at the very end. So I have three quick fire questions for you. Are you ready?

James Duly: Yeah, let's go for it.

Greg Aling: All right, man. In your view, what are the best hidden growth opportunities for SEO today?

James Duly: I'd say parasite SEO is great. If you get instant wins quickly, get sites done on a high DR site, hit it with a couple of T2 backlinks, and that's working the best at present. It might not do in a few months, but at present that's the best way of generating quick traffic, a quicker side on.

Greg Aling: Are you using parasites for your local lead gen as well? Or more for the other stuff?

James Duly: No, like what we end up doing is doing like a best plumbing companies, trying to rank for that term, like almost like the directory site. And we link to like five of our different sites. So we'll put us number one, us number two, us number three, us number four, number five. And that's kind of on that. And you get in five lots of backlinks to different sites as well. And stuff like that. So there's a very smart way to do that.

Greg Aling: I like that. What tools or resources can entrepreneurs use to help them improve their SEO?

James Duly: Just the basic ones that everyone knows, like Screaming Frog, Market Moves, Surfer SEO. We use Autoblogging. I've invested into it for mass scale of AI content for like supporting documents and stuff like that. They're the main ones really. You don't really need many after that. Like Semrush and stuff like that. It's just the generic ones with needed. Yeah.

Greg Aling: I hung out with one of the founders of Autoblogging last week in Manila, so yeah, that was cool to see them there. Saw very cool guy.

James Duly: Yeah, when I first invested into the business, I knew the tool was amazing. I was a little bit worried. I knew him. I didn't really know his work ethic or anything. He grafts. The minute something he's changing and improving, he wants to improve at every single day. So yeah, great mentality. He's a really, really cool guy. RA Sada. I'd recommend some people following him. He's a cool guy, very cool dude.

Greg Aling: All right. My final question for you, and the hardest question—this doesn't make me laugh, James. I might not publish this episode, so be careful. What has been your funniest moment working with SEO?

James Duly: Oh God, there's too many. Funniest moment where you guys to rankings of websites or ranking of stuff that I've done—either it could be both. You can tell too. I'll—we went down a rabbit hole, and we had a big site absolutely tank. We all gave up. We went out to every man in his dog. We was like, literally every single person I could speak to that was high level. I'm speaking to him, what's going on here? The R&D testing team are on it, and Kazra set the site to no index. Oh, that was Kazra. He thought it was on a stage in server for some building another site, and he set the site to no index. And I'm running around all over the place. I can't believe it. What's going on? And then yeah, my bad. You set my sight to no index after just this. I'll just throw Kazra. Oh. That's what really—why I brought you on here to see if we couldn't insult Kazra in some way so that way I could tell him like, yo, James was just on the podcast, and we talked about you, and you'll have to listen to the very end. And it's just us making fun of. Tell where it is. I'll wait right till the end.

Oh, sometimes do that with people that come on the podcast. Like, who do you know that's a social influencer so we could bring up their name like once? And I could reach out to them and let them know we talked about. But yeah, that's great. We actually had a very similar thing. We had this big issue where we saw this drop in in organic rankings very briefly. We figured it out quite quick, but we were looking everywhere, man, and then we realised what it was. Our developer had accidentally no index like 2,000 pages. We asked him to like delist or no index these certain types of pages, so he did this like mass de-indexation, but included all this other stuff. Like, oh no, no, don't do that report.

Yeah, that's definitely a mistake that could happen to even seasoned pros, right?

Sure. Awesome, man. Well, this was an absolute pleasure. I'm so glad we finally got to do this. You know, you're someone I've looked up to for a very long time in the industry. I first met you way back at Chang, my SEO. I saw you post that video the other day on Facebook. I could see my young self in the background, just like, oh man, this guy is cool. So it's always been a pleasure, my friend.

For anyone that wants to follow you and connect with you, where's the best place for them to go do that?

James Duly: I'm on all the social networks, so mainly Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. You can find them all on James Duly dot com. So that's all the profiles are on there and stuff like that. So I'm going to be doing quite a few more of the personal branding side of things now, so yeah, I'm quite active on social media. So—

Greg Aling: Great. I will start sending you like a few hundred Empire Flippers shirts every month so every video, podcast you do, just always write your shirt from me. Give me some. I in wear it.

James Duly: Awesome. I'll give you a few hundred in shirts. Don't you worry about all right, man. Take it easy.

Greg Aling: Great.

James Duly: Cheers, mate.

Greg Aling: Cheers there you have it. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope it got you inspired at all the different things that are happening in this industry. And of course, if you just want to buy a highly profitable business, you can always go to empireflippers.com/marketplace, or maybe you want to make an exit of your highly profitable business, and you could go to empireflippers.com/sell-your-site. I've been your host, Greg. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure you leave a review, give us a like, a follow, share it across social media. Talk to you all soon. See you on the next episode.