James Dooley Podcast

James Dooley and Kasra Dash explain how excavation companies scale because SEO builds long term authority while exclusive leads remove wasted spend. They show that PPC drains budgets because click fraud and window shoppers burn ad costs. They highlight why retargeting videos convert better because trust signals reassure undecided buyers. They stress that dedicated service pages increase rankings because Google needs clear topical relevance.

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.

Kasra Dash: so I have just bought an excavator and I need a consistent flow of inquiries to grow my business what do you recommend
James Dooley: so if you're an excavation company and you're looking to grow there's lots of different types of excavators diggers dumpers ground works I would want to know a lot more of exactly what type of work that makes you the most profit right okay right and then once you've got that a fractional CMO or someone that can just help you out with your marketing overall can start to look at different Avenues whether that's traditional marketing I'm not a massive fan but traditional marketing could be Billboards TV radio magazines whether it's PPC to pay to be the top of Google SEO search engine optimization in trying to rank your website higher I'm a massive fan of that there's many reasons why which kazra can touch on in a minute um then you've got social media so consistently posting on social media social media advertising that you can do whether that's like Facebook ads Instagram ads YouTube advertising stuff like that um and obviously lead generation yeah so over at fat rank.com we do a lot of escavation leads groundw Works leads Landscaping leads Digger and dumper man with a van um type leads man with um an man in an excavator type leads so all like removal of um Deb skip higher and all that a lot of all this kind of Falls underneath the excavation and ground Works kind of industry so at fat rank we do a lot of the lead generation for that and the good part is that we guarantee a return on investment so with regards to the guaranteed the return on investment you're only paying converted jobs so some of the kind of stuff we're going to touch upon now with regards to SEO and PPC all this can be done for you and you're only paying converted jobs the only Carri out to this is don't 100% put all your eggs in fat ranks basket just for as being the sole method of generating your leads that should just only be one method to help you grow your escavation company there is others what's your thoughts then let's touch upon other lead generation companies like back check a trade build a builder Yellow Pages advertising
Kasra Dash: yeah so the the issue that I've had with those businesses before is obviously they they resell the lead I I don't know if if any of you guys know that but for example if excavation company one purchases that lead for let's say1 or50 or whatever or 50 credits um that same exact lead gets sold to let's say four different companies so it's not an exclusive lead and that that's the only Annoying Thing so then that basically means that you are basically driving down your price so whoever has the cheapest price ends up winning um so that that's issue number number one then issue number two is sometimes you actually purchase the lead and you can't even get get hold of that person so you've just wasted a load of money um this is kind of similar to PPC as well I like we've spoken about this before um I'm not a big fan of PPC uh mainly for that reason first of all you need you need somebody fulltime in the actual ad account making certain that they are adding negative keywords to the list um then you've obviously got the likes of Click fraud so for example you can competitors can literally just be clicking on your ads and burning your budget every single day um and then further of all you've got while it's called Window Shopper so for example they've just clicked three different ads and they're just looking around for for an actual price um and they're not actually fully invested into into your actual service so I would look to avoid those two I mean you you can definitely test out right but for me I'm I'm I'm avoiding that um a much safer strategy is probably SEO um actually ranking your website organically um obviously there are a lot of cowboy SEO agencies so if you guys do want a trusted SEO Agency contact us and we we can guide you depending on what your services are and where you're based and stuff we we've got a handful of different SEO agencies that we can help you out on with that but if you're going to do it yourself what I would be looking to do is list a load of services that you provide so for example excavation groundwork drainage grab hire civil um engineering Etc list all of these as actual services that you want to offer on your website and then create SE optimized content for each of those um Services a lot of business owners they don't actually create dedicated Pages I'm not certain why um but if you don't actually have dedicated pages on your website Google won't know that you actually provide that as a service and they won't rank you for that keyword um so look to do that um another play that you could probably do as well is Facebook retargeting so anybody that lands on your website might never or let's say 100 people visit your website all 100 people will not convert into actual leads so what we wanted to try to do is actually retarget those people the next time to go on Facebook and also Instagram it's called me ads and you can set up a pixel on your website to say anybody that visits my website site and doesn't inquire with me I want to show them these ads over here for the next 30 days or for the next seven days or whatever and that's just another way of getting people back on to your website The Good the good thing about doing the retargeting ads is that they might not have enquired with you initially because they might not have felt you might not be the right company because they might they might be lacking in certain trust signals so if you start to retarget them with certain videos of jobs that you've done or video testimonials or case studies is that might reemphasize that trust to say okay I'm going to go back to that site and now inquire they do look like a good business so that ring for me is is a huge huge play but also one big one is that if you are an excavation company and a ground work company and you are looking to grow do not obsess too much on the return on investment from SEO specifically SEO specifically is there to also do your brand building and Trust so that when you are buying leads from a lead generation company or you're getting the leads let's say from fat rank.com that you've got better chances of of converting those inquiries because if someone's looking at your brand online you've got a positive branding you've got lots of five star reviews and all the rest of it you got lots of videos and nice images of you digging certain jobs out and stuff like that so I'd strongly recommend on having some sort of budget for search engine optimization to try to get high rankings but also the major play for this is that if you can show potential investors or if you're ever looking to sell your escavation and ground Works company that if you're generating your own leads from your own website you will get a much higher multiplayer and a lot of people don't talk about that and understand that when you start to understand you're getting a higher multiplier you should be running SEO alongside buying leads wherever it's from people PC or whether it's from a lead generation company where they're giving you a consistent flow of inquiries that keeps you busy SEO is the long-term play you're going to keep trying to build it up and build it up for conversion but also if you can start generating your own leads that's the Holy Grail of owning an excavation company so if you want help grow your excavation company make certain to check out the link Down Below in the description or head over to fat rank.com