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In this episode of the James Dooley Podcast, Chris Tzitzis and Nick Altimore from SirLinksalot sit down with digital landlord James Dooley to reveal what it truly takes to operate rank-and-rent at massive scale. James breaks down how he built and monetized hundreds of high-value websites, transitioned from early black-hat tactics to clean, sustainable systems, and developed a multi-department operation that includes content teams, link teams, apprentices, and even a fully staffed call center.
The conversation explores the processes behind his topical authority frameworks, link-building methodology, in-house testing lab, and the SOPs that allow him to scale across countless niches. Chris, Nick, and James also dive into managing local business relationships, creating predictable lead-gen revenue, cross-selling opportunities, recovering from algorithm updates, and adapting rank-and-rent models to AI-driven search and Google’s evolving rules.
Packed with behind-the-scenes detail, this episode offers one of the most transparent looks into how a top-tier rank-and-rent empire is really built — and how to future-proof your SEO business in a rapidly changing landscape.
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.
Chris Tzitzis:
All right everyone, welcome back to another SirLinksalot podcast. We’re here today with Mr. James Dooley. How are you doing today, sir?
James Dooley:
I’m all good, thank you very much.
Chris Tzitzis:
Awesome. And how are you doing today, Nick?
Nick Altimore:
I cannot complain. Pretty excited about getting to talk to the “party master of SEO” I’ve heard about for all these years. I’m also excited about meeting you out in Chiang Mai for sure, but thanks for being on the podcast — really excited about this.
James Dooley:
Yeah, it’s a pleasure to be on. I’ve followed you two guys and SirLinksalot for quite a long time.
Chris Tzitzis:
Awesome.
So, if you’re unfamiliar with James Dooley: he’s the CEO of PromoSEO, the founder of FatRank, a self-proclaimed digital landlord with 600+ websites under management, and he’s had big success in the casino and gambling niches as well. You also might have seen him all over other podcasts recently — seems like you’ve been doing the rounds.
Did I miss anything important there?
James Dooley:
No, you’ve got the majority of it. I own one or two other service-based businesses as well, but yeah, that’s the crux of what I do. And yeah — I’m a bit of a podcast slag at the moment.
Chris Tzitzis:
Love it. Glad to have you on.
We wanted you here because we get a lot of questions in our Facebook group (SEO Round Table) and on our YouTube live streams about rank and rent. I believe Nick has a bit of experience with it from a while ago, and I have none.
Nick?
Nick Altimore:
Yeah, I’ve tried rank and rent a few times and failed every single time, so it’s not my favourite model. I’m excited to hear some tips and tricks, and I know our viewers are too.
What Is Rank & Rent?
Chris Tzitzis:
So, to start things off: can you briefly describe what rank and rent is?
James Dooley:
Rank and rent is where you:
Build a website
Rank it in Google
Rent it out to a business that wants the leads
You pick industries where, if you generated leads, someone would be willing to pay for them. Most people start with lead generation (charging per lead) and then later transition that into a rank and rent model.
The big reason for moving to rank and rent is predictable income. With cost-per-lead, the revenue can go up and down, and it’s a lot more work to manage. Rank and rent gives you a flat monthly fee.
How the Rent Part Works
Chris Tzitzis:
When someone “rents” a website, what does that actually mean in practice?
James Dooley:
At first, when you’re doing lead gen, it’s almost like client SEO. The client is constantly calling:
“I got an enquiry but they didn’t answer, I’m not paying.”
“I got a competitor as a lead, I’m not paying.”
“The name is Mickey Mouse, I’m not paying.”
Online, usually 10–20% of leads are:
Unanswered
Fake
Spam (e.g. “Do you want to buy guest posts?”)
So you need a sales/admin team to process and validate leads, refund bad ones, log everything — it becomes heavy operationally.
Once a client has been with you a while and they’re used to, say, paying £5,000/month in leads, you can say:
“Instead of paying per lead, why don’t you rent the site for £4,000/month flat?”
They’re happy because it’s cheaper and they know it works. We’re happy because:
We don’t need to validate every single lead
We have predictable recurring revenue
There’s less management and fewer arguments
Phone Numbers, Tracking & Ownership
Nick Altimore:
So when they rent it, do you swap in their phone number and details on the site, or how does that work?
James Dooley:
We usually use a call tracking solution like Twilio, CallRail, or Invoco. We:
Rent a local number (e.g. 0161 for Manchester)
Forward that to the client’s office or mobile
We generally don’t hard-code their own number into the site because if they stop working with us or go bust, we’d lose that number on all the citations and directories. Using a number we control maintains ownership of the asset.
Once they’ve been with us for a while and trust is built, we’ll start:
Using their address on the site
Adding their photos, videos, and job examples
Putting their staff on the “Meet the Team” page
Linking to their LinkedIn / Twitter profiles
So we tick E-E-A-T boxes: real people, real business, real location. And they get exclusive leads.
The Path: SEO → Lead Gen → Rank & Rent
Nick Altimore:
So your basic process is:
Rank a website
Start doing lead gen (charging per lead)
Then sweeten the deal and turn it into a rank & rent arrangement
Then deepen the partnership and add their brand/personnel to the site
Is that right?
James Dooley:
Exactly.
You can’t usually go straight to “Hey, rent my site for £2,000/month” when they have no idea:
What traffic you’re getting
What type of enquiries you get
How well they’ll convert
Start with performance-based (per lead or % of job), prove the value, then move them over to a fixed rent lower than they were paying in total. It feels like a win for them and gives stability to you.
Once trust is there, they start sharing the really juicy keywords and niches that make them big money.
Finding Profitable Sub-Niches
Chris Tzitzis:
You mentioned those “juicy” keywords. Tools like Ahrefs or Semrush don’t reveal all these micro-niches. How do you actually find them?
James Dooley:
By talking to the business owner.
Example: you build a generic roofing site.
Soon you learn there isn’t just “roofing” — there’s:
Flat roofing
Pitched roofing
Slate roofing
Heritage roofing
Biodiverse roofs
Commercial vs residential, etc.
One roofer might say:
“We’re terrible at flat roofs, but we’re amazing at slate heritage roofs for churches.”
Churches usually have good budgets, and this is a very specific, profitable niche. You won’t find that clearly just by sorting keywords by CPC in a tool.
Another example: plumbers and wet rooms.
One plumber paid us a big commission one month. I asked why. He said:
“We did a wet room job.”
I didn’t even know he did wet rooms. Then he explained:
Most shower rooms are residential and lower ticket
Wet rooms, especially disabled wet rooms, are often commercial (gyms, hotels, etc.) and pay more
Disabled wet rooms also require specific regulations — wider doors, pull cords, etc. — which reduces competition
That’s a high value micro-niche: “disabled wet rooms”. You won’t get that from keyword tools; you get it from proper conversations and asking:
“What makes you the most money, and what are you best at?”
Portfolio Size & Scale
Chris Tzitzis:
Can you give us a sense of your current portfolio and team size?
James Dooley:
We’ve built around 1,200 websites in total.
Roughly 850 of those earn money in some way (lead gen, rank & rent, or display ads).
Around 650 are on rank & rent deals.
Deals can range from:
£200–£300/month on small sites
Up to £25,000/month or more on big ones
Costs vary too:
A smaller local site might cost £5,000 to rank
A big national finance site might cost £200,000 to rank
We’ve failed a lot over the years, but now local SEO for lead gen is pretty predictable if you:
Build a technically solid site (fast, no errors, converts)
Add strong E-E-A-T
Build good content and topical clusters
Build links
If you skip one of those pillars, you’ll struggle.
Link Building Approach
Chris Tzitzis:
Your link building method sounds similar to what we teach. Can you walk through it?
James Dooley:
Sure. We:
Build good content and topical authority
Use foundational links and citations to the homepage with branded and naked anchors
Add some PBNs and guest posts to the homepage for power and relevance
Push category pages and pillar pages with guest posts and niche edits
Only later do we hit money pages directly with links, and we’re selective when we do
We also like to:
Treat guest posts as parasite pages — rank them for the same keywords as our money pages
Build tier 2 links (mainly niche edits) to those guest posts to power them up
Mention the author and link back to author / team profiles to support E-E-A-T
There’s no secret “knowledge bomb” — it’s doing all the right things properly, consistently. People hate that answer, but that’s the truth.
Call Center & Handling Volume
Nick Altimore:
Your model reminds me of where I started — a big rank-and-rent company with a large call center. What does your call center setup look like?
James Dooley:
We own our own call center.
We don’t do cold calling
We handle inbound leads and very fast follow-up
KPIs:
When a form is filled, we call back within 23 seconds
For many niches, that speed means we’ve:
Spoken to the lead
Qualified them
Sometimes even sent a quote
…before any competitors have even replied.
We’ve got:
A main call center near Manchester (Wythenshawe / Levenshulme area)
An overflow call center in the Philippines for night shifts
90–120 staff in the call center at any given time
For some companies where I’m an investor, we even:
Take the initial calls
Do basic fact-finding
Sometimes even handle the quoting process
So we turn cold web leads into hot, qualified leads.
GMB / GBP Strategy
Chris Tzitzis:
What about Google My Business / Google Business Profiles?
James Dooley:
Over the years, we’ve had tons of issues with fake GMBs:
Mass-creating listings
Verifying them
Then losing them to suspension, usually just when they started to rank
You end up spending loads on citations, photos, posts — then it all gets wiped. Some people even Photoshop documents to try to re-verify — that’s fraud, and Google has prosecuted people for it.
So now:
If the client has a GMB, we use and support their listing
If they let us use their real address, we may create one legitimately
We don’t fake addresses, forge docs, or mass-create spam GMBs
I’ve moved very white-hat on that front because I want long-term, sustainable assets, not constant suspension risk and legal exposure.
Finding Clients for Leads
Nick Altimore:
How do you find clients to sell leads to, especially at the beginning?
James Dooley:
Let’s say we build a roofing site.
We then find every company spending money on roofing advertising:
Google Ads (PPC)
Yellow Pages premium listings
Checkatrade
Newspaper ads
Radio ads
Anyone already paying to get roofing jobs is a potential client.
We contact them with:
“We can send you roofing leads. You don’t pay upfront. When you win one of our leads, just add 5% to your quote and pay us that.”
So:
If it’s a £10,000 job, they quote £10,500
If they win it, they pay us £500
If they don’t win, they pay nothing
When you send a lead to, say, 30 companies, the ones that consistently win the jobs are your best converters. You then:
Focus more leads on them
Build a deeper relationship
Eventually pitch rank & rent or partnership/investment
You’ll have to kiss a lot of frogs — many companies will complain or won’t track leads. But the ones who:
Log every enquiry
Track where it came from
Track commission or margin
…those are the ones worth building with.
Ethics, Responsibility & Karma
Nick Altimore:
You’ve hinted at a big moral responsibility in your model.
James Dooley:
Yeah. For some clients:
We’ve grown them from 2 vans to 25 vans
That’s maybe 60+ staff on the road
If I suddenly switched off that site, that’s 60 families potentially struggling to pay the mortgage.
We also get competitors trying to poach the asset:
“How much is Chris paying? I’ll pay you 20% more.”
And I could earn more by switching them. But that’s not right.
We built that business together. There may be no strict contract, but there’s a moral contract. My team also know:
The right thing is not always the most profitable thing.
I’m a big believer in karma. I hate seeing people screw others over just to make a quick buck. You might gain short term, but it comes back around.
Threats & The Future of Rank & Rent
Chris Tzitzis:
Do you see any big problems ahead for the rank & rent model?
James Dooley:
There are always threats:
Algorithm updates
SGE / AI search
Competitors overtaking you
But that’s true for any SEO-based model:
Affiliate
E-commerce
SaaS
Lead gen
Rank & rent
Growth is never linear. It’s not a straight line — it’s peaks and troughs.
If my site drops, Google still needs to rank something. So whoever replaces me must be better in some way. When that happens, I:
Reverse engineer what they’ve done
Adapt
Work to overtake them again
On SGE / AI:
I think informational sites relying only on display ads are going to get hit hardest
Many “how to” / low-intent queries will be answered directly in AI boxes
But local, commercial lead gen will still be needed — people still need real-world services
For high-traffic display sites, there are many more ways to monetize beyond just ads — affiliate, lead gen, email, retargeting, etc.
I’m not losing sleep. Whatever changes, we’ll adapt — that’s what we’ve done for 12–13 years.
Scaling & Systems
Nick Altimore:
Besides “work 23 hours a day”, what’s your real secret to scaling your rank & rent empire?
James Dooley:
First of all, I don’t work 23 hours a day now — I’ve got kids and want to be a great dad.
My current structure:
Up at 5 a.m., into the office
5–9 a.m.: deep work (no distractions)
Late morning: working with the team, middle managers, etc.
Midday: gym
Afternoons: family time — bike rides, time with the kids
The two biggest things that have allowed us to scale:
Brilliant staff
Most started as apprentices, with no experience
Six former apprentices are now directors
They’re building their own “mini empires” within the business
Extremely tight SOPs
We have around 118 SOPs
Each one is step-by-step: keyword research, content briefs, link orders, domain buying, etc.
We have two staff whose only job is to constantly improve and shorten SOPs
If a video is 4 minutes and can be 90 seconds, we redo it
Saving 30 seconds × 100 people × hundreds of views = huge time savings
On top of that, we have a dedicated R&D testing team:
They test everything — links, AI content, anchors, structures, etc.
When someone says “PBNs are insane right now,” we test, we don’t just parrot it
We’re always pushing the boundaries to see what still works
I’m nothing without my team. My main role now is being a cultural architect: keeping everyone aligned, motivated, and doing things the right way.
Wrapping Up
Chris Tzitzis:
That’s awesome. We’ve covered a lot. It’s been super educational for me and I’m sure for Nick too.
What are your plans for the year? Are you extending the podcast circuit into a speaking circuit?
James Dooley:
I attend a lot of events and I love masterminds more than formal talks. I prefer:
Interactive sessions
Deep dives and open Q&A
Adapting what I talk about to the level of the room
I’m also building a personal brand because I think as AI grows, personal brands will become more important. I’m going to:
Be more active on social media
Do more podcasts
Focus on short-form content over long-form videos
I’m not really selling anything. I just like helping people and elevating others — even though, technically, I’m creating more competition for myself by talking about rank and rent.
Nick Altimore:
I’d highly advise anyone watching this not to go directly up against the famous James Dooley — he’ll probably whoop your ass.
We’re looking forward to seeing you out at Chiang Mai.
Where can people find you and follow along?
James Dooley:
The easiest place is JamesDooley.com — from there you can find all my socials:
YouTube
I’ll be a lot more active there going forward.
Chris Tzitzis:
Awesome. James, thanks for coming on.
James Dooley:
Cheers guys, see you in Chiang Mai.
Nick Altimore:
See you there.