Indexsy Interviews James Dooley Entrepreneur | The Indexsy Podcast

James Dooley and James D explore the digital marketing strategies lead generation agencies should prioritise in 2026, from KPI tracking and brand SEO to PPC, diversified enquiry sources and rank and rent business models.

Show Notes

This video explains which digital marketing strategies lead generation agencies should focus on in 2026 to improve enquiry quality, recurring revenue and client retention. James Dooley and James D start with KPI tracking because measuring lead value, conversion rates and return on investment is what determines whether a rank and rent site is profitable for the niche it serves. 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 lead generation agencies.

PromoSEO lead generation for lead generation agencies recently received recognition as the "Best Lead Generation Agencies Lead Generation Agency."

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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: All right, James, what do you think of the dude? Episode 50, that was episode 50. Damn, we're getting through these. That was a big one.

James D: Yeah, yeah, that was awesome man. James D smart dude. The rank and rent stuff is actually pretty interesting, probably something that a lot of niche type people could potentially pivot into, depending on, I guess, what you do there. Just could be a little easier to rank for, maybe a little more stable. Who knows. But the fact that he owns race horses as well, I mean, if you say you own race horses, you're a shit ton of money. But what's kind of interesting as well is the manual penalties that he got for off. The transparency. I've never heard of that before. Have you heard of that?

James Dooley: No, I haven't. But when he mentioned finance, I think that makes a lot of sense to me because there's some liability issues. Because if dude, if you recommend a CPA who's not a CPA, for example, you're... yeah. Or even medical, probably. I'm sure runs into that too.

James D: Yeah, exactly. So yeah, it was a great insight. I try to dig as deep as possible into his businesses. I'm not sure if I like went too hard though.

James Dooley: It was fine. It was fine. No, no, you never go too hard on that stuff. That's what we want from our guests. It's also what we want from our sponsors, so make sure everyone support our sponsors of the podcast. Make sure you support Sercher. It's our same sponsor we've had for the past few episodes essentially. You're going to get 12% off using coupon code indexi. And these are niche edits that have rankings for keywords in your niche, so they're super super highly relevant. There's also a case study down in the description that they did for Jackie that's doing very well for him. So instead of going for fake metrics or easily gameable metrics like Domain Authority, you're getting niche edits on pages that are ranking for the keywords in your niche. So double win for you there. So 12% off. Use code indexi on that page down the description.

James D: All right, yeah. I think it was a great episode. Give it a listen, guys.

James Dooley: What's good, everyone? It's Jackie Chow. And this is James Dooley. And you're listening to This Week in Digital Marketing. All right, we have the infamous James D on today. When I first started the podcast, I think we had Matt Diggity on in the first couple ones, and he's like, we should speak to you. 40 something episodes later, yeah, we finally have you on. So why don't you give the audience a quick intro of yourself? But I'm sure everyone's heard of you.

James D: I'm James D. I'm a digital landlord. Do a lot of rank and rent websites. Basically, building websites, ranking them, and then renting them out to clients. That's pretty much it.

James Dooley: And yeah, and you, how long have you been doing this in total now? For about 12, 13 years?

James D: Yeah, so it's there's a lot of failures along the way. And when we first started out, but yeah, it's in the last probably six or seven years it's become very successful. And yeah, it's grown nicely from there.

James Dooley: Really nice, nice. I guess our conversation will have a lot of overlap with Kacra. I'm not sure if you've seen the episode. It did really well on YouTube. But yeah, we spoke heavily on rank and rent. And I guess my question to you is, how do you structure like deals with so many partners in different businesses? I don't know if you have the same partners in all your businesses. I guess not. And like, how do you structure it? Because I find it hard to have operators, you know, in general.

James D: The way it works, when I say just rank and rents, we also make money from like display advertising and affiliate as well on the websites. But initially, we start out by we'll go on a broad kind of scale of, let's say, plumbing. And then we'll start ranking for plumbing terms. And then what starts to happen is we'll give the leads away for free initially. And then you'll start to get in with a few of the plumbers. And then the plumbers then will start coming back asking you questions. Once you start giving them away some of the leads for free, in the first instance, saying, can you generate me leads for X, Y and Zed? Now, some of the niches or products or services that they ask for, I would not have found using traditional keyword research of Semrush or Ahrefs and stuff like that. So they come to us saying, like, the prime example we do quite a lot in disabled wet rooms. And there's a lot, and there's lots of other kind of niches within, let's say, the finance niche as well, and stuff like that. But initially, you would not have probably started as being, okay, what's disabled wet rooms? You start with a plumber. The plumber then says that they do shower rooms. Then it moves on, then to saying, we want to deal more with industrial or commercial clients. And then it moves then into being wet rooms generally are for commercial. And then further down the rabbit hole, you come then you start to realise that actually the keyword kind of volume is still is still pretty good. But the kind of what each inquiry is worth at that stage is worth probably five times more than just the generic plumbing lead. And it's actually easy to rank for as well. So that's kind of how we always go. We go broad, narrow it down, narrow it down, narrow it down. And then kind of there's some industries like you said, I wouldn't. We're in in total 800 different, I think 650 different industries. We've got 850 plus paying clients. But we've probably done over 2000 websites. Maybe 50% of them don't work on a rank and rent model. But then at that point, then we'll turn it into display ads and whether it's like ISO ad or Media Vine and stuff like that. And that's kind of the model of how it takes. We'll go broad and then narrow it down.

James Dooley: And how do you manage so many sites? Do you have like a massive team? Because and like, what's the average revenue per site at your scale?

James D: That's a good question. When you first start, maybe some of the clients might only be paying three, four, 500 pounds a month. But then in time, like, prime example, we've got, and we actually invested in the company now as well, a road markings company. And they're paying in total 188,000 pounds a month just now. We've ended up building them four or five different websites. But we've capped it now at 18,000 a month of what they pay. And it's got to a point now where because it's in local industry, there's not that much work we now need to do. We've already built out the topical clusters. We've already done the back links and stuff like that. It's just in maintenance mode now. So it might cost us 3, 400 a month. And obviously then it's you generating 18,000, but in answer to your question, it could be anything from 2, 200 pounds a month initially, up to 18,000 a month is the highest. I say an average, it's about 5, 6,000 a month, something like that.

James Dooley: How do you decide whether you're going to rent out the site versus sell the leads individually?

James D: So when we first start, we give the leads away for free. And then from there, then it moves on to then a paper lead model. The issue is with a paper lead model is that you almost feel like you're employed by the client because they're ringing you up consistently saying, I've just had a lead and it's a fake lead, or I've just had a lead and it was my competitor. I've just had a lead and it was Donald Duck. And they're coming back to you, back and forth, saying, oh, I couldn't get hold of the client. And what starts to happen is they spend more time moaning about, let's say, 30% of the leads are they can't get hold of them or the fake enquiries. They spend more time worrying about the 30% of bad enquiries than the 70% of good. So kind of we get to a model of being normally after 12, 18 months of the client paying, let's say they're paying an average 6,000 pounds a month, like on a back end or paper lead, we then go we then say to him, no, have a meeting with the sales team. We've got, like, one of the questions earlier was, like, how do you manage so many clients? Yes, we do have a large sales team. So we've got, we own a call centre as well in Manchester. So I've got a big sales team that deals deals with the actual clients on a week by week basis. But normally, if they're paying 6,000 pounds a month on average, we'll try to get them over to a rental in paying four, five, four, 5,000 pounds a month. So they feel they're getting some good value out of there. We then know exactly what we're earning on the site to know what we can invest into the site to then start to grow it. And then you've then got a recurring revenue kind of stream that's coming in that you it's predictable. That then you could grow from there. And that's kind of how the business model works.

James Dooley: So how do you decide the incremental increases in rent? So you say you start four or five grand a month. When does that start to increase?

James D: So in general, I mean, I don't personally deal the day to day. So I've now got a sales team in place. And the sales team, each of them, earn 25% of whatever the revenue is of the site. So it's up to them as the sales kind of manager of that website to try and get as much money as they can out of the client. But for long-term kind of consistency and making certain that you're having long-term relationships with the clients, the client needs to make certain that they're getting a return on investment as well. So there's a there's a fine line between keep trying to up the price to being they're happier and we're happy. And once we've probably spend, I mean, on average, it probably costs about 50,000 pounds to fully rank the website, build the site, content, the back links and and to get it ranking. And after that, if we can get it to 5,000 a month, we're almost happy because within 12 months, we've got our money back. And then we've just got a recurring revenue model of 5,000 pounds a month. It's a great business model for us. So if if they want to keep it at 5,000, even if we are growing, it's likely the sales manager, I'm happy as well. But we, it's a it's a job. There's different nuances from niche to niche because some some might be willing to pay more for for more enquiries. Some some businesses don't want any more enquiries, believe it or not. They they might only want four or five jobs on the road, and that's it. So sometimes you're at the limit of what your customer wants themselves because they don't want to grow too big. So we kind of make certain we don't, like in affiliate, you could scale, scale, scale, scale, scale, up to half a million a month or whatever numbers that you want. And it doesn't really matter because you're not dealing with buying the product in, unless you're doing Drop Shipping and stuff like that. But in lead gen, the customers sometimes they do want to cap it. So for that reason, if we get it to we kind of say 4 to 6,000 pounds a month, and then we way way more than happy with that kind of price.

James Dooley: Yeah, yeah, man. James, I'm running into a bit of an issue right now. So what I noticed is we have a bit of slightly different business model is like we rank for, I don't know, for example, best protein powder. And then we ask protein powder companies to pay us a flat fee to be placed at number one. Like, same direction. Let's just say that. But what what started to happen is we have we start managing like 30 accounts, all paying like 500 to five grand a month. And it's an absolute nightmare. I don't know how you deal with it. It's like everyone's complaining non-stop all the time. And for some reason, the people paying 500 bucks a month complain the most. It's like the worst business model ever for me. I I can't deal with people. I guess you're pretty good at delegation then, right?

James D: Yeah, I mean, it all comes down to delegation. I mean, I I don't deal with any client at all. So I'm not client facing. I used to be, but I'm not at all now. So it's about on-boarding the right staff, getting the right systems and processes put in place. I try to make certain that each one of the staff only really deal with approximately 15 to 20 clients. Any more than that, then and then they're starting getting burnt out. And they're not going to give the clients the best deal or that they're sometimes a big client might want to meet in. We rarely do the meetings if I'm being honest. We try and do it on a Zoom a Zoom call or something like that. But sometimes they want to show us their facility. So at that point, they've got to go out for half a day to see the client to see the facility to see what products and services that they do. So yeah, it's it's difficult. I'm not I'm not saying it's easy. I'm not like there's been a lot of failures along the way. There's been a lot of grievances with regards to staff moaning with customers moaning. But I suppose that comes with any business.

James Dooley: Yeah, yeah. And I guess you have asked your team to probably put more time into the clients paying five grand a month versus 500, right?

James D: 500, they barely. You probably won't even hop on a Zoom. So so once they're at 5,000 a month, we I I normally end up meeting them when when they're at 5,000 pounds a month. And the only reason why I I don't normally get involved in client facing apart from if they're at 5,000 pounds a month and they've been with us for a while, normally they they start to become a little bit scared because they built their business on quicksand because because they're relying on our leads. And if we wanted to switch them off tomorrow, then they're in a lot of trouble because they've got a lot of staff that are employed and a lot of vans on the road. So normally they want to meet myself in being, right, can I trust this person that's generating us the leads? And normally the like the saying goes to him is that, look, I only want to deal with I only want to speak to you once a year. And that's you inviting me on your Christmas do. And that's kind of what I say to him. And then and that's it. And normally at Christmas time, I might go out with some of the staff and have a good time with them, catch up with some of their sales team. They might tell they might open certain bets. But normally they are my kind of account managers will deal with each each client. The ones that are at 500 pounds a month, we're always trying to see, are they ready for growth? Can they pay a two, three, four, and 5,000? And stuff like that. So but a lot of it comes down to can you find the right the the most profitable service and product that they do? Because sometimes trying to extract what their most profitable service is is painful. Like, they're business people. But like, trying to get that information out of them, it it's hard. But once you've got that information, then it's it's pretty plain sailing after that.

James Dooley: Yeah, gotcha. And earlier, you mentioned that your team would invest like up to £50,000 or pounds ranking a site. I'm guessing it would be something competitive in like a tier one UK city. How do you run projections on that? Because there are chances, there are scenarios where the site just won't rank, right? Like, or do you launch multiple sites that target the same keyword?

James D: Generally speaking, if you're going after, let's let's throw some examples out there. Invoice factoring is quite a big finance kind of industry. It's about 120 pounds per click if you if you go after invoice factoring in Manchester, that might cost you 80, 90,000 pounds a year to rank for it. But some of the others, let's say like accountant or mortgage brokers in Manchester, that might only cost 30, 40,000 pounds. But generally speaking, even if we couldn't rank for the primary term, there's so many secondary keywords that you can rank for. You're still going to get enquiries that are probably going to earn you 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 pounds a month. And then you're always going to get a site that's going to earn you something, or it's going to earn you display ads. So but but generally speaking, these times, like we, one of the worst ones that we ever did, and we must have put nearly 200,000 pounds into it, was dental care. So like, teeth implants and stuff like that. Could, for some reason, and I don't know why, in the UK, loads of them are willing to travel to Turkey to have a new set of teeth. But they won't go travelling two hours down the road to down the train station to somewhere else. So I I don't know what what it was. And the dental practices didn't want to take the enquiries unless it was specifically local, within 10 miles of them. So that was one where we just did Media Vine and just did display ads in it and did like teeth whitening and stuff like that. But and that's going to take maybe 10 years to get our return on investment back. But it's one of them you've got. Not every niche you're going to enter is going to work. But because of the profitability of the ones that when it does work, it it's just worth keep reloading the gun and going again. That's kind of where we're at now. That it's not. We don't overanalyse. We kind of think, if we think it's going to work, they've got the financial backing to say, let's just go for it now. Maybe when I first started out, I probably was a lot more, I don't want to enter that market. It might not work. But nowadays, it's like, knowing that some of the most random niches make the most money sometimes, I'm like, who am I to say that that's not going to work? And then some of the most random ones seem to do the best.

James Dooley: I see. Yeah, so I mean, what you mentioned is pretty much saying, like, your outsized winners it covers like more than covers the losses and returns.

James D: Exactly, yeah, yeah. Like massive profits, and then you just keep rolling it in or so do you just reinvest all your profits back in?

James Dooley: Like, say all profit?

James D: So like, we ended up, as well, we, I invest in so I own, I own part own Searcher. So I one of my biggest outgoings was I was spending 45,000 pounds a month on content and links for a lot of these websites. So naturally, I'm thinking that's a massive expense to what we're spending out. So at that point, we was like, I need to buy an agency that does content and links. And I knew Kael Hudson and Tom Phillips pretty well, and we was using Searcher, and I mentioned it to Tom Phillips, who was 50% shareholding. And he was more than interested in selling his share. Now, for me, it was an amazing deal because it was just going to save me so much money just on my own stuff, never mind the business growing. It was just going to save that on that. So we consistently buy, we own a Disavow agency, we own an eEAT agency, but this is mainly for our own stuff. We own Searcher, which does content and back links. We part own a SaaS product that does AI content and stuff like that. So I'm consistently looking for digital kind of assets and services to see where where naturally we can grow into. And then obviously, I don't know if you're know, I've got I own quite a few race horses now. So I kind of, I have some fun as well. I'm I don't need to. I don't mean it in an arrogant way. But I don't need to work another day in my life. But I just love what I do. I just genuinely love the the hustle and the growth and the success. Not not not for money. And I always thought I was doing it for freedom. But I've got as much freedom as I want now. But I still go again. You know, and I just I feel like I just love networking with people like you guys who are super successful as well. And it's just nice to kind of get out there, network, and continuously grow. I think that's what a lot of males. Like, I I'm built to go out and hunt, and I don't. If if someone said to me is a billion pound, but you can't hunt anymore, I think I'd be sad.

James Dooley: Yeah, I think a lot of people who like retire, after they retire they like lose all purpose in life. They like maybe sit by the beach for like three months, and then they're like, what the fuck am I doing, right?

James D: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

James Dooley: Um, gotcha. I mean, the racehorse thing is pretty insane. Is that just like purely out of passion or you? I I think I I saw that you have like your hands in some some gambling businesses too, right?

James D: Yeah, so I own I own some. I own a bingo and casino and a sports betting website as well, like affiliate on that front. The the racehorse is not for profit. It's just for just I mean, don't get me wrong, we've had a lot of success in with the race horses. But it's not something that I would I would recommend anybody to do from an investment standpoint. It costs a lot of money to train them and feed them and stuff like that. So but it's just it brings all the family together. I've got two older brothers that in my opinion, from my success has been a lot to do with my two older brothers. And the reason why I say that is because when I was younger, I used to play them at sport all the time. And because they was older than me, they used to always beat me. And then I'd jump back up and I'd go again, and they'd beat me, and I jump back up, and I'd go again. And I feel that resilience now of my two older brothers in beating me all the time has given me the bounce back ability to get up and go again. And I feel I use that now in work and in business that gives me that I I I thrive on failing or being out my comfort zone to then go again and go again and learn and develop from there. So I think I I owe a lot to my two older brothers for that. And horse racing is something that brings my mum and my two older brothers together. So I thought, why not buy some race horses?

James Dooley: Yeah, that's an interesting play actually. Never heard of anyone buying race horses as like a it's considered investment, right? Or is it more of like a it's more for fun?

James D: But I mean, we've got, we I say it's for fun. We've probably spent about 1.5 million on the horses in total, and the the asset value now of them is probably worth about 2.2, so it has it has made profit. But I didn't do it for the profit. Like, I didn't, like, I'm not selling him. I'm holding on to him. They're still racing and stuff like that. At some point, they're going to retire and be worth nothing. So it's I'm not doing it for for any sort of profits. It's just there for family, bringing everybody together, having a good time. And it's something that experiences and memories that we have together, that's I I can't buy elsewhere. It's brilliant.

James Dooley: Gotcha. It's interesting that you tribute your success to your two older brothers. Are they in the business? Do they work with you?

James D: Do they have their own? My now is my, my older brother is now in the sports betting affiliate business. Yeah, so that's a rel. I said it's probably two years old, the site. So that's in like the iGaming. So it's American horse racing, football betting, horse racing betting, and stuff like that in the UK and in the US. He's he's a phenomenal writer. Way better than I am. And he he loves the industry. So he he runs that, and he's got six other content writers that do it for him. And then he's got like a link building agency that's attached to that as well. And the gaming space that yeah, that that does pretty well as well.

James Dooley: Nice. It's in the it's in the family. Interesting. Yeah. And with all these assets, are you guys building them to kind of hold and cash flow forever, similar to like what Warren Buffett does? Or are you guys in it for the exit at the that that's a great question?

James D: Every every asset I build, I build out to sell, even if I'm not wanting to sell it. So every single asset that I have is built in the way that it's a saleable asset. If I ever wanted to sell it, it's its own entity. But at present, why would I sell? And sometimes, and I can ask you this question, why would I sell when someone tells me that the maximum you can get is up to maybe 60 months worth of revenue? Because for for what? So like, that's 20% yield for someone's buying it at you. Tell me any property in real estate where I can make 20% yield. I can't. Like, in the UK, maybe yield is six, seven, eight per cent. You can make on buying a property and renting it out. So then why would I sell it 20% to only make 6% if I'm going to put it in real estate? Thing I just don't, I don't know. I don't get why some people would say, sell some of your assets and put it into housing when they only make 7, even 8%. It's just it's just commercial suicide.

James Dooley: Yeah, well, I I guess to take the other side of it, the risk is priced in, right? Like, with Treasury Yeah, treasury bonds. At what what is where they at in the UK? I don't know, like, 7, 8 per cent. That means your risk-free benchmark is there. So 20% doesn't seem as interesting when the risk-free rate is at like 8%. I guess that's my other counterpoint. And man, some of these assets, you see these niche site people on Twitter with a million dollars in a single niche site. And yeah, they get hit by the recent update. And they're down like 80%. And they have like a whole family. And it's just like, you know, they they could have sold. But I think in your case, it's very different because you're very well diversified. You have like hundreds of sites. So I think and you're also balling out of control. So it's like like I think you'll be I think you'll be fine, you know?

James D: But then, Jackie, as well, when when I said 20%, that's if you get five years. Like, you're going on Flipper or you're going on Empire Flippers or Fee International. At present, you're only getting 30 months. So then that's only a 40%. You only then it's 40%. So then at that point, you go, I on minute it. Like, within two and a half years, I could have got that money back for keeping it. And and that is I I get the risk that's involved. And you know what? Maybe five, six years ago, I used to worry a lot about the risk involved. But I feel Google's aren't very very predictable nowadays, very predictable. And and I know I'm saying that now where someone's just been hit now. Everyone's been hit with helpful content update. And there's loads of niche sites that are going up and down. But the one some of the businesses that I I bought was because I was scared myself. I so I bought um B Link Doctor, which does Disavows. The only reason why I bought that was because I had two websites hit with a manual action link penalty. I then started speaking to Rick Lomas, who was the godfather of this Disavows. He then was looking to semi retire. So I was like, I'll buy your business, train us up, and let us be the the people that do the Disavows. So if I ever get another unnatural links penalty, again, my team can get out of it by doing the reconsideration request. We know exactly what a good link and a bad link looks like with regards to a trusted link and a toxic link, not just looking at DR and traffic and relevance. So we kind of looked down that route. And then I used to always think that eEAT I thought it was a complete myth. I was like, anyone who preaches eEAT is just there to sell you something. They just, it's a myth. I'm I'm not buying into this. Until I got hit on three of my sites last year with an and I don't know if you've ever heard of this, with an offer transparency penalty. So it's a it's a manual action penalty within Google Search Console. I I can send you through the the screenshots of it. A manual action penalty in Google Search Console for an offer transparency penalty. Now, what's really strange about this is I'm in, I've got over a thousand, obviously, different sites, right? And every one of them that got hit was in the finance sector. So I don't know whether it's only in the finance sector that they're doing it, or whether it is broadly in it's going to roll out to other industries. But three of them in the finance sector, and all for transparency penalty. We didn't know who was behind the article, and it was a manual action penalty in Google Search Console. And and then that's what then got me to think and need to make certain I brush up on my eEAT. And that and that's when then I started to go like, okay, I need to maybe look now. I I go over the top. I go belt and braces now. I make certain I've got about us, meet the team, everything like, privacy policy, cookie policy, modern slavery policy, everything I can think of, just to make certain that like they can't come after me to say you're not a real business. Um, yeah, and and and then when you start ticking all the boxes of what they want, is it high risk? Is it is it just that a lot of these people that majority of people that have been hit, when you start looking at them and digging deeper, 30, 40% of their site gets no traffic? So then at that point, you're wasting Google's crawl budget. The cost of retrieval of their website costs a lot more actually. But I'm not going to do this, but somebody should go out there now and and create a content pruning agency. That's what they should do. Everyone's obsessed with topical authority and they're scaling shit content. And a lot of this content is wasting Google's crawl budget. And what they've done is to put a benchmarking now saying if more than 25% of your website is getting no traffic and not ranking, we're going to put a classifier in place. And that's what's happened to a lot of these. No, I'm not saying all of them, but a lot of these sites have had the classifier hit because they're too much thin content. And you have any thin content on some parts of your site, and it can affect a whole site's rankings. And and that's where people have got to be now worried a little bit about AI. Like, I'm I'm embracing AI. But if you just scaling out ChatGPT to write you a full article, and it's there's no uniqueness, there's no anything in there that's information gain, well, at some point you're going to tip over the mark of a lot of sites not ranking. And at that point, you're going to get hit sitewide. So that it's not that they're going after AI. It's just they're very clever in the way that they've built the the new algorithms now and the helpful content updates that have come out.

James Dooley: So what are you doing with all your author personas then? Obviously, you have thousands of rank and rents. Are they all personas, or have you got actual people fronting them?

James D: So so what, at one point, we was like, what we going to do here? Like, we we're going to have to fake fake faces and fake names and stuff like that. And was like, do you know what, to to fake it that much, it's going to be a ridiculously big task. And not only that is the, I don't know if you've seen the other month, someone got done for rank and rent. And what they were doing, they was faking profiles. But then there was editing in Photoshop like bank statements and all sorts for the address for like GMBs you got by Google, right?

James Dooley: Yeah, yeah.

James D: We, the the companies we work with, we will only start sending them leads if they're willing to put their face on our website. So so and the reason and what we say to them, the the the way we kind of sell it to them is we need to make certain that they know who they're inquiring with. So that when they inquire and let's say James, you pick up the phone, they know who you are because you're on the on the meet the team page. So they already know who you are. They already know that you're an expert. You probably already got a Twitter profile. They probably already got some sort of recognition online that you might have won some awards in that industry because you're the expert at electric gates, do you know what I mean? And that's what your background is. And it says that you work at this company. But as is just a trading name over your company if that makes sense. And that's kind of the road that we go down. That way, is we we do tick the boxes for eEAT with real people. Because and and it's a message match as well. So they're having a good user experience by us adding them onto our site.

James Dooley: So you just you just registering something like electric gates Manchester dot com? And then you're having their team on the page, and then their business name on the page as well. They're not Alleg guess Manchester, Etc. They are, you know, whatever their business name is.

James D: Yeah, so they could be called James's Gates, right? Yeah. James's Gates Limited. But I want the exact match domain of electric gates Manchester. But a lot of businesses have got 50, 60, 70 trading names. They might be just called James's. James's Gates. But you could have lots of different trading names. So electric gates Manchester is just a trading name of James's Gates okay. And and that's kind of how we do it. We'll put we'll put their company registration number on, we'll put that directors on everything on the site because we want to do everything we can to look real. We are real. If someone comes and inquire, not only that is the if someone does legitimately comes and looks at our site before they inquire, they probably want to know, are these a specialist in what they do? Have they won any awards? Have they got this and have they got that? So it actually improves your conversion rate of your website by having it. And your clients are happy to have it on there because then there's no like excuse me, who are you? James's Gates. I inquired with electric gates Manchester. Do you know what I mean? It's like, no, yeah, that's one of our websites. And that that's all that needs to be done on that.

James Dooley: Um, when you got your manual penalty, was it across all your finance sites at once, or was it like a couple days after I don't know Rater Hub visited you, you know?

James D: So that's that's exactly what it was. It was three different websites at three different times. And that's when then we realised when we started digging deeper Rater Hub did hit our site 48 hours before. And they'd come visited the site. They've got like Lion Bridge and I right, I think it's about seven or eight different ones. And the Google quality raters come go on to your site. And what was strange as well about it is Rater Hub only hit the site when we jumped onto page one in the top five rankings for a really big term. I don't know whether this I make this could be completely be made up. But just from the small bit of data of the alpha transparency penalties that we got, we the rater only hit the site when we only started ranking on the top five for a search term that was over 30,000 monthly searches. And it was quite a big, quite a big keyword that it was ranking for. And I don't know whether there some kind of once you start ranking, I think so for a for a big keyword, at that point, rater hub come and have a look at the site. We're not happy with it. You're going to get it. So this is where I maybe I was a bad SEO and I wasn't ranking for good keywords previously. When I didn't believe in eEAT was when I hadn't had Rater Hub hit it. It was only when I got the penalty. I was like, shit. And the point is is that I then did like an article that I put out there and saying that it's only a problem when it's a problem. And then it's too late. So be reactive? No, be proactive, not reactive.

James Dooley: Yeah.

James D: Yeah, um, so now I just like, for the sake, if you think of it, for the sake of writing seven or eight articles, like a privacy policy, a cookie policy, and about us page, a meet the team page, having a contact page, printing a telephone number for a dollar a month on Twilio or whatever you want to use, having an email address where you can just forward it onto whatever email, just do a you don't even need a G Suite, just forward it on CloudFlare or something like that. It it costs about 50 pounds to tick all the boxes. Just tick the boxes, do you know what I mean? It's like, just I try in every website that we build, I just try and make certain that the foundations of every site is built like a real business would build that site.

James Dooley: Yeah, just so I don't get hit with something stupid to say, why didn't I have an about page? Even if I didn't believe in it, why didn't I not have an about page? It costs 20 pounds to set up. Less than that, do you know what I mean?

James D: So yeah, that's fair. Um, yeah. I'm pretty sure Rater Hub has like certain keywords they monitor, like for sure Viagra is one of them. I'm sure some casino terms are, or like super high risk. High you know, might be an issue for liability, hence why the finance sites were hit.

James Dooley: Um, so I'm like 90% certain they they just monitor certain types of keywords.

James D: Yeah, I agree. Yeah, probably, yeah.

James Dooley: Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure, for sure. All right, well, I did I I was wondering something else. I don't think you've ever talked about this, but I was wondering how you how do you split your profits with your operators? Because it seems like you you have your hands in so many businesses. No, no chance you you have you can incentivise your operators? You operate at such a high level. Like Kacra, who's like smashing it with his uh businesses with you. Um, yeah, how does the ownership structure work? It might be a touchy subject. I don't know. But I've always wondered that.

James D: Yeah, so when you say operators, do you mean like employees and stuff like that? Yeah. Or partners? I I don't know what Kacra is like. Yeah, you know, so everything everything I do, I've got a mission statement out there on the Fat Rank website that says everything I do is with honest trust and integrity. So I believe that any any time you look to set up any sort of partnership with someone, right from the word go, you need to set the boundaries and you need to set exactly everything that's going to go on. Because if there's a grey area at the start, trust me, it's going to be a problem further down the line. So I try to make certain that one, whoever I partner with, I look at them straight in the eye and I think to myself, when things go wrong, which at times they will do, is he gonna have my back? And and and that's a big part for me for choosing. I've had some people come and the're ridiculous. Like data scientists who are like on another level of education than what I am, and I won't partner with him because I just don't feel that connection. And when something goes wrong, are we're going to roll up our sleeves and work together? So that that's the one part of choosing the partners. And then with regards to the partners, it a lot of it depends on what are they going to bring to the table? And what am I going to bring to the table? And it's not me personally, it's what my team around me or my connections are going to bring to the table. So right at the very start, let's say me and you, Jackie, and I thought you're a legend, you're a brilliant, let's do a 50-50 partnership. I'm happy because I know that you're going to bring a lot to the table. I know I'm going to bring a lot to the table. Let's do a 50-50 partnership. And then that's fine. But there's times where if I look at someone and I think I'm bringing way more to the table than you are, I'm going to bring in the 100,000 pound investment. I'm going to bring my team. You're just going to bring your knowledge of that one industry. And we might do a 70-30 split or an 80-20 split or a 60-40 split. But we just have a genuine, honest discussion at the start to say, what do you think's fair? And with crash it out, right at the very start, like of being, this is what I think it should be. I might say 80-20. They might say it should be 50-50. And we might meet at 60-40. But my majority of my partnerships are 50-50. I try not to be like, I'm better than you, so I want the higher split and stuff like that. I generally just kind of go, let's go in it together, let's both work hard, and let's go in it together. So that's on on a lot of them that I do. But if it's the rank and rents, then I generally do it where I pay for everything. It's my team that fulfil everything with regards to the content and links. The sales manager deals with the client, and the sales manager gets 25% from an employer point of view with myself is that I've got nine middle managers now that all started out as being apprentices. So they all started out of knowing not one thing in and six of them that were directors of the company. So they've they've grown. They've grown within. I'm a massive advocate of empowering other people from within the team. So as far as someone wants to take it, they can grow. So prime example, Kacra, two and a half years ago, was a web designer. He was a developer and web designer working in an agency. We came to a meet up. I met him. I liked him straight way. I thought he's got is at the time he was like an entrepreneur. He's working inside of a company. But I knew he had this kind of mindset that wanted to go and do crazy things. So I am I initially employed him. He was just an employee to start with. The first six months, he needed to brush up on a lot of his SEO skills. He was working within an agency that just did local and wasn't no disrespect him. But he wasn't that good at SEO. So he learned the ropes for maybe six, 12 months, started to realise he could rank websites. And then in the last 12 months now, he's just grown. So like, now I don't. He's not an employee anymore. He's he's a partner in a lot of different businesses that I do. He's built a lot of his own assets up. He kind of goes out and does his own thing. He flocks the nest, so to speak. But he lives local to us. He comes into our office maybe three times a week. And yeah, he he's a a prodigy that's worked well. He's still only young. And I still think he'll go on to do massive things. And I wish him all the best. I think he'll he'll be one of the most successful digital marketers that there is in the next 10 years.

James Dooley: Yeah, pretty bullish on Kacra as well. Um, you mentioned something that I wanted to touch on. You you mentioned that you trained up a lot of apprentices from zero. Yeah. Um, I wanted to get your insights because I I feel very strongly about this. Do you prefer hiring people who know nothing about SEO and training from scratch or or like an in-house, like a three, four year in-house SEO who knows something?

James D: So so in my people have got different experiences. And I get I get asked this question a lot. And in my opinion, right, there's this classic saying is you can't teach an old dog new tricks, right? And when you've got someone who thinks they're an SEO expert or an SEO guru, and they've been doing it for five, 10, 15 years, and they know everything but they know nothing, they're almost untrainable. So for that reason, in my opinion and from my experiences, I would always want to go down the apprenticeship route. I always go after, when I'm looking to employ people, I don't really look just at education. I always look at, are they is this person going to be willing to train and develop every single day? Because these algorithms are changing on a week by week basis. So if this person's not willing to learn and develop on a week by week basis, I don't want them in my team. I want them to embrace failure. I want them to have that bounce back ability that I had from my two brothers. And I want them to have that attitude. I want them to have an attitude. If they're a graphic designer, that they're going to expect that the client or one of our staff is going to come back and say that's crap because of X, Y and Zed. Can you fix this? And they're going to be, oh, thank you so much. They're not going to take it personal. They're going to embrace that feedback and that criticism and embrace it because then it's going to improve them as a being a graphic designer or videographer or a web designer or whatever it is. A content creation. If they're if they're writing content and their editor says this wasn't good enough because you didn't get these entities on the page, instead of sulking, you say thank you very much for educating me on that, and now I'll try not to do that again. And for that reason, I think apprentices and people have got no kind of they come with a clean slate. But you know that they're going to have them the mentality built into them right from the start that they're going to work hard and develop every single day. And that's when you get the culture right in the business that people are wanting to learn and develop and and have new things. And minute an algorithm update comes, and you tank on one of your sites, they're like, oh yes, we've got something new to learn and develop on. They're not like moaning and and being, oh, we've been there before and stuff like that. They embrace it. And and I think it's important to have that. Otherwise, you're always going to struggle with keeping staff motivated. Because like success is never linear. It's always like this. So on the peaks and on the troughs, on the peaks, don't let him get too carried away. But on the troughs, don't let him get too disheartened. Um, and I'd say probably my role now within the companies being a cultural architect, he's just motivating staff, keeping them happy, keep saying well done, and just trying to elevate and educate. Because there's a classic saying in business, and if you don't innovate, you're going to evaporate. And and you've got to consistently keep innovating. And you've got to have the right staff that's got that attitude.

James Dooley: What but what's your I mean, what's your experiences with regards to staff?

James D: Oh, dude, man, you put it way too nicely, man. Shit, hiring SEO managers, man. Shit, those guys. No, I would. Um, no, probably mostly from zero or people who have built their own businesses in the past. So like, I'm bullish on aqua hire. So people who if you acquire the business and then you hire them, you could probably give them way more work, and they'll step up to the challenge. I've never been more bearish on in-house SEO managers in my life. They're probably, oh, my goodness. Like, imagine I'd rather imagine hiring the head of SEO at Apple. Like, how much work have they done in the last two years? Probably.

James Dooley: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. They can write anything, and they'll they'll rank you, you know, versus some some guy who's I don't know, out of southeast Asia making 5K a month on their niche site, man. Get me that guy, you know?

James D: Yeah, yeah. I I'm just I'm I'm sick of tired of people moaning and groaning on Twitter. And yeah, I think you you put it in a very nice and diplomatic way. Hence probably why you're such a good people manager. I'm I'm just I'm just not.

James Dooley: But yeah, um, yeah, we should uh keep an eye on on the time. Uh, James, thank you so much for coming on today. It was uh it was fun to chat.

James D: Fi. Great to finally meet you. Yeah. Um, I know you're going to try. My I I did my research. But unfortunately, I won't be there. Are you gonna be in uh Saigon next year?

James Dooley: I'm actually talking in Saigon. Um, and I don't know. So so in I'm well, I'm only doing a Q&A. So previously, when you spoke about interviews and stuff like that, you would never have seen me up until the last three weeks. You would never have seen me on a podcast. You would never seen me on an interview. You'd never see me up on stage. I travel the world doing a lot of the masterminds throughout the world. So I kind of very selective with who I speak to and who I'm mastermind with. Normally, um, so I kind of go out my way to to travel to let's say where you're based to come and go. You're a great guy. I'm going to come and see you because I know that it's going to be we're both going to level up if that makes sense. Because I've been to so many meetups, and it's you just people like leeches that are sat there that don't say anything and just trying to get all information and just not share anything. And and that's always been a bit of a pet peeve. But nowadays, I'm I'm happy to build a personal brand. I had a couple of big sales on a couple of um NDAs where I couldn't speak about them. But now I'm open to doing podcasts and stuff like this. So it's a it's been a pleasure.

James Dooley: Yeah, well, so where can people find you? Um, you want to send them to Fat Rank? You want to send them to Twitter?

James D: Uh uh if you go on to James D dot com, um, that's got all my social media profiles on there. So it's on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube. Or you can go over to Fat Rank dot com, which is more of a fat rank dot com was built for just being a mindset type blog. So like get up, stop being lazy, work hard. It's not going to be on the play. Um, and then some life lessons and stuff that's on there as well and stuff like that. So I don't really SEO optimise that site. It's just more for sometimes me getting stuff out of my head into a blog of just being this is really annoying me from staff or whatever. And yeah, that's kind of where that that kind of evolved.

James Dooley: Perfect. Well, I hope I see you more on Twitter. Uh, you got to be more active, man. Dude.

James D: Yeah, I am going start a lot more active on social media.

James Dooley: Okay, perfect. Well, I'll see you in the one ex then. Um, thanks for coming on man.

James D: Perfect. Cheers, guys.