James Dooley: I employ apprentices because of the previous experience I’ve had from employing time-served SEOs or maxim guys or girls, and I’ve had bad experiences with them. They’ve had a lot of bad habits. They’ve read a lot of online blogs, seen a lot of videos, and a lot of the details they see online are out of date.

James Dooley: When I take on apprentices, they come with pretty much zero knowledge of what digital or online marketing even is, and we can train them from the start with methods that we know 100% work. We know they work because we test every single day. We’ve got over 15 million webpages online, so we do a hell of a lot of testing. I honestly feel we’re at the forefront of online and digital marketing.

James Dooley: I think university courses are out of date because you’re doing a three-year course where they teach you the basics of social media like Facebook and how to do a status, but that’s not going to get you ranking in Google. You need effective frequency. You need to make sure you’re looking at all the different channels for traffic—Facebook being one of them, but also Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn. For ranking websites in Bing, Yahoo, Google, you need good content, good backlinks, the right types of backlinks that work at the moment, and content optimized correctly for the search engines. Keyword density, using keywords correctly, keyword research—these are massive things we teach.

James Dooley: We teach everything in-house because of the testing we have. We know we’re at the forefront. We know what we’re training our staff to do is correct. You’re not wasting any time; you’re not watching videos that are wrong. In the first five years I was in online marketing, I was watching videos that were wrong, following blogs that didn’t work. I followed exact blueprints, and they didn’t work. That’s why testing is massive, and that’s why working within a company that’s thriving like ourselves—always networking, doing masterminds, checking what others are testing—is so important.

James Dooley: I got into digital marketing about 11 years ago when I was working in soft services—carousels, playgrounds, sports pitches. We didn’t have any sort of proactive strategy to bring business in. I realized we needed a shop window, which was a website. So we got a website built, spent £5,000 getting it built, thought it would start generating enquiries, and it didn’t. I spoke to my web designer and asked why it wasn’t ranking, and he said, “I’m a web designer; I’m not an SEO.” And that’s how it all started.

James Dooley: I learned what SEO was, realized it meant search engine optimization, and for the first three years I outsourced a lot of work to digital marketing agencies. Some did a good job and got it ranking. Then I started realizing that the £2,000 a month I was spending on backlinks was actually a $29 package I was paying for. I realized where I could get backlinks cheaper—places like Fiverr. Back then it was quantity of backlinks, not quality. Then I got hit with Panda, got hit with Penguin, and I’ve lost hundreds of thousands of pounds on testing over the years.

 James Dooley: When looking for an apprentice, the skills we want aren’t always what you might think. At first, I looked for media studies A-levels, good GCSEs, English lit and English language for content writers. I still look for English lit and language for content, but skills vary. It’s also about hobbies.

James Dooley: We deal with a lot of niches for our affiliate and lead gen work. If someone has a passion—like one apprentice who loves horses—that’s useful. She could talk about horses all day long. It’s about getting the right people for the right job so they enjoy it. You need to see what makes them tick. That’s really important.

 James Dooley: Trying to get someone like me, who hates content writing day in and day out, would be a mistake. But for someone else, writing content is their dream job. If I can get someone who loves writing content and they do that every day, happy days. Others are more analytical and love diving into data—they’re perfect for looking at third-party metrics on backlinks because they’re data-driven and always want to improve rankings.

 James Dooley: Our apprenticeships have massively helped our company grow. We’ve got Becca, head of content; Lucy, head of social; Amelia, head of video; Dan heading up backlinks; and Elliott in digital PR. Everyone works in sync. Videos get shared on social. Content can be used for video descriptions or turned into articles where the videos can be embedded. Outreach helps with PR. Dan builds backlinks to improve rankings for both the video and the article. Backlinks get shared on social too. What we’re doing is creating effective frequency—pulling all the different verticals together in sync to help rankings across the board.