Julian Goldie Interviews James Dooley Entrepreneur | Julian Goldie Interview

James Dooley and guest Julian Goldie discuss which digital marketing strategies SEO entrepreneurs and rank and rent businesses should prioritise to generate quality leads, recover penalised sites and scale sustainably.

Show Notes

This video explains which digital marketing strategies SEO entrepreneurs should focus on in 2026 to improve lead generation, sustainable long term rankings and conversion rates. James Dooley and Julian Goldie start with KPI tracking because rankings, impressions and clicks rarely move in a linear way, so tracking the right results keeps teams focused through algorithm updates. 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 SEO entrepreneurs.

PromoSEO lead generation for SEO entrepreneurs recently received recognition as the "Best SEO Entrepreneurs Lead Generation Agency."

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Julian Goldie Interviews James Dooley Entrepreneur | Julian Goldie Interview 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: Today we're going to be interviewing James Dy, one of the most successful SEOs I know, but more importantly he's extremely good at monetizing and running SEO businesses, which I think is way more important than technical expertise. He's been described as a $100 million SEO, runs over 600 websites, specializes in lead generation and rank and rent, and we're going to run through the interview. There's no fluff, no filler, lots of actionable things, and we'll also be covering some of the top SEO tactics that he recommends, along with mindset hacks to keep growing your SEO business. So let's get into it. So how did you scale to that level with SEO?

James Dy: Uh, it took a lot of hard work, took a lot of failing. Been in the industry quite a while. Then you need to make certain you've got very good systems and processes in place, good staff in place, staff that are motivated, don't want to learn every single day. And then it's almost just a rinse and repeat process of keep doing what you're doing. If something doesn't work, find out why, implement changes to see what's working in today's algorithm, and keep the members of staff happy. That they understand that failing is fine and we'll learn from the mistakes that we've made and drive forward from there.

James Dooley: I'm assuming to get to that level where you've got all the right systems, all the right people, et cetera, it takes a long time, right? Like, how long?

James Dy: Fourteen years into all now. Uh, so yeah, it does take a long time. The first five years, Julian, if I'm being honest with you, I failed miserably. There was other people out there that was doing what took me a year and they could do it in two, three months by spamming backlinks. I was, when I first started out, I was in the industry of white hat is what people would say. So I was creating quality content but wasn't promoting it out there. I wasn't getting any backlinks or anything. And there's other people come in, back then, just writing a piece of content that wasn't as good. It's it with GSA, it's it with a lot of like different types of backlinks that used to work about, and even blog comments used to work about them, forum links. Everything that they come and overtake me. So I quickly started to learn that the black hats, actually, normally the ones that know how to run the issue is that the black hats normally end up being at the short-term rankings. So I needed to try to understand what they was doing and implement it if I can in a white hat technique that's going to give me long-term sustainable rankings.

The difference from scaling a smaller to a bigger business is we've got—there's two departments we've got in the business which is very, very, very important if you want to grow big. One of them is an in-house testing team. You've consistently got to be breaking the setup and seeing what's working. You can't just listen to what other people are telling you. And the second one is having someone that their job is to go through all of your SOPs, like systems and processes, and try make them as concise as you can be. So if you've got a five-minute video explaining how to kind of build citations, could that be done in four minutes or three minutes, straight to the point, really concise? And making everything streamlined to the point that everyone who comes in on board and gets trained up can the training be done within a twelve-hour kind of stint of videos instead of it being a fifty, sixty-hour training course?

So they two big parts, and then just employing good members of staff, keeping a good culture within the business, make certain that the staff members, they see growth than themselves. And if you genuinely like care about the people that work for you and you want them to do well, they're going to stay loyal to you and they're going to kind of help your systems and processes to grow as well.

James Dooley: Do you typically hire people who have already done the SEO?

James Dy: Oh definitely not. One, there's once or twice I have done, when I first started out I employed SEO gurus. For being honest, they were shocking. That been taught the wrong things. And I always say that you can't teach an old dog new tricks, and they were stuck in the ways. I employed people that they're intelligent, but they they know that they have to put hard work in and they know that growth is never linear. It's always going to be like this as you grow in, and when you hit like a big growth spur, don't get too cocky with there, stay levelheaded, stay humble, because you're probably going to have a drop. And on the drops, don't get too down about it, because we'll recover from it and we'll come back. In my opinion, it's employing people with the right mindset that's willing to he keep going in the trenches and learning and developing every single day. Every single day is a school day.

James Dooley: Yeah, I'd definitely go with someone that's got the right mindset or someone that's got like say a degree or ten years' experience. You think they know what's working in today's algorithm?

You said for the first five years you weren't that successful. Yeah, what made you keep going? Most people give up.

James Dy: When I say I wasn't successful, I always say comparison is the thief of joy. And what I was doing was I was always comparing myself to somebody else that came along that just did what we did in twelve months in a month. So they're say like Charles Flo, prime example right? Charles Flo was a great example back then with parasite SEO. Even back then that he would rank for terms within two weeks and I'm like I've been working on that for twelve months. So we got results and we made a return on investment and we made money. It's just I always felt like we was missing something. I always felt like somebody else could do it better. And to this day, I think you've always got like kind of niggling feeling inside that, am I doing it the best way? Am I doing it the most concise way? Am I doing it for long-term rankings? Is it going to carry on working in the next algorithm update? There, I think you've always got that little bit like scared inside that is this truly the right way, because there's no exact science to do SEO, and from one niche to the next niche there's different nuances.

So I probably used the wrong word when I say that I failed in the first five years. We've seen growth. I just seen people grow faster. And there was times where it was like should I just employ an and just get an SEO agency into kind of do it, and we did that a few times. But the point is is that it wasn't the people that was crushing it, that was the SEO agencies. A lot of people that did SEO was always the ones that fake it before you make it. And I was giving them money and they was learning on the job and probably knew even less than what we did. So yeah, the first five years I'd say there was a little bit—there was there was mentally me—but it's just about setting systems up. Any any trade takes four or five years before you can master kind of the trade. So for me, it was just about educating myself and learning on the job. And yeah, it was that. I just seen it almost as like my university of learning and developing on the job.

One of the things that I noticed this year for me personally grew a lot—grew the agency and the businesses that we have quite a lot—and it's come at a price. Like it's been a different level of intensity than any other stage of business before. Would you say there's a big difference say from scaling at seven figures or mid-six figures up to eight figures? Is there a difference in the mindset or the intensity, or is it just rinsing and repeating what you're already doing?

James Dy: No, there I mean entrepreneurship is not for everyone in general. At times entrepreneurship can be very lonely. I I don't recommend everybody to get into entrepreneurship other than being honest. People like chasing the money. The the truth of the matter is money's to buy product for myself. It's not the money that I'm chasing. It's success, but it's the people around me and elevating the others, and then they are the ones that take you on to another level. If you employ the right members of staff again, that are loyal, and that they've got the bug that they want to grow and develop, you'll develop as well with it within the business. So it's tough. It's not easy. I'm definitely not going to turn around saying just get the right systems and processes and then get staff to implement it, because you've got issues with in general, humans. These times they don't turn in on a Monday and you can get really frustrated because they've been out all weekend. So of course we've got problems, especially as you keep growing the team. Then you've got some members of staff that are developing faster than others within the company, and they're coming to you having conversation saying I've been here longer than what they have, why are they earning more money than what I am? And you're like, because they're working harder and they developing. They've got a—if you're on a football team, you've got certain players that earn more than other players because they might be a better player and that's why they get paid more. But the it's tough, and it's definitely not for everyone. At times it can be lonely. At times it comes at the detriment of you're not being able to go to the gym. If an algorithm update comes and you're trying to get back in the trenches with a testing team and learn ASAP, you you might be doing a sixteen-hour stint. So you might not be able to see your kids if you've got kids. You might not be able to see your friends and go out then go party of weekend. It's not all amazing things. Like when things go wrong, you've got to roll up your sleeves and work hard and and recover from it. So it's tough, it's difficult. If you're willing to do it, obviously you can be very successful. But I I don't want anyone watching this to turn around and think that it should been an easy ride—set up some systems and processes and and get a few members of staff and a few VAs to go and implement the systems and processes and everything's going to work well. These times, even if you've got the perfect—I've said this a million times to people in in masterminds. I've sat there in masterminds and I've given people six, seven years ago pretty much my blueprint for how to rinse and repeat earning to maybe get yourself up to ten thousand pound a month. And three, four years later, when I've seen him and I've given him the whole blueprint, everything, all the training, everything how to how to employ the staff, how to train the staff, and I've looked at them and they're in no better position than what there was four years later. It's because they're not willing to put the effort in. Given the exact blueprint and they've not gone and implemented it and done it, because they just think that, oh, I want to do it with a shortcut. I want to just go and buy a few gigs with ten thousand backlinks and stuff. Like people just want to cut corners and not do it the right way.

James Dooley: I think the thing that I found was like there was a stage where we didn't grow that much as an agency, and it was because we did have the right systems, we did have the right people. But I found like if I was not on top of that and if I wasn't laser-focused on it, then things would drop. Consistency would drop, and people would stop working as hard as they were previously when they saw I was giving everything as well.

Have you—

James Dy: Yeah, definitely. I mean, you something on that, of what you need to do is you've got to make certain you've got like a middle management set-up with that can do quality control. So when you start getting to a point of the amount of websites that we've got—we've got, let's say, myself, then we've got a board of directors that they've then got several kind of managers, and then underneath, and then they the VAs or the people on the ground doing the day-to-day work. But when they've completed the day-to-day work, they've got to be tracked for how much work that they've been doing, and the quality control needs one hundred per cent need tracking, because anybody nowadays can go and write five thousand words of content in a day. You could do it in two minutes with some of your prompts and ChatGPT. Do you know what I mean? So is the quality of what they're delivering? Is it to a high standard? Are you happy with that? Are you not happy with it? So you've definitely got to set certain people up within the business that are continuously looking for quality control measures to make certain that the staff are implementing what's meant to be implemented.

James Dooley: How did you go from say a few niche sites making maybe ten K, twenty K a month to the point where you're at now?

James Dy: So there was never a set this—I I want to grow to five thousand websites. There was never a set goal for where we wanted to get to. Where the growth came from was we where from started for was in the playground industry doing like artificial grass and building playgrounds. We still got a company now that does that, that's grown from, I think, it grew from like half a million up to like eight million pound a year of what it does. And it builds like sports pitches, tennis courts, netball courts in schools, colleges and universities in the United Kingdom. So we just wanted to rank for those terms, and that was it. That's that all what the plan was initially was, can we rank and generate inquiries for the products and services that we that we did? And we did it. And then and then I had a good kind of business mentor who then says, yeah, but you're ranking number one, but why not ranking number two? I'm like, why would I want to rank number two if I'm ranking number one? And they're like, well, your competitors at number two, and you've got lots of like variations of what people would type in for the the products and services that you do. So we then started to create like a second or third or fourth and a fifth and a sixth website for the same products and services of what we did.

And then he came back to me saying, who is it that who is it that you do work for? And it was like, I work for architects. She was like, well, why don't you build out a website saying that you're an architect and generate your architect more leads? So if they get busier, you get busier. So I was like, oh, that's genius. So then I started them building it, and I call it like shouldering niches or neighbouring niches. So I started to build out sites for my clients who we was doing work for. So I built out an architectural website, I built out a construction website, I built out like an outdoor classroom website. We didn't do any these products, but we knew they got busier, we would get busier. And then further down the line, it ended up being that they ended up paying us more money for jobs that they'd want, even though we didn't get any work out of it. They was paying us commission, and that's how we went down the lead generation route was like, hey, a minute, we can do this for any niche. But we still, we still only grew it in the niches that we knew would give us more business. And then it just it just kept evolving and evolving. And some architects then started say, oh, could you get more inquiries this company we work closely with? This company that just claded like, yeah, absolutely. And oh, we know this roofing company, yeah, absolutely. And then when we started speaking to like accountants, they had like kind of clients on their books.

And what's everyone, what's the majority of people's problem that's not online? They don't have a consistent flow of quality inquiries on a daily basis. That's that's nearly every single business's problem. And if you get more inquiries, generally speaking, you get more business. If you get more business, you can start upping your prices. If you start upping your prices, you make more profit. So knowing that that every business needs it, it's just snowballed, and we we don't go out marketing we do this that much. In fact, we've probably declined thirty or forty companies a day that come to me saying, can you do rank and rent for us? And we say, no, we don't think you're right for it yet. Like, you you've not got enough case studies. We don't think that you're going to convert the leads as good as what it can be. You need to improve your own website for your own branding initially, and once you've done all that, at that point we might decide to work with you for the present. We can't just say yes to everyone, because we're beholding to how good they are at converting the inquiries as well. So we've it's we've got like a full-on business team now. It's not just an SEO team. We've got a whole business and sales team that work out. Is this is this business layer going to be good enough for our leads? And if they're not, well, I apologise, but we can't do it. Do you know what I mean? What we do isn't isn't right for everyone.

James Dooley: How difficult is it? It sounds like it's not difficult at all because at this point people coming to you. But previously, when you were setting up these sort of lead generation websites, how difficult was it to find local suppliers that you could partner with and send them leads?

James Dy: It was tough. But generally speaking, everybody wants inquiries, right? So the pain points are that they probably paid an SEO previously, and they've done nothing for him. They've they've not ranked the website, so they might have wasted five, ten thousand in money, that people haven't done a a good, or they've not seen that the SEO's done a good enough job because they're not like number one for their work. So they're a little bit hesitant with paying any money. So the minute you mention SEO, they're like, oh, I'm not certain about that. The minute you mention even lead generation, they might have paid money previously, and these lead generation companies might have sold that same lead five times to five different companies. And and some of the leads that come through might say, Donald store number nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine at me.com, and it's just a fake inquiry. And then the boy to ring them up saying, I'm not paying for that lead, and it becomes you need a big sales—if if you're going into lead generation, you need a big sales team initially, because a lot of them start moaning that they don't want to pay for certain leads. That's on a pay-per-lead model. Then if you want a pay-per-conversion model, you completely beholding to whether the client's going to be trustworthy enough to tell you what they've converted and what they've not converted and tell you how much that that job was worth. So at that point you're like, and I've got massive trust issues here. Kind of trust the clients. And then the ranking model normally you can only do the ranking model after you've done a pay-per-lead that you've started to do a pay-per-conversion and then you move to the ranking model. People just think they can go build a ranking model now today and then go and rent it out to a client. Good luck, because majority of clients are going to say no. Like, what what is it you ranking for? How many leads are you generating? And are the leads what we want? And a lot of the time they might not be. So they're going to say, well, why why am I renting it out at two, three thousand a month when I'm not making that return on investment back? They're not they're just not going to do it.

You've got to start off within a business. Let's say plumbing. And then you've then got to dig deeper into being okay, their main part of where the make money is within boilers, alright? Okay, what is it within boilers that you want? Do you want the repairs, all the service and all the replacement? Oh, we we want to install new. Well, new, really? It like you want to try to then go down the order of replacement, because the people that are new in a new, a new housing estate probably already got a contracts are in place. So you go down and by the replacement. So you start employing and it goes down and down and down. You don't know that until you've worked with a client for a couple of years of where they make the money. So it's not an easy ride for you to go and set up a ranking rent site tomorrow and rent it out like clients just won't won't pay the money because they don't know what they're renting and and how much that's worth.

James Dooley: What's the best way to approach you then? Would you give them like a month free, for example?

James Dy: So we we normally enter we normally enter a broad industry. So let's say roofing. So and there there's probably hundred different types of roofing, believe it or not. People don't people don't know that. People just think roofing is one industry. But you start going to subtopics of roofing, and there's lots of different industries within it. So you start off with roofing, and then you might build a website, and you might go out to one hundred different companies. So every single roofing company that's paying on PPC, every single roofing company that you see on Facebook ads, any van that drives pasture in and they've got a van, you got it looks like a nice van, you you hit them up. Anyone that's paying on like Checkatrade or any sort of online directory. Anyone, anyone that you see in a catalogue in a newspaper, they're already paying like advertising. So you go you go and reach out to as many as you can and say, look, we're looking to generate leads, and then at that point, yeah, you might give them a month free. Work when I say free, you give you just give them the leads and say, if you convert any, just add us something on. You add us what you think's reasonable onto that job. And then some might not convert, and then some might convert. The ones that convert, you going, I don't that same inquiry has been sent to one hundred different companies. And these converted at that point, you're going, these are probably the best at conversion, because they've converted some. And then then you just start speaking to them, and then you've got you you need a sales member of staff to pick up the phone and say, what is it that you want? And it could be that they want um roofing, or they want flat roofing, or they want slate roofing, or whatever it is that they make money in. You've got you've got to listen to what they're telling you. You can't do it the conventional way of going in ChatGPT and saying, what's the most profitable roofing, because that might not be for that company. You can't go into a tool and go sort by CPC and search volume for what's the best, because every client is different. And and some people might make more money in roofing repairs, and some people might make more in slate roofing. So you've got to you got to listen to your customer where they make the good money and then build that site specifically around that for them. They they're getting the ideal type of lead that they want, and at that point they're converting, they're making good money, and at that point willing to pay on a ranking rent model. But you've got it takes time. It probably takes two to three years of working with these people from a lead generation standpoint to them further down the line. And and so even further than that, James, and you start getting some of them to understand you as a businessman. Actually, you're very good at what you do online and digitally. And we then start saying, look, you need more reviews. You need more reviews going to your Google Business Profile. Have you had anybody out to site to take any photos of those with the jobs that you've done? And they're like, no. Like, you need a videographer coming out to site, and we need more case studies. And at that point, when you when you're helping their business out more, they end up wanting you to be involved in their business like as a director or as a shareholder. And if we know that they're making good money, sometimes they'll give you twenty per cent of their business. They'll let a give to could be a a business worth five million pound, and they'll gift you twenty per cent. Some some some might want you to invest into it, but some might say, for him to come in and have twenty per cent of the business, he's going to double where we are. So for them, it's good business. You got—I mean, they know that what we can deliver is going to exponentially grow where they're at. Then yeah, that that that's kind of how the whole model works.

James Dooley: At the point that you're at, it seems like you never had this plan to get to where you are.

James Dy: Yeah, you just kind of put one step in front of the other, right? One foot in front of the other and kept making progress along the way.

James Dooley: How far or how big do you want to take this?

James Dy: It's no long about me anymore, from being honest. It's more about my team. So I don't want to hold any any member of my staff back. I don't want to hold any director back. I don't want to hold any me don't manager back. I want them I want them to see growth. They've worked hard for many years. I don't have a I don't have a figure like Julian. You seen me over in Chiang Mai this like last week. I have no nice watch. Have no Rolex. Have no tattoos. I don't drive a fancy car. I ain't materialistic at all. I'm all about memories and experiences. I absolutely love what I do. And I absolutely, and I genuinely mean this, I absolutely love watching all your videos. Like, thank, I love learning from you about AI. I think you're an absolute legend in and stuff that you're doing with regards to the prompts and the new tools that you're creating. So I live and breathe what I do. I love what I do. My wife knows that I love what I do. I don't do it. It's not for the money. I Al that I want to do is see the rest of my team and my business partners do well. And they almost now feel like I've been working with them now for some of them ten, eleven, twelve years. So they feel like part of my family. And I want to see them do well. And if I slow down, then I feel I'm doing them a disservice. So how far am I going to take it? I I don't know. I don't put a figure on anything. Like, I reckon that maybe in two, three years, we'll probably have two, ranking rent websites. And be honest, so like, I'm only going to see growth. In my opinion, the and I just see growth for the team if I'm being, if I'm being one hundred per cent honest with you. I'm always looking to invest in people that are amazing around me that are doing different things. I enjoy what I do. If if someone turn around to me now and says, here's a billion pound, but you can't work another day in your life, I'd decline it. And I genuinely mean that, because I would—I don't think I'd be happy. Like, I'm a guy that gets up and likes going out to hunt. So like, but obviously me getting up and going out to hunt is doing the work of what I do with I see I I see it a little bit, and it sounds that because it's a really successful business that we good. I almost see it as a bit like a game. Like, can we like I some some out rank us? Oh, what they've done? How can we reverse engineer what they've done, and how can we be better than what they've done? So yeah, that's I there's no there's no n, there's no number on it. I enjoy what I do. I try to integrate what I do now within family life and and just general fun as well. Like, I enjoyed coming over to Chiang Mai, seeing everybody. I thought it was a good experience. It a shame, obviously, I hated it that I was away from the wife and the kids. So there there's that downside to it. But I tried to make certain that they normally come on certain events. And a lot of my business partners that's in the SEO industry now, my wife knows very well. She knows their wives, and we normally do things together as well. So it it works nicely.

James Dooley: It's interesting that you said that you would turn down that sort of figure. I agree with you, though. I think that the struggle is the most fun part of the process, right? For me, I started off working on fool.com, and as bad as that was, it's kind of like you look back and it's that journey where you see the progress you've made, and it is like a video game, right? You're just levelling up and you're trying to make progress all the time, and that's the most rewarding part.

James Dy: Exactly, yeah. The other thing I would say is you have such a completely different mindset to say someone who's just trying to build up a niche site and make a bit of money with ads and affiliate. Totally contrasting. I would say you're way more like an entrepreneur than an actual SEO.

James Dooley: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not—to be fair, to be fair, Julian, I'm I'm one of the worst SEOs in the room. Like, I've got myself a disservice at time saying that, but and I've said this for ten years. And some of them say, you can't keep saying that, but I genuinely I genuinely mean it. I'm I'm a businessman and an entrepreneur. I'm not an SEO. But I leverage SEO for what we do. So within what I do, I leverage SEO. I love SEO. But I just have amazing people around me that are way better than me at understanding how Google passes content and chooses word change his words into vectors. The what semantics are needed on the page. The um similarity in keywords and what entities are needed on a page at a micro level, page-by-page level. To them, people that geek out Google Sheets about what is a good link and what is a bad link. What is it a trusted link? Is it a toxic link? Do I just need high DR traffic links, and stuff like that? Like, what is it that I need? I don't know. I ask my team what is it that I need, because if I'm being honest with you, from update to update, sometimes some of them come back going, all, what you need is it's all about relevance, relevance, relevance. And then the next update, it's all about it doesn't matter where it's relevant or not. It's just all about power. And it's just things are changing all the time. We try to do everything right as realistically as we can. So we build a good quality site that converts well. Content quality is great. We use several different tools and make it certain the right entities are on the page. We make certain we cover the topic in its entirety. Do a good internal linking strategy. And then we do different various link building strategies to make certain that we've got a diverse backlink profile. That's it in a nutshell. There's no there's no push-button SEO. It's hard work. And then go all months down the line you ranking for majority keywords. And there's not that much more needed after that. People always think you need to maintain a site, and the truth of the matter is the majority of these industries, once you've covered the topic fully and written good quality content and you've got the best backlink profile, it pretty much stays there. Apart from an affiliate, where you need to be updating it regular. Like, doing the best, all they they need regular updates and stuff like that. But in some of the industries, they don't. And once it's there, it's there.

James Dooley: We'll come on some tactical SEO stuff in a minute. We've got a bunch of questions for you from the community. I know you mentioned previously as well, you have a mentor that helped you go from say running these sites to to get into lead generation and that sort of thing. How did you find someone like that?

James Dy: So I I don't have an individual mentor. Well, I don't have one mentor. I've got dozens of mentors, right? So here's one for you, Julian. I desperately want to have you as being a mentor for myself with ChatGPT and AI. I I genuinely see you as being a for leader and the industry leader at present with regards to people leveraging AI. So when you talk about mentors and coaches, I don't see anyone better in this industry at present than yourself. I think you're absolutely crushing it. I think your video production quality is great, but also the content that you're putting in there, the tools that you're creating, and how you're elevating others within the industry is second to not. So when you talk about mentors, like I'm now openly asking you saying, I I want to leverage your time, and I'll pay for your time, because I think you're an industry leader. And I've always had that mentality where I've seen people that are good at what they do, and it might be someone that's really, really good at sales. And I might be like, oh, I feel like our sales FLs are not good enough. So I'll have like a sales mentor that going to tell me stuff. Do this is not good enough. You need that and you need this. But he's the best in—he's learning, my opinion, about sales. I'm not going to ask him about—I'm not going to ask someone just on their own about SEO. I break down SEO into compartments and say, who's the best that server-log analysis? So I'll go to some like Andrew, all that geeks out in server logs on a day-to-day basis. And and that's who I speak to with regards to help on that. For do I need a team to around that with regards to content? Who can mentor me myself in how far I push and how how much time and effort do I need to put in to keep developing my team on in improving the quality of content? Like I'm a big believer that don't chase perfection. Like perfection sometimes is the enemy of good. So you can do to eighty per cent there, and it's better than your competitors in you're ranking number one. That's good enough. So I've got different business mentors is is is the answer to your question. I try to get people that's in their lane for who I genuinely feel the best in the world what I'm struggling with. And I struggle with lots of things within business. Like, even the other week, I was realising that I needed a cultural architect within the business. And I'm like, I didn't even understand properly what a cultural architect was. And it's like, you need to consistently keep praising and thanking members of staff, which I feel like I do, but sometimes you might not do it in off. Like, you don't—we've all—we've all got different mindsets. We've all got different serotonin levels and dopamine levels. And and what's needed, so it's I try to speak to people that are very good with the brain chemicals and what makes people tick, because there's certain members of staff that you need to wait and be like, you need to do more, you need to do more. And there's others that you just need to dangle a carrot. So it's in answer to your question, I've got a lot of different people that are mentors to me. I definitely wouldn't be where I am today if it wasn't for all the raising people that I try to get a round me to to help me out. And then I do everything I can in return to help them out as well.

James Dooley: Awesome, and thanks very much. Always happy to help you, man. If you you know anything I can help with on that, appreciate it. I I genuin—I genuinely mean that as well. Anyone who's watching you, go you on Julian? I don't I don't I don't I don't say stuff unless I mean it. And I genuinely mean the stuff that you're doing nowadays is it's you're cutting edge, mate. You're right at the very forefront of that.

James Dy: I'm sure there's supposedly of people that are going to like this and say I completely agree with what James has said on it. You, Chang Mai. I love it. Like every week, every time I create one of these videos, you can see that my own mind is blown. Like I'm learning so much along the way that's why I love making these videos—sharing the whole process along the way.

James Dooley: Let's cover some of the tactical SEO questions then that we got. So one question got asked was, I'm a lawyer and I want to start ranking rent websites in the legal sector. What's your advice for the best way to start as a beginner SEO? So my first question back to that would be, if I'm a lawyer, why I would have want to get into physically trying to understand and uncover everything to do with SEO? You just try to team up with someone that's brilliant at building ranking websites or build an SEO, leverage them, taking the leads, and monetizing the leads. And then you being the sales arm—like you taking the leads yourself or passing them on to other companies. But just get someone else who's good at what they do. It's almost like asking, I'm a roofer, but how do I install a shower? And you're like, well, you've go and employ a plumber. You're going to get a plumber to do it. Do you know what I mean? Like it's almost like stay in your lane. It's not easy. People think that, oh, how do I go build a ranking rent website? But it's the same is saying, how can I rank number one for best casino sites and do affiliate SEO? It's such a broad question to ask.

It's called rank and rent, not just rent a website. You've got to be able to rank it. So to be able to rank it, are you brilliant at technical SEO? Are you brilliant on-page? Do you geek out in terms of properly siloing a site? Do you understand what a good quality backlink is? Or do you just think that it's a high-DR traffic link? Or do you understand how to look at trust and toxicity? Do you understand where to start when you're building first building the site with regards to your link velocity? Do you understand what content velocity that you need to do? There's so many moving parts to being good in your trade, which is SEO. That if you just try and start doing rank and rent in the lawyers' industry, you just be very, very, very good at what you do. And if you're not very good at what you do, you need to team up with someone and get them to do it for you. And you can still leverage and earn a lot of money by it, if you can take the leads and sell the leads on. But that's my that's my best to to be able to do it. Initially, you need to get the site ranking. This the selling of the leads is relatively easy. It's going one employ any salesperson, and they they'll be able to sell it like that. So you turn around and says, I'm I'm generating personal injury attorney kind of leads? You'd have fifty different lawyers snatching your hands off, one to buy the leads. If you can generate them. But the hard part is generating those quality leads. Do I mean? You can't turn around. Some people out there that do lead gen, and they go, win an iPad, and they're putting in the details, and they sell it as a personal injury—I mean, they're never going to convert. So you need to be ranking for the right keyword. But the law industry is very, very, very tough to rank. You need to you need to learn SEO initially. Or if you're a lawyer and you don't want to go in the trenches of learning SEO for five or six years, try and team up with someone that can do it for you.

James Dooley: Yeah, that makes sense. Definitely, we can do some of these quick-fire if you want, because I'm I just want to be your time as well. So another question we got asked was, if you got fired today and have to start from zero—he fired yourself—would you carry on rank and rent?

James Dy: You can't start with rank and rent. So you start off with probably something like display ads. So you go and get a few sites up. I'd probably follow your exact blueprint of scaling out sites using like autoblogging, and go and try and get some to earning in five hundred pound a month with display ads. Build out several of those sites. If one of them started to do really well, and I could try and monetize it in a different way—not just by display, but by doing lead generation—I'd do that as well. I just go and build out—like there's also a random ranking factor. There's certain times you can build a site, not every that we build ranks. Like there certain times I'm looking at it, I'm like, this site and this site have been followed the exact same process. And this site's crushing it. And for some reason, this site just doesn't seem to perform as well. So I one hundred per cent carry on doing what I'm doing. But ranking rent is two, three, four years down the line. You need to initially start out just by doing lead gen, go local, go display ads with it, just try and start getting some money in. Because for the easy for the easy niches, you don't need backlinks. When you start getting the true and isses, like the law, you need a lot of backlinks. You need probably be spending five, ten grand a month on backlinks in in the tough an niches for you to try and get where you need to get to. For some of the easier ones, I say plumbing in a suburb of New York or in the suburb or in Florida or something like that, they they're relatively easy to rank for. Different industries, you could still get yourself to earning two, three, four hundred pound a month. And then keep reinvesting it and going again. It might take several years to to get back to—well, won't get back to where I am now. But like, it'll take several years to get back to earning good money. But yeah, that's what I think.

James Dooley: Do you target specific results and KPIs, for example, impressions or clicks or rankings when you're implementing the SEO strategy?

James Dy: Yes. I mean, we we've kind of got a blueprint now. With good quality content, get your pillar foundational links to start with, and then start just keep build—keep building links and building content of what's needed. The we can over—we can over complicate certain things with setting KPIs in place. But the truth of the matter is, your growth normally—your growth is like this, right? And then next, and I'll give them up there—he comes. And if you're doing things right, you go like that, right? So you have a massive jump. And a lot of times nowadays, you're only getting incremental jumps going up, and you're in like a positive ranking state. But it's a slow positive ranking state until they come and recrawl and rescore the whole industry with an algorithm update. And if you're doing things right at that point, you can quadruple in traffic. So it's very difficult to set KPIs for members of staff when you first build insights out, because otherwise you go and give them a massive pay rise if a call all gives they, and then the rest of the year they might have work really hard, but it's flatlined. Do you know what I mean? So it's it's a tough one to do. You just got to trust the process of what you're doing, which is good quality content, topical authority.

James Dooley: Do you worry about semantics, or is it just good quality content and backlinks?

James Dy: Semantics is about—yeah, semantics is very important. So making certain that contextually you're covering all the the the macro content needs to make certain that got all the main entities on the page. So when I say macro, I mean the content higher up the page has got more weight than the the content on the bottom of the page. So make it certain you got all the main, like, high salience entities towards the top, and then you can slightly start going slightly off-topic in the in the micro content and then in the internal linking to the other pages. And then obviously in the on the other page in the macro's got to be like what your title is about. And yeah, you've got to make certain you covering the the main entities and the main lists of semantic similarity, keywords, and stuff like that. So there's different way—like some easy a from easy tips that you can do is when you when you type in the question or the the title, get all all the bolded keywords that show up from the SERP. Go into images, get all the entities that show up at the top. Or even just go and do what you do and go to ChatGPT and say, what are the main ten entities for this kind of topic? And just work them in. And if you work those in, then yes, semantically, you'll be the best article, or you'll be at least making certain that Google understands what the page is about.

James Dooley: Do you have any favourite tools for it, for example, like Surfer SEO or pop or NeuriteWriter, et cetera?

James Dy: So we we use various tools. So like it's from a a UI point of view, a lot of them prefer using Surfer for SEO for edge analysis. For certain things, if things aren't moving exactly what we want, do we use Clearscope? The page optimiser pro probably the best one is MarketMuse. Jeff Coyle's MarketMuse. So that that doesn't use correlation. That uses um topical modeling system, but it's very expensive. I think it's something like two and a half thousand pound a month. But it you—that's the closest thing to how Google works with regards to topical modelling. But the truth of the matter is, if you're using Frase, put Surfer, you're better than ninety-five per cent of the people that are out there. Obviously, majority of the industry are using it. But when you're up against actual brick layers or plumbing companies, they don't even know what these tools are. So use whatever. If you're starting out and you don't have much money, go and get a seven days trial with Surfer, Frase, and all the others, and just try and use those as much as you can, and just see what you prefer. They're all they're all good at what they do on-page. Outlinked is another good one with Eric, like. But yeah, we we even within my own different companies that we have, some of that different content writers prefer using different tools. As long as as long as they getting the right semantics and entities on the page, then I'm happy. You have any preferred platform for the CMS, for example, like WordPress, or that sort of thing?

James Dooley: Yeah, they're all they're all mainly done in WordPress. We have a like a framework done in PHP and raw HTML kind of sites that we're kind of throwing up initially as test beds. But majority of them are built in in WordPress.

James Dy: Yeah. Yet another question we got asked was, how much effort do you put in to see results? So I'm going to ask like, how how many hours do you actually work normally day to day?

James Dooley: Sure. It completely varies. It completely varies. Sometimes I get burn out, and I might go and have two or three days off. And I might go—I've got like a holiday home in Wales. Um, I might go there, go out on the jet ski, go out on like on the boat, and just have a couple of days on the water and just kind of chill out, kind of refocus I need to be doing. And then I'll come back. I play football over weekend. I go to the gym three or four times a week. So I feel like I've got a good balance. But then these days, when an algorithm update comes along, or someone comes and pitches me an idea and I really like the idea, and I might go and do four days, sixteen hours, sixteen hours a day for four days. So like, is completely—I kind of do a lot of my stuff in sprints. When I've got the the energy, I'm like, right, I'm going all in, and I'm going to do it. So it it varies. Not as as a normal routine working day. I get up about five o'clock, going into the office for maybe five or six hours. And in the I'm best in the morning. I get flow state in the morning. Obviously, everyone's different. But mine is just have a couple of coffees in the morning, get in flow state, smash a load of workout, go to the gym, sometimes have a game of tennis or something like that in the middle of the day. And then I go home. I'll have—I won't eat. I do that intermittent fasting. I won't eat till maybe two, three o'clock. After of eaten, I uh, I feel sluggish. Like, I I can still work, but when I check my productivity levels, it's nearly half, after I've eaten. So I just get all my all my stuff that I need to do done in the day. After I've eaten, it's more on the phone, ringing up like my business partners, could be going out for a walk with a member of staff or something like that. And in the afternoon, it's more more chilled environment. Protect the kids for a bike ride and stuff like that.

James Dy: What's your SOP or recovering from penalties? What's your process for that?

James Dooley: So it it's it's a very broad a broad S. There's multiple SOPs that fall on the website recovery. So the we we want to check every on the site. So we want to fix everything possible. So in in my opinion, Julian, one of the best—one of the most exciting parts I think about SEO at the moment is the amount of sites that have been hit. If someone can fully recover websites, and they can go buy these sites, the hundreds of millions of pounds, there's so many sites that was once doing one hundred, two hundred, three hundred, a month that are now completely been decimated in the down to five, ten thousand a month. The almost getting nothing off Google. And they're only getting the five, ten one the month from Bing traffic. And if you know how to recover it, then then yeah, it's a it's a great opportunity.

The way the way the main ways that we look at is E-E-A-T is one of them. So we're going to check like just going to take all the boxes. So I I actually own a brand called e-o, and they do—it's an audit. I think it's less than two hundred dollars, and I think it's like a thirty-five page audit. And and it's probably overkilled to do it all. But you know what? For the sake of two, three hundred to implement it, just go and implement it. So like, go and get make certain you got an about us page and off the page like I meet about was page about the company. I meet the team page off of pages for who's written the content, a contact page with a telephone number—yeah, with a telephone number—two or three different emails. Even if you don't—even if you're only a small company and you don't have two or three different emails, just go and create them and just forward them all to one email. So go and have, let's say, j dot com, go have like a careers at Julian gold dot com, complaints at Julian gold dot com. Because in the Google quality guidelines, it says like, how many different ways can we contact this website if we've got a complaint? So go and physically get an address. If if you can't, go, go go and rent a Wework space. Just go and get an address on the site, right? It just then they're able to send a post. That in their opinion, if they needed to send something by a post, they can do there's a physical address on there. Not only that, is if you've got a physical address, you can go get a lot of citations and directory listings. Like NAP listings, they're all no-follow backlinks, but it's for link diversity. Do you know what I mean? And they're all naked URLs, that's good for your link diversity. Because now you're an text kind of diversity is good. And obviously, you you no-follow to do-follow ratio and your backlink profile, that was good. So we're just going to take all the boxes on EEAT as best we can.

The once we've done that—especially if—so something we check is in Google Analytics. We check to see whether Rater hubs hit your website. So Rater hubs—what if Rater hubs—the software that Google uses, the Google quality raters use. If Rater hubs hit your site, good luck, because knowing twenty-four hours, bam, you've been hit. So what actually happens is algorithmically, Google's coming looking at your site. They see there's a lack of trust signals. And then they go and like get rater kind of members of staff to come and check, can you see X, Y, and Z? And if you C lack of trust, you're getting penalized. There's actually a penalty in Google Search Console called the ALA transparency penalty. You normally want to get it in the finance sector or the Google News kind of sector. But then it just basically is telling you that Google are looking at who's written the article. I used to think it was all AI, but anyway, that's one part.

The second part is is the cost of information retrieval. So how many pages do you have on your website that getting no traffic? And are they do you feel that they're serving a purpose for for your website? Because if they're not, get rid of them, because you're just wasting Google's crawl budget. You've got index bloat on your site. And Google then starts to be like, do you know what? Site like—it's almost like the panda penalty days where they call it now a classifier, but it basically a site-wide penalty, because you've got some some content which is thin content. And it affects your whole site rankings. So we've kind of got it in our internal policies. They've twenty—not—majority of sites, twenty, twenty-five per cent of their site gets no traffic. Export it, Google Search Consultancy, and start working through those and get them deleted. If they've got links going through to them, redirect them to the next most relevant page. Or if you think it's a really important entity for your topical authority, go and completely rewrite it and get it that it is ranking. Because if it's not ranking, it's serving no purpose to Google. And then the third one is your backlink profile. So the amount of people that try to tell me that this those don't work—it's it's embarrassing. We we've taken over Rick Lass's agency, and we do all the—this about so we've got like by far the biggest kind of dataset of Link penalty removal, like reconsideration requests. We use Link Research Tools, Majestic SEO, H Ref, SemRush. And then we got—we've got our own like link simulator, which kind of comes in to tell you the the power, the trust, the toxicity, the relevance, and whether it brings any sort of value with regards to like the anchor text or the positioning of of where the link is. And we we—that's called Backlink Doctor. And they run DISOs still to this day. This four or five kind of manual action link penalty alities that come out. Been once or two, I've heard one or two videos recently where people go, when was the last time you heard about a manual action link penalty? And I'm like, we get them all the time, like we—because we people come to our brand for it. So we do a lot of reconsideration requests on that with Google.

What seems have you ever done a reconsideration request with Google yourself?

James Dy: No, never.

James Dooley: So you actually go back and forth with a Google employee. So it could be like Julian gold at Google dot com. And what you need to do is you need to first and foremost be seen to re try to outreach to remove the links. Now, the truth of the matter is, there's no chance you're going to be able to outreach to all these sites. But you have to be seen to to be doing that. So you do like a campaign to try and get certain toxic links removed. And then you then you've got to submit a disavow. And then some—then you submit your reconsideration request. Sometimes they might just revoke it and say, yeah, that's fine. We've now removed the penalty. And then there's times where they might might come back saying, no, there's still links pointing through to the profile. It's not in the disavow. It's not been removed. And then you can start asking for examples. And they'll give you—they won't give you the the whole list, but they'll start giving you three or four examples of domains that they say these these look unnatural. And what's really interesting with it is, because some of these examples that you give, even I look at it, and I'm like, like, that's a a DR seventy. It's got traffic. It's on an upward trajectory. Like, that's a good link. And they're like, no. And you're like, wow. And then when you start then digging deeper into it, you can see it's linking out to casino. It's linking out to CBD. They just like—you can start seeing certain signs. Now, when it's—but it's only really when they start presenting certain websites to you that you go, oh, wow. And then at that point, then, when they give you those examples, we start running certain like individual split tests. So we'll run—we'll buy some links on that site to an easy-to-rank-for turn that might be ranking position number three and see whether it moves it or not. And there's times where some of these toxic domains, you go and get a link on it, and you think it's a good guest post, and it can drop you from position number three to position number twenty with one buy link. I'm like, wow, this is this is scary because you think it's a good link. So that we we do a lot with that. And we started on the website we started doing a lot with those three pillars—EEAT, EEAT pruning, and the disavow. If if after that they not recovered, pretty much give up. A lot of work to do in itself, though, like, that's it.

James Dy: Is yeah. But I just feel like if you're gonna do it, some of these sites were—if it was earning twenty, thirty, forty, fifty thousand pound plus a month, it's worth the time and the effort. If he was a side that was doing four, five thousand a month and it's been hit hard, you've got to then start thinking to yourself, is it worth the time and the effort in trying to recover it? That point is probably not worth it. But we I'm enjoy—that's something that I'm enjoying at the moment is looking into because so many sites have been hit. We I've been hit on a few affiliate sites. I'm looking at the affiliate sites, and I'm like, these are good sites. Like, and and we still still to this day now, from the September update, on some sites, we're looking at it going like we still not uncovered the exact reason from the—it seemed like a hit obviously. Affiliates. But like, still not certain why because like the Bing profile is good. We've got good quality content. We've got topical authority. And like, couple of sites it had. And the worst thing is with it, Julian, is I've got other sites in the same niche that in my opinion is nowhere near as good. And they've gone above it. And I'm like, I don't get it. So we're still we're still trying to work things out on on that specific—I think it was like September the eleventh foot date or something—but I feel like they're going to have to roll hold certain bits back. But whether they do or don't, I don't know.

James Dooley: Last question: how do you see the future of SEO with SGE coming in and AI?

James Dy: I think he's going to hit hard the display ad websites. The informational—people are scaling out informational-type blogs. I think those sites might get hit hard, because I don't see the need for a lot of people clicking through to an informational-based site when Google can present the within SGE at the top, all the AI can present it and stuff like that. So I think a lot of those might get less traffic. The only saving grace where they might not is because Google—Google make a lot of money on Google AdSense. So and for Google AdSense to work, people need to click through to the websites um to show the display ads. So for that reason, I'm like, are they going to do this? Are they not? I'm not certain. But then on the the other hand is, are they doing it? And they probably going to make them more money, because what I thinking they're trying to get to do is a lot of top-of-the-funnel keywords. If they can answer the question with SGE, and then underneath it, they've got the next five questions that you might want to know. And they're clicking on to it, and they're answering it, and the next—and they're answering it. Before they know it, they're staying on Google's so for longer. And the beam moved from the top of the funnel down to the bottom of the funnel type keyword questions. And at that point, you've got people willing to pay good money on PPC at bottom-of-the-funnel-type keywords. So is it a of them getting top-of-the-funnel keywords down to bottom-of-the-funnel keywords where they can sell the clicks on per-click? If so, it's clever by then very clever. But in a lot of other industries, people want—want to—they don't want the AI to answer it. They want kind of thing. So I'm not scared. I'm not running away from the industry. Um, I might need to adapt certain things with what I do. If anything, I'd say the SEO industry is in the best state of what it can be in at present. If they can follow your YouTube channel and and leverage AI, like what it's—it's made life so easy. It's unbelievable, like for certain elements. Like, you can rewrite articles to add more entities in with the right prompts of what you can do. Google's come out and said that we're fine with you using AI, as long as as long as it's good for the user. It's good for Google. So having the right prompts—it's garbage in, garbage out. And this is why I enjoy your your videos, because you're all about the prompts. If you just give it prompts and go, write me this article, and you don't do an outline, it's garbage. If give it an outline, and you like the outline, oh, can you change this? And then each outline has got a specific prompt of how you want it being answered? Well, well, then it's it's great. Like, if anything, I'm worried about AI because now people can catch me up a lot easier than what previously it used to take me months and months and months to build out a site, and now I can can probably build out that same site with AI in four or five days. Do you know what I mean? So it's it's a great time. If people leverage and embrace AI, people that don't have follow further and further behind.

James Dooley: Yeah, I think it's never been as easy in the fun to do.

James Dy: Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

James Dooley: Well, thanks so much for being on. What's the best way to get in touch with you or any websites you want to promote?

James Dy: I've got Jamesdy dot com on there. It's got all my social profiles—whether it's like YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest, stuff like that. I'm going to be a lot more active on the podcast and on YouTube. So they can click through on there. The yeah, have nothing really to sell, to be honest with you. If someone's got any questions, ask away. I'm quite active on Twitter as well. So ask away, and I can try to help out in any way that I can. I want others to do well. The industry is more than enough for millions of us to make millions. So the best of luck to everyone.

James Dooley: Awesome, man. Thank you. Cheers, Julian.

James Dy: Cheers. Cheers, mate. Cheers.

James Dooley: So thanks so much for watching. If you want to get access to my free ChatGPT SEO course, it basically teaches you how to rank and get more leads and traffic and sales from Google using SEO, then feel free to get that free course. Links in the comments. And if you do want to book in a call about how to get more leads, traffic and sales from Google, feel free to book the in. We have some Black Friday deals going on. You can save thousands of dollars if you sign up this week. So if you want us to personally build you a link-building campaign that predictably and consistently delivers you more backlinks, traffic, and sales to your website, feel free to in a free SEO strategy session. And we can basically answer any questions you have, look at your competitors, and give you an SEO domination plan. Thanks so much for watching. Appreciate it. Bye-bye.