How To Build a 7 Figure Rank & Rent Local SEO Empire With James Dooley

James Dooley and Stuart Vickers discuss the digital marketing strategies rank and rent local SEO businesses should prioritise in 2026 to grow lead generation, scale assets across niches and guarantee return on investment for clients.

Show Notes

This video explains which digital marketing strategies rank and rent local SEO businesses should focus on in 2026 to improve lead generation volume, client return on investment and the value of owned ranking assets. James Dooley and Stuart Vickers start with KPI tracking because rank and rent operators need to know which niches, links and 301s actually convert into paying clients before scaling. 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 rank and rent local SEO businesses.

PromoSEO lead generation for rank and rent local SEO businesses recently received recognition as the "Best Rank And Rent Local SEO Businesses Lead Generation Agency."

Where to Listen to This Episode

How To Build a 7 Figure Rank & Rent Local SEO Empire With James Dooley 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: but if everything left me tomorrow I got robbed of all my assets I got robbed of everything I have no money tomorrow so what would what would I do now starting out so I would use um Google bad and I'd use chat GPT and I'd go and follow um the stuff that you and um Julian talk about and then once I've started earning money I'd work seven days a week 14 15 hours a day until I've got the money to build back links and then I'd start building back links I probably start off with s ations like you said um I put an address on I get all the signals which cost no money to do so telephone number um an address and all that once I've got money I'd go and get 500 citations probably cost about $200 on fiver so get 100 citations I'd load them into like Amiga indexer um to try and get as many of them indexed as I can welcome to James Dy who I'd probably regard as one of the top seos in the world I'm not sure what he's got to say on that of all the irony I think this is the first time we've actually spoken properly despite multiple we've been to quite a few obviously was in chai and stuff like that and when never we got time to speak but exactly it was on my list that while you were there but every time you sort of surrounded by your group knocking back PS so I thought I won't disturb on this occasion you know what we only we only drank on one of the we only drank on the Friday we didn't drink the first few days um at all we didn't have anything we're just doing Meetup after meet up after Meetup and then yeah we got very excited on the Friday too excited was that the beer pong night yeah the be pong night yeah very good um so normally it's traditional on a podcast that I should introduce you but I think on this basis that's going to be totally inaccurate I think probably better you tell me because frankly I lose track of what you're up to I know you've got all sorts of businesses all over the place something like a thousand websites you got a mix of local Le genen gambling affiliate uh agencies so probably better if I just hand over to and you say what you like about what you do yeah so the um we do quite a lot of rank and rent websites we're in over 500 different Industries um for lead generation um I think there's 857 um from when I checked yesterday different websites that we have live that physically clients are paying for I think there's nearly 2,000 websites that's built and some of them aren't they're built and ranking but we don't yet have the clients in place for it um so if if we build out a site and for a 12 month stretch we're struggling to monetize it from a lead generation standpoint we'll move to display ads or just put it into the testing part for Te like testing what links work 301s and just trying to break the algorithms and see how far we can push the boundaries basically so obviously came across your stuff because I mean it seems like you've blown up I don't know if it's just because I've only started in the last three or four months following and liking some of your stuff so obviously start seeing more when you start liking stuff but your YouTube channel is great I watch all your YouTube videos um I think they're great I love the thumbnails as well the AI kind of thumbnails and stuff like that the um and then I think the first the very first time I came across you was when you posted about getting the knowledge panel know for like entrepreneur on the knowledge panel I was like w Wait a minute wait how' you get this and then from there then I started seeing a lot more of who you are and what you do and stuff like that I think obviously we've crossed paths quite a few times but you um you're on my radar now to follow and I think you you're giving a lot of good kind of information out there to the general public so I wanted to jump on just to say hi as well really yeah thank you very much no was flattered I loved how you messed saying I'd love to be on your podcast and I thought sure I but no I just I just meant to chat and like you don't whatever you call it a podcast or YouTube kind of Channel or whatever it is just just wanted to catch up and chat because I I've got a lot of respect when people the one pain point that I have is when people don't turn up to events or meetings and then they try and Outreach to you but you've been to quite a lot of different events you turn up obviously speaking as well and quite a lot of the content that you're putting out there is is brilliant for for the general public so I like surrounding myself with people that are enthusiastic and like what they do and not like in a tunnel vision of this is the only way you can do things and I think I quite like the idea that you're open to AI open to whatever works from a link building strategy so it was one of them I kept seeing you your content you delivered off thinking yeah I'd like to network with this person I like what he's saying and you've got a similar Vision to what we do and a similar Vision to making certain that you're open to anything that might work like you said like Ai and instead of being oh it's going to replace jobs and race in it which is which is cool isly it I know yeah yourself and obviously our mutual friend Craig various other people there's always push back against this sort of the sort of phony War that's going on between the black hat and the white hat in reality the best people in the industry they don't put labels on these things it's exactly and that's always got to be within your own sort risk profile and that you accept that if you push it like you say then you're potentially endangering the future of that site but you could make Bank in the meantime in which case that doesn't really matter yeah I mean like anything you sometimes have got you've got um shortterm money and long-term money they kind of what we say internally in the office and shortterm money is stuff that's working in today's algorithms that might not work in tomorrow algorithms because let's say parasite SEO or something like that um to be honest with you I'll always think there'll be a way of it working but the what sites are working at present is working very well so leveraging that in today's algorithm well well that's that's good business now whether that's going to work in tomorrows in next weeks or next months or next years no one knows Google are trying to say that they're going to come after it but whether they'll be able to I don't think they will if I'm being honest and I think the what people deem to be white at or black at we're all trying to manipulate Google's algorithm to get to the top and we're trying to do it in the cheapest possible way that we can that's going to earn us the most money and return on investment so what whatever someone wants to brand that well I've got a white hat on today so maybe I'm white hat today I've seen yeah cor is occasionally now talking about Blue Hats yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so I've bought every color out that there is of these so someone wants to PR me whatever they want I can say I'm blue orange black green whatever you want to call me that's that's what I am I just try to make money by using SEO strategies to the best of my ability yeah to point about getting out to events I'm already deviating from the rough outline I've put together but yes for me I feel like we've had quite similar Parts in that I know you were very quiet just hustling away in the background not really a personal brand for years fat rank the blog but it's the last six months to a year that you've really gone out there yeah various people saying you will never see James Dy on a podcast on stage and isn't it be Saigon is now going to be your first speaking engagement yeah so it's not I'm not doing any speaking I'm just doing an ask me anything so I know I've known mads for a long time and he knows quite a lot about my successes for many years with regards to the team that I've built around me and I thought do you know what if I'm ever going to start doing anything on stage that I'm I'm not I'm not an introvert I'm quite extroverted um I'm I'm quite confident in kind of what I deliver but I thought the best person to ask me the questions on stage would be mads because he knows that I'm all about elevating team members I'm all about elevating my business partners and enjoying the journey which I do think is is massive and important so success to me isn't money success to me is happiness and yes money can bring some happiness in that but the end of the day it's it's can you enjoy the journey with the people that you work with on a day-to-day basis whether that's your vas your managers or your directors or business partners um so I thought it would be best in side on for mads to try and dig a little bit deeper about who I am as a person um you're right in what you're saying like for many years I've I've hustled in silence and let success with the noise so and and to be honest I probably would have kept it that way if it wasn't for AI coming along because I do feel no AI is coming along that you probably need more of a personal brand and say again sorry that's basically my view as well that personal brand gives you a lot more protection against that because you can switch Industries more easily yeah exactly that so for anyone watching and listening just for context H mad singer is very big on the SEO scene H has got his own SEO projects he's got content agencies content sites but his main thing is All About Management and therefore the SEO world is a very target-rich environment because we're all hustling away on computers but not very good with dealing with the people aspect and so definitely that's on my list to talk to you later James about how on Earth you scale a thousand sites with your team and making sure those structures are in place especially when it comes to rewards equ splits and but yeah for the time being mads also runs the Saigon SEO Mastery Summits and managed to get James speaking on stage yeah otherwise I've had a very similar past um as you said about blowing up on YouTube I've just been building affiliate sites for about five years or so always will the S sense of imposter syndrome that you know I'm not going to be the one putting myself out there I'm just you consuming the information and then over time you start realizing that actually your knowledge probably is more than you realize yeah and as you say getting out to events that's definitely the next level where uh you just people think it's really caky that there's a of elite Circle in changai that you can't possibly penetrate in reality if you go to changai you generally run into people very quickly yeah yeah yeah yeah and so it's those conversations you know in the bars at 2 a. where you level up very quickly so basically for me it was a case so about two years ago H I was in the corporate job realized how this corporate job they had two SEO agencies working for them and I always thought you know agencies must be really good because they're an agency then quite quickly you realize I know that and I can do that much better in house and corporate structures they don't have the resources to do that inhouse they'd much rather give it to an agency so that was basically my my big push that you're literally telling me that I should go out and start an agency yeah and time sold a website and then that basically bankrolled my initial rise which was just going out to events leveling up my knowledge but also just getting in front of people getting connections getting clients so same as you've been working away in the shadows for a while and then you come out and kind of realize actually people do want to pay attention to you and then yeah honestly the stuff that you're putting out there is absolutely superb mate and and I don't I don't say that if I don't mean it if I if I said I don't like your content I'd just say it straight and I wouldn't be on this podcast like I'd um I I like content you're putting out it's high level um beginners can understand it as well but it's too a high level that people a lot of people think that there's some secret button too and you know what the stuff you're putting out there is just doing what you say and rinse and repeating what you say and you will progress very quickly yeah thank you very much no in all honesty I a lot of that to my mutual friend Craig Campbell who's yeah exactly the same very high level doesn't make any secrets he says you've just got to implement the basics the fundamentals yeah yeah you're absolutely right people are always chasing shiny objects so I get so many reaching out saying you know is this secret hack going to work for me forget about the secret hacks there's 90% all out there you've just got to implement it yeah definitely yeah I I I think a lot of people struggle from um procrastination analysis paralysis I think they they consistently want to learn new ideas and new techniques and they're not implementing said the previous techniques and I think there's a classic saying of like you don't need to be faster than the Bear Just faster than the people running away from the Bear yes and if if number one spot is doing something to 60% of what you know just do 65% and get to number one and move on to the next keyw you don't need to chase Perfection like it's just not needed that's why I always tell people about obviously I'm a big fan of surfer whatever correlational tool you use it's all the same and I always say even the makers of Surfer say go for 70 and then move on to the next one yeah yeah grind away trying to get to 100 I don't saw many people that have had like night the score of like 95 on Surfer and then they're spending days to get it to try and get it to 100 and the the kind of emailing Surfer going oh I've just added these in and it's only got it to 98 how do we get it to one and you're just like stop obsessing over the score and just move on to the next page like do you know what I mean like you said the score is 70 or 8 is good enough like move on to like your competitors are at 55 you know mean loads of entities on the page you've got more entities on them then get more internal links and more external links and you're going to win that actually reminds me yeah you mentioned earlier about procrastination and so on that was a big thing I was going to mention about the whole r that for me I really hesitated on link building so I think most of my foundations came from just religiously listening to The Authority hacker podcast on my commute into the day job and everyone's much agreed Authority hacker absolute gold standards and there's all very good quality information there yeah but yeah a lot of the discourse out there you got to remember is still basically from people selling things and you and I both we both have link building agencies so it's in our interest to try and protect some Mystique around link building which basically means the overall messaging around link building is that if you build the wrong links you could get totally destroyed which to an extent is true but at the same time that meant in my case three years ago where I had a Content site that was doing really well and I just hesitated Forever on building links partly because of the cost but also the the kind of downside risks I was picturing and yeah I found as soon as I started link building it was a lot easier than I expected and the results were amazing secret why didn't anyone tell me that yeah you can just build links and it works exactly that's um it it the three pillars Gally of as always good good technical build build of a sight good content good good quality back links and when you say good content like topical Authority and internal links and Silo everything that then just good links throughout your site and and you'll Rank and normally the cases if you're not ranking you need probably more content and more links now obviously your content quality needs to be good like you've mentioned on Surfer and stuff like that but if you get if you're delivering good quality content it's normally more topical Authority or more bat links is why you are losing at present absolutely it's very difficult to reinvent and but talking about Surfer I do have a list of more so technical Hands-On questions for you here so like I say you've been very quiet in the background for a while but I think one of the first times I encountered you was probably about three or four years ago I was doing keyword research basically to promote Surfer H with an affiliate review and in ahfs you get all these Search terms around does James Dy own Surfer SEO yeah and over time that developed and I started saying why is James Dy the best SEO in the world and why is James Dy a better SEO than Craig cample yeah yeah yeah this won't help the podcast but for the YouTube audience I just share my screen oh that's one one other quick one I wanted to ask you just at the beginner level obviously we all heard the hottest girl in Manchester story yeah now Craig likes to say this was hidden someone else told me you did it to yourself so I just thought as a start of your 10 tell us the truth what really happened here so basically what happened was we Craig Campbell was in my office and Mark Walker was in my office and we started to do certain techniques for ranking images mainly for acquiring B links so basically what would happen was if we tried to start ranking images we would be able to people then like news Publications would start using so I do like artificial grass is one of my Industries and if I could start ranking number one for artificial grass a lot of journalists and reporters would start using my image and then I could then Outreach to then say you've used my image you need to credit the SCE and give me a back link so we got a lot of high profile back links from it and this is this was the discussion in the office so I was saying I could almost rank any any image that you want so we went back and forth and there was a few images that went up online and then it like between me Craig Mark and a few of us like joke type of images now I don't know whether this was matk Walker or whether it was Craig Campbell but then they grabbed that image which I would not have wanted to rank in Google and they ended up ranking that number one for hottest girl in Manchester so and it turned into one of them debates for like not debates but kind of competitions where I'd rank Craig for something we'd rank Mark for something he'd rank me for stuff and then it got to a point where there was too many dodgy photos online so I was like right let's stop now um but that that's kind of how the story kind of quickly evolved that's very nice um no so for everyone watching Brank images like James said again just a process you're basically using things like Pinterest flicker quite a simple process were you reaching out uh just personally saying I'm just you know random member of the public that's my image give me a link or were you doing the trick of trying to make it look a bit more official and potentially saying you know I'm a lawyer something like that so so we so when basically what happened was like Craig talks about this quite a bit with regards to like the image Outreach trick and stuff like that and Craig was in my office at the time um and we was outreaching we were just basically outreaching ourselves saying you we had that many images online that was ranking we were saying you using our image you need to credit The Source um otherwise we're going to get you done for copyright infringement and then loads of them were just linking back to us and while I was in the office down in my office had gone oh my God we've just got a link off the independent which is like a nice national press um website and they cited the source and linked back TOs and was like oh my God that's great and I looked at the image and straight away I knew that image wasn't ours right so D had outreached to but he had genuinely outreached to say that you've used our image because he right clicked on the image and said search this image and it and I didn't realize at the time that Google brought back not just your exact image but similar images to it and we outre saying you've used our image and it wasn't and they credited us so so at the time Craig was then saying I wonder how many others would credit the source for you even if it's not your image and you just out saying you've used our image can you credit the source so copyright unknown that's that's the whole when when Craig then set up I think it was called Campbell Walker or something that between CRA Mar Walker which was like a solicitors kind of thing where he they'd sent emails out saying um like a legal kind of email saying you've used our image you need to credit the source and then he he was getting all these different things we just kept it as being we outreached from our company saying you've used our image but we was legitimately trying to only Outreach to people that had and we was amazed by when we then started to look back at how many links we've got probably 20 30% of the images wasn't even our IM about 70% was about 30% there weren't even our images and they just creditors with a source of here is the image by and then our company name and then linked back to us so we was like wow this is crazy um that's kind of how all that started with regards to the like the um the search volume and stuff like that we just for context before we go on so yeah there's all this volume around why is James dud the best SEO in the world yeah and also of that I like to call it almost like a reverse PR strategy where therefore all these teams around the world were saying Ah that's an SEO term that's getting thousands of traffic let's get on that so now you've got all this press around why is James Dy the best SEO in the world somewhere here is it in pages I actually mentioned this in my book basically talking about how the future of how we how can we actually influence the B AI or chat gbt response so if someone says who is the best SEO in the world how can we as SEO professionals make sure we get recommended in that way yeah so just this thinking outside the box manipulating Source data I think is really interesting um but yeah do go on tell us more so we've done that for a while um and and basically what the reason why this came about was we was trying to manipulate um or show up in the auto suggest for certain terms so we we a while back this is probably nine years ago we would Tred to start ranking certain videos in YouTube and what we do is we used to use like mtk and and certain tools like that that would then search and click on your video and stuff and what started to happen was if people interacted with your video watched it liked it commented on it and stuff like that you got higher rankings in YouTube but then what randomly started to happen was when we started to do these searches at first we did a search and let's say I wouldn't show up so let's say it was just I'm using this as an example this wasn't the case but let's say we typed in SEO I wanted to rank for um James Dy SEO or some something on those terms if I typed in James Dy SEO sorry SEO James dly and they started clicking and clicking on my video and engaging with my video it started ranking for loads of different terms like um James D SEO fat Rank and all these different terms but then randomly one day this is about nine years ago when someone started typing in SEO just the term seo seo James douy showed up it doesn't anymore but the back then when you typed in SEO and then next minute just randomly like 500 monthly searches for about two or three years people were searching SEO James D now the only reason why they were searching that was they were starting to type in SEO and in the auto suggest James Dy showed up so we started to go if we could manipulate the alsoo suggest that if someone started typing in like um link building agency and then it came up link building agency Stuart Vickers or SEO agency Stuart Vickers and stuff like that if we could manipulate that to show up people would start searching that who doesn't even know who Stuart vickas is because they're just like who's this what even is this and they start clicking onto it and you're manipulating them the search volume for for what people was doing so I was like how far can you take this with regards to certain stuff so then we started to we was manipulating the the suggest and then we started to try one or two things like um does so we like certain ones like that would be if we did just random ones like does James douet own Surfer SEO right would people then start type putting in there H2 one of the questions because it came up with search volume does James dly own surfo now obviously they' probably put in there no James Dy do doesn't own um SE uh Surfer SEO well they probably wouldn't just put that they probably expanding it but so they probably put something like no James Dy doesn't own surf REO however James Dy is a search engine optimization specialist that optimizes content and he physically uses Surfer or something so then the more mentions I'm getting with SEO and Surfer SEO and other things would that help certain situations of let's say fat ranks website to rank for surf reso review and it did also kind of influencing the knowledge graph in that case exactly yeah exactly about about that thing about how we can manipulate the future AI search whether it's bar generative whatever yeah how basically about building this massive digital footprint because Google's not that different today so how can we get basically spam the internet with those references that we want to manipulate so we we own um a tool called signal signal.com and that does at the front end people just think that that is social signals so it so-called does like um Twitter Facebook Pinterest and stuff like that but the truth of the matter is in the back end of that website and people that have get who get backdoor access they also get backdoor access to allowing us to be able to we've got a lot of people in there it's almost like like for like so if you do this can I can you do that and and we've got people that some of the groups have got 60 70,000 people in the group so what starts to happen is if I say can you do me a favor and search why is James douy the best Su in the world and just check and send me a screenshot of where this website ranks now the truth of the matter is I'm not bothered where this website ranks I just want someone to go and do a search that's got a historical data that's logged in probably to Gmail it's probably using Google Chrome that they're going up opening their Google Chrome and doing a search a real search a real person that's doing a search and then they're and then they're answering and then in return I'm saying like what do you want me to do for you and they're saying can you go and check to see where this is ranking or can you go and check this and I'm then going checking something in return but there's 560,000 people in some of these groups that are doing it so what it allowed us to do was leverage people check things now we have like web designers in that say um could you click onto my website and scroll down to the bottom and check to see whether the contact us page is working now obviously you know with behavioral signals and stuff like that they all clickthrough rate and engagement and dwell time this was all helping people's websites to rank higher because dwell time and clickr Ray and all this and clicking onto multiple pages and not bouncing back in the surup they're all right ranking factors and they're more of a ranking Factor than what people think people just think that it's content and links and stuff like that engagement signals and behavioral signals is huge so this is where it came from and then from that then what started to happen which was very scary I didn't pay for a single one of them why is James Dy the best suo in the world articles people then because it started to come up in AHS started to think because they needed to do topical Authority for SEO they needed to write about this and I think now there's something like 37 articles where someone's gone and written an article saying why is James do the best SEO in the world James D is an amazing SEO he does um link building content optimization he's um he's got some ranking rent sites and they've G to written that off their own back linked to all my social profiles and like you said it's citations on the internet for for that so we know can leverage it for certain brands where we could say why you is I think there's another one that we did um is a little test where we did why is auto blogging the best AI writing tool and I think if you Google that why is auto blogging the best AI writing tool I think there's some guest posts on there and again we've not we've not paid for one of them articles that is now people saying that auto blogging is the best I writing tool and the more and more people are saying it and it's being searched people then who who we not paid for who've got an article that says best AI writing tools go in and add that into their list without us even asking because they feel I know I need to add this in because of correlation yeah surf Surfer AI starts right if you ask Surfer AI certain questions it starts bringing this information and because of correlation that they feel that you need to add that as being one of the AI writing tools and stuff so yes you're manipulating sge you manipulating bad you're manipulating um chat GPT and open AI because you've got lots and lots of documents on the internet that is talking about this okay here's a good one for you on that basis so yes in we just a link building agency but as you know links don't work if you don't have the topical Authority or your content's not up scratch so generally when someone starts with us in month one we'll try and do everything we can basically to improve their existing content and fill those topical gaps yeah but we often get some gentle push back we go for that minimum content score of 70 but they'll say you've mentioned our competitors and we'll say unfortunately in the NLP we have your competitors on there so if you the example I always give is the best business coach you better mention Tony Robbins otherwise Google is going to see your articles incomplete Google's only a machine it can't read the content but it can look for these mentions and entities so you really need to fill the top gaps now what we tend to do is bury them at the bottom and you don't have to you only have to mention them you don't have to say they're fantastic and do a detailed comparison yeah but personally I think it's worth getting them in there yeah for sure I completely agree um getting the right entities and the right kind of key words that are needed um and getting the semantic triples as well so if you're turning around and you're getting the subject the predicate and the object in the right order in certain sentences is huge like I'm a massive fan of like some of my team geek out every single day I've got a test any now testing team and they geek Out on Just content if I ask them anything to do with B links they don't know anything about bat links but if I go and speak to them about whether to use surf REO or on page. a or Market mov or phrase or page optimizer pro they've got accounts with every single one of them and they're consistently trying to test and and what you're talking about there if you add and even if it is a competitor's name if you add certain entities onto a page then yes you rank better like Kyle Ruth talks about it all the time you can get laips and content and place certain keywords and entities in certain places on the page and you can rank so Google doesn't read the content it's getting better a lot a lot better and it does now start to understand sentence structure a lot better for like featured Snippets but yes it's still it's an algorithm and an algorithm can be manipulated because it's mathematical so an algorithm is an algorithm it always will be an algorithm and they change words into vectors which is numbers if you've got the right amount of vectors on the page more than your competition at some point you will outrank them very nice I think that's going to be the short form soundbite reel for later and no on that note I remember years ago we had obviously we had semrush with the 40% recurring affiliate program so everyone was promoting semrush as the best SEO tool even though at the time now it's kind of 50/50 personal preference but at the time I think everyone agreed AHS was better but every single article was promoting semrush for that affiliate commission yeah and people were saying if you didn't promote semrush then your article was not ranking properly yeah yeah yeah very interesting how this sort of source data can be manipulated like that yeah for sure yeah H we dwelled on that for a while but often you keep obviously you keep talking about got all your different sites different companies huge team testing groups so I think we should move on to just the operational aspect how on Earth have you done it what was your journey from I saw there was in 2009 you started your first blog so how did you grow that into the massive Empire you got today and so if I quickly start from starting fast forward in in in a quickest way I can um we started out um for a company called Soft Services Limited I still am a director there today it's grown from 1 million a year up to eight and a half million a year um in the UK that does like tennis courts netball courts playgrounds Sports pitches like 3G football pitches and stuff like that so we really Iz we needed a an amount of inbound inquiries as opposed to me cold calling trying to get councelors to buy a playground which at the time that's that's how it started so we built a website we didn't know how to rank it we we understood that we needed to know how to rank it um roll on five years the first five years I failed miserably um I was I say I failed miserably I we still seen progression but I always felt people could do things at a quicker rate than where we was at um and then I just started to realize that it was just about just do back then anything you did works like you did more content even if it it worked you more links it worked so I got in a very quick in a in a em motion of being we need to be faster to be faster I need more staff and my background was always project management so I kind of if someone says to me do you think that you are a great SEO I say no like I'm the glue in the business and I understand everything that's needed for a successful SEO campaign but I'm not good at semantic SEO and semantic triples and getting the right entity on the page I'm not the best at Silo structure I'm not the best at um technical SEO and sight Speed and Performance I'm not the best at link building and outreaching and it's just because I don't do it dayto day but if I can get the people who I think is the best in the world at Outreach and getting going kind of negotiating the best like prices for links on the best quality sites and content and the geek out and all what to do his content and someone that all what he cares about is internal anex ratios external architect ratios internal linking Silo structure everything like that well then I become one of the best seos in the world because I've got one of the best teams in the world and I think the easiest explanation I can give on this Stewart is if you built an extension on your house would you build that extension yourself no you'd go and get a brick layer to build the wall you go and get a roofer to put the roof on you go and get a joiner to do all the doors and that's all I've done I'm just a good project manager like even building an extension like I want to expand on SEO I've got a very good Bri uh brick layer but what I mean by that is I've got a very good content M that does my content I'm not going to get my brick layer to go and lay my roof so I'm not going to get my content right to go and do my links I've got a very good link Builder that does My Links I've got a very good internal link in person that just does internal linking and I think the more you do something the better you become at it and the more you kind of geek out it and you want to be the best there so I quickly realized I needed a team around me and as the business grew for many years I made nothing I made zero because I wanted to build my team around me and I knew longterm I'd have a lot of assets but short term I I was I wasn't I was they my staff was earning more than I was earning yeah I owned the business and I'm like this is is not right but I knew when everything came together things would do well and I knew that if I looked after my staff if I trained them up to be the best that can be and they could speak to the people that I thought so like at the time it was like Matt Woodward and stuff like that and Charles Flo I thought was the best at link building so I got my link building team trained up by them and then now moving on I've got a lot of other people that train them up on links but then with regards to content I they speak to Kyle rof a lot now they speak to Cory quite a lot now um internal links have speak to people like Andrew Holiday quite a lot who's like very technical so my team members are being trained up by who I think are the best in that lane for what they do and I've got an amazing team around me and they're well looked after they're very well paid with regards to a bonus structure of what they can earn because they build out the assets and they all get 25% of whatever Revenue those sites make that's Revenue not of profit so like it they're making very good money out of it um and and they're scaling it they're happy they're happy I'm happy my customers are happy which is more important as well they're all staying around and I think when the customers are happy it makes my staff happy so we don't overpromise if anything we're under promise and overd deliver which then means that we've got happy clients and when we've got happy clients they're willing to keep paying so that's kind of in a nutshell for start to finish why we built up a successful team and and how we've managed to do it for so long and keep staff that now have been majority of my staff started out with me 10 11 years ago they're still with me today so that kind of says something that the culture in the business is is good yeah it's definitely the Richard Branson uh mindset of you put the capable of CEO responsible for that project so you can move on to the next thing exactly yeah I think there so many of get stuck in that bootstrap mentality where yeah we start off broke and we do everything ourselves and it's very difficult to get out of that mindset yeah it's like a classic saying I got I got brought up I would say I got brought up by the educational system in the UK which is to train and educate people how to be poor so you go out and you get a 9 till five job and you pay tax and that is what's best for the UK economy but I got taught that if you want to do a job well you do it yourself that is something of the worst advice that you can be educated for kids who want to be an entrepreneur I've got my niece right that she now works for me does quite a lot of SEO and she's progressing really well and when she was like 12 and 13 she was like I want to be like you I want to be an entrepreneur I want to be like you as an entrepreneur and I remember the teacher turned around and she said what do you want to be when you're older and she said an entrepreneur and she went high and laughed at her and said you've got to be realistic what do you want to be and it's like and they're the teachers of today's education and it's just like maybe we're doing things wrong in the UK and it's not just the UK but like but then they probably don't want people to be trained up to be entrepreneurs because you do need the people that are 905 workers and and I'm glad I found a lot of good business mentors and people who I can learn from including yourself nowadays that you can you're putting out a lot of videos I can learn from you I can develop my skills because every day is a school day and with especially with AI you've got to keep developing you've got to keep learning and trying to if you don't innovate you're going to evaporate that's the kind of classic saying so um yeah back to what you're publishing is is incredible and people need to start subscribing and and getting onto it more yeah thank you very much no there is something quite humbling about SEO as you as you all know that because it's so quickly H adapting that you just can't afford to be arrogant youone that back seats but I mean yeah we all say we're all denying that we're the best whatever um but realistically how many people do say they're the the best SEO around there's very few most of us are very humbled because it doesn't reward arrogance certainly no definitely not I mean we don't really do like we kind of try to revert it back where we're speaking to a business owner and we they only give a crap about one thing and that's return on investment so if we talk to them about how much money they're going to make and they only pay us a percentage of what they make that's kind of how we manage to win a lot of the business the business owners over and they love it because they don't want to talk about what Dr the links are and what semantics and what percentage of keyword density or whatever it is that you want to talk about to clients and what what you put in the reports they just want to know how much they don't even want to know about traffic they just want to know about how much money that those inquiries this is if it's an inquiry based office in e-commerce how much product have they sold that's that's all really that they looking yeah obviously an SEO a marketing manager might want to see traffic growth and Impressions and stuff like that but the business owners just want to know what Roi that they make so yeah yeah tot it's something we battled with the qualification because of course um you probably got the same thing that you got a large audience of people who don't have a lot of money but a very high level of knowledge and they're hoping that your help could save them whereas realistically from our perspective we can go to a business that trusts us and it's no longer about price yeah and yeah just a very interesting process in terms of you want to help people but at the end of the day it tends to be the the busy business owner who's got their channels and trust you and there's no longer about price so when it comes to pricing uh you do tend to favor those yeah exactly I mean they're if they're busy with what they do like if you're a dental if you're a dentist and you're own a dental care practice you are brilliant at doing implants and fixing people's teeth you're probably not very good at business so if we if they if someone can come along and help you generate leads for what you're good at and then you can convert them and just keep doing what you're good at which is fixing people's teeth and doing dentures and doing implants and everything else then yeah like that's they just need to be busier at what they're good at and then they can if they can put the trust in somebody like yourself that runs an agency then and you can generate what they need happy days and you mentioned about um the investment in terms of Roi and the percentage do you actually do any Revenue shared type deals or are you talking about pitching your current retainer as a percentage of perceived outcome no yes so like what we when we first start in any industry they don't pay for SEO they don't pay for Content they don't pay for bat links they don't even pay for the the inquiries that we send them through like we don't we don't charge you anything Al what we do is we say what is it that you do and say right we build conservatories right okay well if we was to send you leads for conservatories so let's say like Edwardian conservatories is what we specialize in right if we send you leads for Edwardian conservatories how much do you charge currently we charge five and a half thousand okay what is your competitors charge or anything up to 7,000 right do you think if we sent you inquiries that you could win the jobs at £6,000 and they say yes right okay every inquiry we send you for an Edward Conservatory price it up at £6,000 if you win it pay us the5 500 extra that you've added on you keep the 5,500 and you know that probably only cost three and a half thousand you're going to make 2,000 profit are you happy with that obviously they're going to say yes because they're winning work without paying anything so the the only thing they're paying is the the bit the finders fee that they've added on and if they don't win it they don't pay us anything so this is where we say we can get guarantee a return on investment they only pay when they've won the job they've done the job and they've been paid but we're very picky with who we work with because we've got to make certain that that company is good at converting our inquiries otherwise we don't get paid but that's kind of the model that we do we go out every bus pretty much every business owner wants to work with us because we zero risk in it all the risk lies with us yeah and it lies with us because and the reason why we do it is because one I think we're very good at what we do with regards to ranking the websites and two if we don't think it's a profitable Market in 6 12 months time we can do display ads and do all informational posts and stuff like that so there's other ways we can monetize it to get our money back or we put it in the testing bed of websites to just go and try to test things out of what's working in today's algorithm or not so no s's ever wasted but then it what allows us to do is are we are we certain this is going to make an Roi for us as a company no is it worth was going into it yeah like let's still test it so even if only one in 10 niches work we still make a good return on investment but the truth of the matter is probably around I don't know it depend it depends on the niche but a lot of our Industries we enter we normally end up making good money out of it sometimes it might cost us 45 pound to build the website out in full that's like not it might only cost1 pound to build the website but to do all the content all the back links and everything that at longterm might cost 440,000 if that site can make 4 thou 4,000 a month in profit for us after that well that means within one year we've got all of our money back and then every year we're making $4,000 a month clar profit because in local once the ranking there's not too much work that needs doing to them it might it might need an occasional backlink if it's a difficult kind of um service that you're going after but a lot of them if it's like carpet cleaning or specific rug cleaning for like that there's not there's not that many out there that do it so it it works nicely and the clients are happy we're happy and like you said and then it makes my stuff happy if the clients are happy yeah I think every model whether it's affiliate Rank and rent agency they've all got their own pros and cons obviously yeah but yeah people see the C I certainly do you see the cash flow of agenty it's very appealing but at the same time it's very difficult to actually work with someone else's websites because you often start with someone and find they're either on different platform and then you find they've got they're on WordPress but they've got some sort of custom build and all the things you normally you know that if you put WordPress installation on your hosting it all works you've got the same set of plugins everything together but you find one that's a couple years old they've been through various development agencies and what you're left with a complete mess and you basic but weren't even on your radar before because in your world they've always been they've always been there so I think maintaining that control over the website is always very appealing and like you say from a sales perspective if you've already made that investment you then you're full stack you control where that lead goes yeah yeah yeah like what you were saying there with regards to the CMS systems and stuff like that we could not do we could not do it because we're not technical enough we do not have a good enough technical te that could you go and update all the plugins if you get a new client they've got 45 plugins and you go and update them all and then it breaks we then got then start realizing how's this broken oh this plugin and this plugin are conflicting with each other we we're not we're just not geared up for stuff like that we Gear Up For Speed we build a site we scale it if it doesn't work it goes into display ads if it doesn't work for display ads it goes into the testing pool rinse and repeat very similar setups to or WordPress someone asked me to do something for Magento or wooc Commerce or whatever it is I don't know how to do it like when that's not my Lane I'm not good at that um I'm never once going to come along and say that I'm good at that um and that's where like you're when like what you're talking about there it's just there's too many moving parts for me to take over somebody else's website to understand what is going to get the best bang for the book for the client it's just it's just we're not get up for that if someone's Technical and they can do it I know lot of people that are earning a lot a lot of money doing client SEO and and it is brilliant in certain markets and stuff like that but for us it's just not something that we GE up to I remember you know Ross tavendale yeah yeah know Ross yeah big London SEO agency owner and I spoke to him at SEO on the beach in Spain for people watching this is in theory an SEO conference it is basically just a beach party with SE um but we had a good talk where he basically said he's never never really done the affil has got really successful agency but he says actually at the end of the day when you look at overall cash flow agency margins are actually very small and so although the cash flow might seem low from a Content site or lead gen um the actual Roi works out pretty much the same because you're profit at that point yeah I mean Ross I mean I don't think it helps him too much where having like a big office in London and paying all London wages like for did digital PR and stuff like which is what what he's got a very successful agency in doing you it doesn't matter where they are in the world if someone's good at Outreach or good at getting stuff in newspapers you almost don't need to be paying for the big office in London and all the staff in London like you need to try and leverage vas and stuff like that I think that became can become a bit of a burden where it can be you've got a lot of overheads um like we we've got a lot of very very good stuff in the UK that are expensive but each me they're like my middle managers and my directors but each one of those members of Staff who've got four or five Vaas some up to 10 vas that work underneath them whether that's in South Africa in the Philippines in Venezuela in Bangladesh like depending on who like what type of job it is so like South Africa and the Philippines do pretty well with regard guyss if we need any certain content being done and stuff well we would never use someone in Bangladesh for Content but they're quite good technically or building certain sites out or building like citations so we're trying to leverage that staff that is a lower kind of cost for the like the jobs that just following a process in the if that makes sense so but Ross is a very very intelligent SEO he's a very Advanced guy like I've got a lot of time and a lot of respect for um him he he could he could do some damage if he entered the affiliate or the lead gen space because he's he's he's a good SEO like very good SEO yeah definitely and I love the guy for that mat as well yeah yeah one the things I love about this community and that on the on the public facing side people think we're all competitors so some people reached out to me saying yes we're going with you but we've got this other website we're going to give it to Julian Goldie and then we're going to compare after a few months I hope that's okay I'm saying I love Julian Goldie great guy we hung out in Thailand um it feels like you know on the public side they think this is some break neet competition thing but then we're all having beers and Chang mice together yeah no ex I mean the the industry is so big that you could you could both be in the UK and both be in the exact same industry and they still probably both 10 to 15 different sub niches even just within that big Niche so there's so many different keywords that you can go after and the the market is so incredibly big for SEO I think the industry is there in the SEO industry at present it's all about elevating each other and I think because every day is a school day and the algorithms do change regularly it's better to to have everyone on each other's side to help each other out to help each other of what's working and yeah I love the that's why I love my like I've said this a few times if someone said to me here's a billion pound but you can't work another day in your life I wouldn't I wouldn't take it like I love the industry like not the whole SEO Community I like my extended family like I love him I think he brilliant I think it's brilliant that it's one of very few Industries in the world like you said that we don't seem to see each other as competition we actually how can I help you and Elevate each other which is great I think that's one of the shocking things when I started getting out going to the eventss touring the world is just how open people are yeah I was speaking to Alandra Mayans at get me links whilst in Thailand and he said very early on when he took over get me links H he had a call with Matthew Woodward just like you said and Matt just told him everything about how you run a link building agency and he basically pushed back and said why are you doing this and he just said it's in our interest to help help each other out the pie is big enough was the exact wording he gave me yeah yeah yeah yeah Matt Matt Woodward's a great guy as well like so living out in CTO Rico is we did a one or two masterminds in London with him um and yeah he's you know what he's another he's like an OG of the industry like I've got um I love I love the content he puts out and Yeah he was more more old school kind of it was more a six seven eight years ago I was like I was I was an admirer of his do you know what I mean so when he came to how you doing um and he doesn't seem to to do quite as much new stuff anymore but he's when I was in London he was pretty much like semi-retired he was like I don't I've made I've made a load of money like what should I do and at that point he was that's when he then started to realize that it's just it's not about the money it's about the journey and enjoying where you've come from and then where you're at now and just appreciating life and appreciating people are around you that's a perfect point to move on to just a few additional questions I've got from my list I know only got half an hour left um we mentioned London a few times and yeah like me you're still in the UK and I think You' probably got the same battle IEM that especially on day like today in theory we can live and work anywhere why do we still choose the UK and pro well yeah let's open the conversation up to that happiness you were talking about as well in terms of what you value I think you're certainly at a point where you've got very abundant resources um yeah so you so let's start with UK so UK um I love the whole kind of the free NHS system if ever there's a problem we can use that um I love the idea that I don't like I absolutely hate the weather but I've got I've got family I've got friends I like to be rooted I like to know where I've come from I'm proud of where I've come from I Love Manchester as a city um I feel I do feel like London's a great City I do feel Manchester's a great City I think we've got a lot of great places in the UK the one big thing that I don't like is the weather so if I like there is being my base then I also love traveling so like I like here is being home but then I like going like okay once a month I'm going to go away for a week or might go away for a couple of weeks in summer in Winter sorry um sometimes like the whole of January we'll go to like Dubai um just to get some winter sun but I I I genuinely love the UK um apart from the weather I love the UK I love the people that are there I think there's a lot of high level people from the UK in Theo industry as well some people aren't actually on stage some people are um out there and like how how me and you was hustling in Sil so to speak there's a lot of others still to this day that are hustling in silence and very very very successful people that we I normally get to my office and we normally have some private masterminds you definitely need to come to the next one um up in Manchester um Craig Campbell comes to them all like Gary Wilson and stuff like that there's probably about 15 to 20 people it's invite only um we're trying to keep it at that it's high level but there's some very very high level business people in there that we're all we've all got different strengths and we're all trying to elevate each other so yeah there's many reasons why I will always keep the UK's being my home um so that's the first part the second part was how do I deem um happiness so well success some people talk about success and think that success is money I think that's ridiculous I think success is more um health and happiness um now don't get me wrong like money can bring a lot of happiness you can do a lot of nice things with money but I've also seen a lot of people that sets an end goal achieve achieved an end goal onto the next one yeah and then yeah there's another end goal there's another end goal there's another end goal they're always trying to get the next high but when someone does achieve what they seem to be their end goal which could be earning five million 10 million 50 million whatever your end goal is and if you reach it you have this feeling of emptiness and you're like what is that it is that where it's at and I've known a lot of people that achieved their High goal of being like 50 million and I'm done and they've got there and I've had some close friends that have killed themselves and there was the most happy the happiest people I've ever known got very nice Sons and Daughters a really nice wife a happy family they've always been a nice employer the staff around him thought it was really nice and within 12 months of selling he just went into depression and and it was so sad to see and I've seen it once or twice not not kill himself but enter this state of depression and emptiness after achieving what they thought would be their perfect once I get here that is it I'm going to be happy forever and it's so empty so you've got to realize then when you understand that that it is all about the journey and the success and the CL climbing the mountain as opposed to getting to the peak of the mountain the climbing of the mountain is the happiness and and there's a never ending kind of I never Now set myself a goal and this is why I'm saying if someone said to me here's a billion pound but you have to stop i' be like no no chance because that's not where I'm at my where I'm at is going to chamai kind of masterminding with people geeking out about SEO because I do s stff this I actually love SEO as an IND I I not just the people like I enjoy someone turn around to me like you got a day off tomorrow i' probably watch a few of your videos and one or two videos from Craig Campbell and geek out and seeing what's working and what's not like that's I I enjoy it like same um I've had yeah the same problem on a smaller level where yeah I might have hit a certain Revenue goal and thought great I can take things easy now and you do get the certain kind of the what now element yeah and yeah you're absolutely right is that point point of stepping back and realizing actually I do enjoy what I do yeah and you're right it's that Hands-On grinding CU I'm sure you're the same when you're working on a project it's like being a painter or a sculptor it's exactly that exactly that yeah I mean when you I I'm not a painter but I can imagine someone who's gotone and painted it they actually enjoy doing it the end goal of selling it for £100,000 pound but that's great but they actually enjoy doing the painting in the first place yeah h on that note I also had questions of when we was setting up this call you basically said you tell me when's a good time so I thought this is the person despite the size of the business got a nice open calendar so what is your week look like now and what do you think your ideal week would look like if they're not already the same so I feel like I've got I don't there's every anything anything that you could say is ideal but ideal at present is the the working program of what I have so what works best for me is I normally get up now this wasn't always the case but this is the case like in up been pretty much all of this year um and it was worked best for my body clock I get up at five o'clock in the morning we go straight into the office probably into the office for 5:30 so me Scott and kazra drive together into the office for 30 minutes it takes to get there we kind of asking each other questions and what did we do last night and just see like normally KRA might have been up till midnight watching some podcast and what do you think of this and what do you think of that and we just chatting we're getting to the office we don't eat anything um we do intermittent fasting till um 3:00 in the afternoon so we work we get into the office for let's say 5:30 we'll work till about 12 1:00 then we'll go to the gym at 1 o'clock in the afternoon work out at the gym then go home have our kind of whatever you want to call it lunch or brunch or afternoon tea or whatever it is um and the reason why we do that is because we realized that when we used to eat breakfast or eat something we felt lethargic after we eaten like within the workplace our energy levels are so much higher when we do intermittent fasting now this is different for everybody just for us for all three of us in fact it just worked the best this way um and then we've done our workout we seem to work better out in the gym on a on an empty stomach which is like a bit crazy because you'd think obviously eating something might give you the energy to to work out but that's just work best for us and then I see my son and daughter um who between 3:00 and 7:00 every day I try and make certain between 3 and 7:00 that I don't do anything between 3 and 7 o'clock so I try and don't book anything in I turn my phone off I go to the park I go on to bik ride um I go to a soft play center it's just time with my kids so and that's what I try to do every day and then with the go to bed at 7 see the wife for a bit might watch football or might go football training myself or then sometimes go back on my laptop and catch up on what people are saying and watching podcasts um probably go to bed at 11:00 and then rinse and repeat that cycle of getting up at 5: go to bed at 11: and and that that's my day today at pres so my day-to-day in the office I I'm not needed in the office like the only thing that I do is I'm just asking questions and seeing what Innovative new ideas that we're doing what might what I'm hearing from other people people that's working and can my testing team be testing certain and implementing certain things they normally test it if it works they'll improve the SOP they train the stuff up that does the day-to-day kind of process of getting that done and I'm not really needed like I'd like to feel like I am needed but it kind of runs without me if I'm being honest but the um I'm I'm always in there I'm always trying to be the one that the most energetic I'm I feel like I'm more of a cultural architect nowadays so making certain culture is good and everything's happy if anyone wants a one to one they can have a one to one with me but then that that gives me a lot of free time that if someone like yourself this is what I'm saying you tell me a time I'll I'll I'll work around you um I'll book in a time if you say it's no this is between my three and my four o'cl time with the kids but actually today works okay because they're out at the moment with um the mother in law and stuff like that so I'm like you tell me what what's a good time and I'll I'll make it work for me cuz I can have no set meetings so this is why some of these podcasts work pretty well because I'm like you tell me what what's a good time and I'll I'll fix I'll fix in around your busy schedule I do your point I think there's a lot of um credit there to the almost sort of Monk like stoic discipline um yeah you mentioned the gym That's a classic one where often I'm terrible to getting up in the morning but no matter how high you climb you we've all got this belief that there'll come a day where we can just sit by the pool sipping cocktails and not have to do anything yeah not realizing that you would never actually like that in the first place we need that meaning and purpose and just those those systems to keep us functioning each day yeah so yeah I think there's a lot you got to remember like certain if you go back to the caveman times they they they used to get up and they get up and hunt and that's kind of what their DNA is get up and go and hunt for food so like if someone like I don't I could just be going sat on a beach if I wanted to and I've drink Pina clader all day but I I'd feel unhealthy I wouldn't want to then go and work out at the gym I wouldn't want to then I would see all my friends who might be playing football with or whatever like I just feel like the the kind of the model I'm in now is is by choice so I must love what I do in work I must enjoy the people that I work with I'm still investing in new companies every single day like with business partners that I have or sometimes with a new business partner that I quite like to work with him I think he's quite a cool guy so yeah I'll do that I don't need to do that I I'm not forced into doing that there's no like there's no one like turning around to me going you need to hit these goals you need to hit this threshold and stuff like that like I'm doing it because I enjoy it and I feel like it makes me make better decisions as well because they're not forced upon so that's kind of where I am at the moment but like I'm still I still feel like a school kid I still love going to these meetups cuz I still feel like people like yourself and other people are way better seos than myself so like and and like Julian you mentioned Julian gold is's unbelievable with AI Craig Campbell's always got some sort of new trick up his sleeve so every time I meet him I'm like right come on let's go out on the jet skis up in Scotland and we'll go up and we'll go meet him and he's always got random new ideas that I'm like wow that's crazy so I I love it I love this new level of kind of people giving me information and me being absorb all this information and it's great on that note I think I did just have a few final technical questions for you yeah like technical but um yeah so KRA in changai there's a lot talk about obviously CTR manipulation but people talking about specifically if you can send your traffic from either a Gmail redirect link or a Twitter link so the point being for those watching uh so C manipulation driving traffic to the website as we've discussed a lot uh if that's coming from anywhere then obviously there's some value to it but if it comes from an existing platform like Twitter or Gmail then that's a good sign that this site is going viral you're not just getting loads of scammy traffic you're getting actual social traffic basically so casual was saying you built a tool to actually do this and basic a major operation to get it off the ground the speaker had said uh this is just a good thing you can do but cash said actually you've got to really dig down and invest and build this tool yeah so that's part of signal bar um so it's not really a tool it's just more of a network of people that you can get to do certain things but not only that is the we face right so here's one for you let let's talk about traffic if you run PPC to your website you will now you need to split test easyier niches to see this you will see a again on through to the page that you run them through to so if you do it just through a random PPC page obviously it's not going to rank if you're sending it to an actual inner page and you start sending PPC traffic to that page you actually start climbing the rankings in SEO now I'm not saying that Google reward you for using PPC and that the PPC team go and tell the SEO team that they should rank higher I'm not saying it's that but what I'm saying is the click and the engagement works even from running PPC the same runs for Facebook ads the same runs for I don't know if You' ever did like website notifications where you could go and do a web notification ping that someone then goes and clicks through to it that improves rankings Pinterest ads LinkedIn ads Twitter ads YouTube ads everything works if I went and sent traffic through um YouTube you did a link in a YouTube description now that's an intersexual link so someone need it has to be a human that goes and clicks on to it normally it says do you want to go through to this website you say yes and you go through to it if you do a volume of that traffic from YouTube as being the referral you will get a an increase of where that page is ranking Twitter does the same Pinterest so like the the Christopher that was up on stage spoke about Gmail and spoke about um Twitter being like two places it's not just those two places Google can see so many different places of traffic and this is where I came back down to when we're speaking about behavioral signals and engagement signals if you can get people if you can build up like Matt Matt dig was talking to me about his digity marketing website and saying that it's going up and up and up and up and one of two of his affiliate sites was like up and down up and down up and down and he's like consistently my digity marketing was going up and I'm like oh that that seems a bit strange because some of of your affiliate sites you don't build an email list for some of your other stuff you don't do YouTube for that's getting kind of people to come back to it that your affiliate sites don't have branded searches yet digity Martin's got branded searches it's got clicks from email it's got clicks from the YouTube channel and you're building out a proper brand and that engagement signal adds to your overall quality score of your site so if you can be building and this sounds very why at in the the approach but if you can build a proper brand and try to get traffic from as many sources as you can that will work very good hence the reason why now kazra is building up um is Twitter following him because if he can get if he can start doing um links in Twitter and people then click on to it and go through to the site he knows that that's going to help his website rank better he's building up a YouTube following he's building up and then he's sharing on LinkedIn and you can do like LinkedIn pulps Linkin PS is a great parasite SEO but actually if that parasite SEO started ranking and generating clicks on the links through to your site those clicks from LinkedIn puls will make your website rank so much better as well so people now have become obsessed like Charles float talks about parasite SEO quite a lot whatever you want to call it parasite SEO Barnacle SEO piggyback SEO whatever it is that you want to call that we've done that for 10 years right but but we didn't call it parasite all what we called it was we want to rank Our Guest posts that's all we called it at the time we want to write good quality content for our guest posts we want to do tier two bat links to Our Guest post and physically try to rank Our Guest post because in my my opinion the best quality type of link that you can have is from do follow contextual bat link that ranks for the key word that you want your website you what you want your web page that you're linking through to rank for that is the best type of link you can have so if you can get your guest PKS ranking for what the web page it links through to and it says an exact match of what that's ranking for through to yours Google's ranking this page but says oh no no no no this is a better page because this is an exact match anchor this is the page you want to rank and that's always been the case but people just cheap out on the content of guest post they don't try and rank the guest posts the amount of people that don't do tier2 back links to the guest post is scary like why not it's a brand new page the page level's got no power yes it might be a dr60 but it's on a page that's got no power go and get some tier tws through to that page and watch you're going to spending 3300 pound on a guest B but you won't going to spend 60 pound on three tier tws like why because it 10x is the power of what that that guest post is is go and get some tier 2s to your guest post and watch your ranking Skyrocket this what I keep saying in the on the link building side that now we've got chat chbt if I take the surfer entities put into chbt I can do a perfect article in 10 minutes so what people still submitting these vague guest post of top 10 tips to achieve x h and it's just filler content they're getting they're getting ey writer to write it for $9 I'm like chat GPT used with the right entities can write a better article than someone on ey writer for $9 get go and like you said go and extract the entities that's needed from Surfer get them on the page and get it written and just maybe put like a prompt in like try to write this as concise as possible but getting all the main entities on the page because you don't want to load of fluff but then you've got the information kind of density in a 2,000w article instead of it being a 4,000 word article but it's got all the entities in really concise manner you'll rank the guest post why not try and rank it to try to get traffic from the guest post like in my opinion Christopher's talk where he talked about do Gmail and do Twitter why not just do everything G YouTube Twitter Pinterest if you if you you're you're you've got amazing thumbnails your thumbnails on your YouTube channel are amazing right here's something for you I don't know whether you do this or you don't are you pinning your YouTube videos on Pinterest because if you're not go go out no set Stuart Victor's Pinterest up go and get a board for aiso right go and pin all of your AI uh videos all them images will be ranking in Pinterest go and get some tier 2 back links which could be like anything to to Pinterest I don't recommend this to money sites but to to Pinterest you can still do GSA you can still do SEO autopilot you can still do money robot go and get some like Niche cheap nich edit right go and get some links to the board of aiso in Pinterest and watch how much traffic that you can get from Pinterest through to your videos which then gets them subscribing like go and find traffic from everywhere like we call it effective frequency like if you was ever educated about advertising or marketing 10 years ago they would tell you that you can't go and run um some radio ads unless you billboard advertising TV advertising and all these other platforms because people don't buy from you until they've seen you five times if you use that same mentality online and get seen on Pinterest on LinkedIn on Twitter the there's tools out there that that automatically reshare them on them places anyway go and get traffic from as many sources as you can try and do these like some of these like ranking the LinkedIn puls like go get some tier tws to your LinkedIn puls article to get it ranking like Julian Goldie is an amazing example of it like Twitter B links go and type that in he think he ranks like one two three four and five all them will be driving traffic to his um Twitter following which people start following that his YouTube channel to start subscribing to that the more engagement he's getting the more is you go and look at his website and and look at like it's like this yeah go and look at his backlink profile his backlink profile doesn't fall or his content velocity he's getting way more traffic to his website now don't get me wrong his content velocity link velocity has gone up slightly but his his rankings have skyrocketed because of the amount of Engagement that he gets natural engagement he gets from all of these places so when when KAS says I've got a tool for it it's just effective frequency how can I rank all these different places to try to rank better and all these different platforms like search is crazy quar search is crazy um Pinterest search I'm not about just within Pinterest the search within Pinterest the the amount of people that use Pinterest try to start ranking on the first page for aiso like for what you do Julian goldish should be I don't think he's done a video on it yet he probably next you and Julian probably have a video out tomorrow if for Pinterest this well like go leverage it there's loads of people on there that want to know and you've got a m you've already done the hard work you've got amazing thumbnails you've got amazing content on your on your YouTube channel literally takes you 20 seconds to just go Chrome extension pin pin to that board thank you very much next next day Pinterest pin that board it takes 10 seconds you've already doing the hard work go and leverage all the traffic from everywhere else thank you very much sounds good to me I know you only got 10 minutes left so let's have a nice easy one uh obviously sorry blowing up on YouTube is being great and but it does mean that I've got loads of obviously beginners really Keen to learn and therefore I get loads of Outreach saying I literally have no money what can I do what's the best way to get started so I normally say first of all start writing we've got the AI now so content isn't really a problem yeah even correlational things you don't really need them as an essential you can s just extract entities from a web page and create your own s of serf template that way press release very cheap links citations very cheap links so the fundamentals are still quite basic but from your perspective I'm wondering if from a high level perspective if we step back a bit from just pure how do I rank on Google uh if you had to start again today what would you do so so my question so with he guys that when someone says I've no money how do I rank it's like if you've known like to learn SEO is like going to University to go to university going to take you three years I'd say go and get a job go go get a job in an agency and learning in the agency you're learning in the agency and you'll get paid try and ask can you do overtime and save some money up until you've got 10 15 grand and until you know that you're good at SEO but realistically you need some money right well that would be my first to them and I know it's quite brutal with what I'm saying but too many people go I've no money um can you teach me how to rank no you're just wasting my time right that's about telling a business owner about Roi and what do you expect to make per sale that sort of thing yeah that in terms of with this website what do you want to make and they might say I want to make you know three or people like Craig Campbell has got a free SEO course go do the fre SEO course and when you've completed it to completion then come back to me and I might say what do you think is the most important ranking fact because I'll know if you've done his course if you not the point is 90% of people that buy a course don't even complete it which is crazy so all these people say that they want to build out a site but they have no money no they don't majority of people don't they just think that they do but they don't like what they say and what they do are two completely different things so a lot of the time and there's no disrespects to people starting out I've not got much time for them until the goal like this endless amount I've just said in this video 10 times your YouTube channel is amazing have they watched every single video on your YouTube channel if not don't speak to me until you have do you know what I mean like you can't expect me to be giving you information that it's already out there go and watch every video that's on my YouTube channel and then when you've watched every single one of them then ask me something that you might feel you might struggle with within SEO don't just say how do I start out with no money like that's kind of what I normally say to them.

James Dooley: but if everything left me tomorrow I got robbed of all my assets I got robbed of everything I have no money tomorrow so what would what would I do now starting out so I would use um Google bad and I'd use chat GPT and I'd go and follow um the stuff that you and um Julian talk about and then once I've started earning money I'd work seven days a week 14 15 hours a day until I've got the money to build back links and then I'd start building back links I probably start off with s ations like you said um I put an address on I get all the signals which cost no money to do so telephone number um an address and all that once I've got money I'd go and get 500 citations probably cost about $200 on fiver so get 100 citations I'd load them into like Amiga indexer um to try and get as many of them indexed as I can

James Dooley: welcome to James Dy who I'd probably regard as one of the top seos in the world I'm not sure what he's got to say on that of all the irony I think this is the first time we've actually spoken properly despite multiple we've been to quite a few obviously was in chai and stuff like that and when never we got time to speak but exactly it was on my list that while you were there but every time you sort of surrounded by your group knocking back PS so I thought I won't disturb on this occasion you know what we only we only drank on one of the we only drank on the Friday we didn't drink the first few days um at all we didn't have anything we're just doing Meetup after meet up after Meetup and then yeah we got very excited on the Friday too excited was that the beer pong night yeah the be pong night yeah very good um so normally it's traditional on a podcast that I should introduce you but I think on this basis that's going to be totally inaccurate I think probably better you tell me because frankly I lose track of what you're up to I know you've got all sorts of businesses all over the place something like a thousand websites you got a mix of local Le genen gambling affiliate uh agencies so probably better if I just hand over to and you say what you like about what you do

James Dooley: yeah so the um we do quite a lot of rank and rent websites we're in over 500 different Industries um for lead generation um I think there's 857 um from when I checked yesterday different websites that we have live that physically clients are paying for I think there's nearly 2,000 websites that's built and some of them aren't they're built and ranking but we don't yet have the clients in place for it um so if if we build out a site and for a 12 month stretch we're struggling to monetize it from a lead generation standpoint we'll move to display ads or just put it into the testing part for Te like testing what links work 301s and just trying to break the algorithms and see how far we can push the boundaries basically so obviously came across your stuff because I mean it seems like you've blown up I don't know if it's just because I've only started in the last three or four months following and liking some of your stuff so obviously start seeing more when you start liking stuff but your YouTube channel is great I watch all your YouTube videos um I think they're great I love the thumbnails as well the AI kind of thumbnails and stuff like that the um and then I think the first the very first time I came across you was when you posted about getting the knowledge panel know for like entrepreneur on the knowledge panel I was like w Wait a minute wait how' you get this and then from there then I started seeing a lot more of who you are and what you do and stuff like that I think obviously we've crossed paths quite a few times but you um you're on my radar now to follow and I think you you're giving a lot of good kind of information out there to the general public so I wanted to jump on just to say hi as well really

James Dooley: yeah thank you very much no was flattered I loved how you messed saying I'd love to be on your podcast and I thought sure I but no I just I just meant to chat and like you don't whatever you call it a podcast or YouTube kind of Channel or whatever it is just just wanted to catch up and chat because I I've got a lot of respect when people the one pain point that I have is when people don't turn up to events or meetings and then they try and Outreach to you but you've been to quite a lot of different events you turn up obviously speaking as well and quite a lot of the content that you're putting out there is is brilliant for for the general public so I like surrounding myself with people that are enthusiastic and like what they do and not like in a tunnel vision of this is the only way you can do things and I think I quite like the idea that you're open to AI open to whatever works from a link building strategy so it was one of them I kept seeing you your content you delivered off thinking yeah I'd like to network with this person I like what he's saying and you've got a similar Vision to what we do and a similar Vision to making certain that you're open to anything that might work like you said like Ai and instead of being oh it's going to replace jobs and race in it which is which is cool isly it

James Dooley: I know yeah yourself and obviously our mutual friend Craig various other people there's always push back against this sort of the sort of phony War that's going on between the black hat and the white hat in reality the best people in the industry they don't put labels on these things it's exactly and that's always got to be within your own sort risk profile and that you accept that if you push it like you say then you're potentially endangering the future of that site but you could make Bank in the meantime in which case that doesn't really matter

James Dooley: yeah I mean like anything you sometimes have got you've got um shortterm money and long-term money they kind of what we say internally in the office and shortterm money is stuff that's working in today's algorithms that might not work in tomorrow algorithms because let's say parasite SEO or something like that um to be honest with you I'll always think there'll be a way of it working but the what sites are working at present is working very well so leveraging that in today's algorithm well well that's that's good business now whether that's going to work in tomorrows in next weeks or next months or next years no one knows Google are trying to say that they're going to come after it but whether they'll be able to I don't think they will if I'm being honest and I think the what people deem to be white at or black at we're all trying to manipulate Google's algorithm to get to the top and we're trying to do it in the cheapest possible way that we can that's going to earn us the most money and return on investment so what whatever someone wants to brand that well I've got a white hat on today so maybe I'm white hat today I've seen yeah cor is occasionally now talking about Blue Hats yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so I've bought every color out that there is of these so someone wants to PR me whatever they want I can say I'm blue orange black green whatever you want to call me that's that's what I am I just try to make money by using SEO strategies to the best of my ability

James Dooley: yeah to point about getting out to events I'm already deviating from the rough outline I've put together but yes for me I feel like we've had quite similar Parts in that I know you were very quiet just hustling away in the background not really a personal brand for years fat rank the blog but it's the last six months to a year that you've really gone out there yeah various people saying you will never see James Dy on a podcast on stage and isn't it be Saigon is now going to be your first speaking engagement yeah so it's not I'm not doing any speaking I'm just doing an ask me anything so I know I've known mads for a long time and he knows quite a lot about my successes for many years with regards to the team that I've built around me and I thought do you know what if I'm ever going to start doing anything on stage that I'm I'm not I'm not an introvert I'm quite extroverted um I'm I'm quite confident in kind of what I deliver but I thought the best person to ask me the questions on stage would be mads because he knows that I'm all about elevating team members I'm all about elevating my business partners and enjoying the journey which I do think is is massive and important so success to me isn't money success to me is happiness and yes money can bring some happiness in that but the end of the day it's it's can you enjoy the journey with the people that you work with on a day-to-day basis whether that's your vas your managers or your directors or business partners um so I thought it would be best in side on for mads to try and dig a little bit deeper about who I am as a person um you're right in what you're saying like for many years I've I've hustled in silence and let success with the noise so and and to be honest I probably would have kept it that way if it wasn't for AI coming along because I do feel no AI is coming along that you probably need more of a personal brand and say again sorry that's basically my view as well that personal brand gives you a lot more protection against that because you can switch Industries more easily yeah exactly that so for anyone watching and listening just for context H mad singer is very big on the SEO scene H has got his own SEO projects he's got content agencies content sites but his main thing is All About Management and therefore the SEO world is a very target-rich environment because we're all hustling away on computers but not very good with dealing with the people aspect and so definitely that's on my list to talk to you later James about how on Earth you scale a thousand sites with your team and making sure those structures are in place especially when it comes to rewards equ splits and but yeah for the time being mads also runs the Saigon SEO Mastery Summits and managed to get James speaking on stage yeah otherwise I've had a very similar past um as you said about blowing up on YouTube I've just been building affiliate sites for about five years or so always will the S sense of imposter syndrome that you know I'm not going to be the one putting myself out there I'm just you consuming the information and then over time you start realizing that actually your knowledge probably is more than you realize yeah and as you say getting out to events that's definitely the next level where uh you just people think it's really caky that there's a of elite Circle in changai that you can't possibly penetrate in reality if you go to changai you generally run into people very quickly yeah yeah yeah yeah and so it's those conversations you know in the bars at 2 a. where you level up very quickly so basically for me it was a case so about two years ago H I was in the corporate job realized how this corporate job they had two SEO agencies working for them and I always thought you know agencies must be really good because they're an agency then quite quickly you realize I know that and I can do that much better in house and corporate structures they don't have the resources to do that inhouse they'd much rather give it to an agency so that was basically my my big push that you're literally telling me that I should go out and start an agency yeah and time sold a website and then that basically bankrolled my initial rise which was just going out to events leveling up my knowledge but also just getting in front of people getting connections getting clients so same as you've been working away in the shadows for a while and then you come out and kind of realize actually people do want to pay attention to you and then yeah honestly the stuff that you're putting out there is absolutely superb mate and and I don't I don't say that if I don't mean it if I if I said I don't like your content I'd just say it straight and I wouldn't be on this podcast like I'd um I I like content you're putting out it's high level um beginners can understand it as well but it's too a high level that people a lot of people think that there's some secret button too and you know what the stuff you're putting out there is just doing what you say and rinse and repeating what you say and you will progress very quickly

James Dooley: yeah thank you very much no in all honesty I a lot of that to my mutual friend Craig Campbell who's yeah exactly the same very high level doesn't make any secrets he says you've just got to implement the basics the fundamentals yeah yeah you're absolutely right people are always chasing shiny objects so I get so many reaching out saying you know is this secret hack going to work for me forget about the secret hacks there's 90% all out there you've just got to implement it

James Dooley: yeah definitely yeah I I I think a lot of people struggle from um procrastination analysis paralysis I think they they consistently want to learn new ideas and new techniques and they're not implementing said the previous techniques and I think there's a classic saying of like you don't need to be faster than the Bear Just faster than the people running away from the Bear yes and if if number one spot is doing something to 60% of what you know just do 65% and get to number one and move on to the next keyw you don't need to chase Perfection like it's just not needed that's why I always tell people about obviously I'm a big fan of surfer whatever correlational tool you use it's all the same and I always say even the makers of Surfer say go for 70 and then move on to the next one yeah yeah grind away trying to get to 100 I don't saw many people that have had like night the score of like 95 on Surfer and then they're spending days to get it to try and get it to 100 and the the kind of emailing Surfer going oh I've just added these in and it's only got it to 98 how do we get it to one and you're just like stop obsessing over the score and just move on to the next page like do you know what I mean like you said the score is 70 or 8 is good enough like move on to like your competitors are at 55 you know mean loads of entities on the page you've got more entities on them then get more internal links and more external links and you're going to win that

James Dooley: actually reminds me yeah you mentioned earlier about procrastination and so on that was a big thing I was going to mention about the whole r that for me I really hesitated on link building so I think most of my foundations came from just religiously listening to The Authority hacker podcast on my commute into the day job and everyone's much agreed Authority hacker absolute gold standards and there's all very good quality information there yeah but yeah a lot of the discourse out there you got to remember is still basically from people selling things and you and I both we both have link building agencies so it's in our interest to try and protect some Mystique around link building which basically means the overall messaging around link building is that if you build the wrong links you could get totally destroyed which to an extent is true but at the same time that meant in my case three years ago where I had a Content site that was doing really well and I just hesitated Forever on building links partly because of the cost but also the the kind of downside risks I was picturing and yeah I found as soon as I started link building it was a lot easier than I expected and the results were amazing secret why didn't anyone tell me that yeah you can just build links and it works

James Dooley: exactly that's um it it the three pillars Gally of as always good good technical build build of a sight good content good good quality back links and when you say good content like topical Authority and internal links and Silo everything that then just good links throughout your site and and you'll Rank and normally the cases if you're not ranking you need probably more content and more links now obviously your content quality needs to be good like you've mentioned on Surfer and stuff like that but if you get if you're delivering good quality content it's normally more topical Authority or more bat links is why you are losing at present

James Dooley: absolutely it's very difficult to reinvent and but talking about Surfer I do have a list of more so technical Hands-On questions for you here so like I say you've been very quiet in the background for a while but I think one of the first times I encountered you was probably about three or four years ago I was doing keyword research basically to promote Surfer H with an affiliate review and in ahfs you get all these Search terms around does James Dy own Surfer SEO yeah and over time that developed and I started saying why is James Dy the best SEO in the world and why is James Dy a better SEO than Craig cample yeah yeah yeah this won't help the podcast but for the YouTube audience I just share my screen oh that's one one other quick one I wanted to ask you just at the beginner level obviously we all heard the hottest girl in Manchester story yeah now Craig likes to say this was hidden someone else told me you did it to yourself so I just thought as a start of your 10 tell us the truth what really happened here

James Dooley: so basically what happened was we Craig Campbell was in my office and Mark Walker was in my office and we started to do certain techniques for ranking images mainly for acquiring B links so basically what would happen was if we tried to start ranking images we would be able to people then like news Publications would start using so I do like artificial grass is one of my Industries and if I could start ranking number one for artificial grass a lot of journalists and reporters would start using my image and then I could then Outreach to then say you've used my image you need to credit the SCE and give me a back link so we got a lot of high profile back links from it and this is this was the discussion in the office so I was saying I could almost rank any any image that you want so we went back and forth and there was a few images that went up online and then it like between me Craig Mark and a few of us like joke type of images now I don't know whether this was matk Walker or whether it was Craig Campbell but then they grabbed that image which I would not have wanted to rank in Google and they ended up ranking that number one for hottest girl in Manchester so and it turned into one of them debates for like not debates but kind of competitions where I'd rank Craig for something we'd rank Mark for something he'd rank me for stuff and then it got to a point where there was too many dodgy photos online so I was like right let's stop now um but that that's kind of how the story kind of quickly evolved

James Dooley: that's very nice um no so for everyone watching Brank images like James said again just a process you're basically using things like Pinterest flicker quite a simple process were you reaching out uh just personally saying I'm just you know random member of the public that's my image give me a link or were you doing the trick of trying to make it look a bit more official and potentially saying you know I'm a lawyer something like that

James Dooley: so so we so when basically what happened was like Craig talks about this quite a bit with regards to like the image Outreach trick and stuff like that and Craig was in my office at the time um and we was outreaching we were just basically outreaching ourselves saying you we had that many images online that was ranking we were saying you using our image you need to credit The Source um otherwise we're going to get you done for copyright infringement and then loads of them were just linking back to us and while I was in the office down in my office had gone oh my God we've just got a link off the independent which is like a nice national press um website and they cited the source and linked back TOs and was like oh my God that's great and I looked at the image and straight away I knew that image wasn't ours right so D had outreached to but he had genuinely outreached to say that you've used our image because he right clicked on the image and said search this image and it and I didn't realize at the time that Google brought back not just your exact image but similar images to it and we outre saying you've used our image and it wasn't and they credited us so so at the time Craig was then saying I wonder how many others would credit the source for you even if it's not your image and you just out saying you've used our image can you credit the source so copyright unknown that's that's the whole when when Craig then set up I think it was called Campbell Walker or something that between CRA Mar Walker which was like a solicitors kind of thing where he they'd sent emails out saying um like a legal kind of email saying you've used our image you need to credit the source and then he he was getting all these different things we just kept it as being we outreached from our company saying you've used our image but we was legitimately trying to only Outreach to people that had and we was amazed by when we then started to look back at how many links we've got probably 20 30% of the images wasn't even our IM about 70% was about 30% there weren't even our images and they just creditors with a source of here is the image by and then our company name and then linked back to us so we was like wow this is crazy um that's kind of how all that started with regards to the like the um the search volume and stuff like that we just for context before we go on so yeah there's all this volume around why is James dud the best SEO in the world yeah and also of that I like to call it almost like a reverse PR strategy where therefore all these teams around the world were saying Ah that's an SEO term that's getting thousands of traffic let's get on that so now you've got all this press around why is James Dy the best SEO in the world somewhere here is it in pages I actually mentioned this in my book basically talking about how the future of how we how can we actually influence the B AI or chat gbt response so if someone says who is the best SEO in the world how can we as SEO professionals make sure we get recommended in that way yeah so just this thinking outside the box manipulating Source data I think is really interesting um but yeah do go on tell us more

James Dooley: so we've done that for a while um and and basically what the reason why this came about was we was trying to manipulate um or show up in the auto suggest for certain terms so we we a while back this is probably nine years ago we would Tred to start ranking certain videos in YouTube and what we do is we used to use like mtk and and certain tools like that that would then search and click on your video and stuff and what started to happen was if people interacted with your video watched it liked it commented on it and stuff like that you got higher rankings in YouTube but then what randomly started to happen was when we started to do these searches at first we did a search and let's say I wouldn't show up so let's say it was just I'm using this as an example this wasn't the case but let's say we typed in SEO I wanted to rank for um James Dy SEO or some something on those terms if I typed in James Dy SEO sorry SEO James dly and they started clicking and clicking on my video and engaging with my video it started ranking for loads of different terms like um James D SEO fat Rank and all these different terms but then randomly one day this is about nine years ago when someone started typing in SEO just the term seo seo James douy showed up it doesn't anymore but the back then when you typed in SEO and then next minute just randomly like 500 monthly searches for about two or three years people were searching SEO James D now the only reason why they were searching that was they were starting to type in SEO and in the auto suggest James Dy showed up so we started to go if we could manipulate the alsoo suggest that if someone started typing in like um link building agency and then it came up link building agency Stuart Vickers or SEO agency Stuart Vickers and stuff like that if we could manipulate that to show up people would start searching that who doesn't even know who Stuart vickas is because they're just like who's this what even is this and they start clicking onto it and you're manipulating them the search volume for for what people was doing so I was like how far can you take this with regards to certain stuff so then we started to we was manipulating the the suggest and then we started to try one or two things like um does so we like certain ones like that would be if we did just random ones like does James douet own Surfer SEO right would people then start type putting in there H2 one of the questions because it came up with search volume does James dly own surfo now obviously they' probably put in there no James Dy do doesn't own um SE uh Surfer SEO well they probably wouldn't just put that they probably expanding it but so they probably put something like no James Dy doesn't own surf REO however James Dy is a search engine optimization specialist that optimizes content and he physically uses Surfer or something so then the more mentions I'm getting with SEO and Surfer SEO and other things would that help certain situations of let's say fat ranks website to rank for surf reso review and it did also kind of influencing the knowledge graph in that case

James Dooley: exactly yeah exactly about about that thing about how we can manipulate the future AI search whether it's bar generative whatever yeah how basically about building this massive digital footprint because Google's not that different today so how can we get basically spam the internet with those references that we want to manipulate so we we own um a tool called signal signal.com and that does at the front end people just think that that is social signals so it so-called does like um Twitter Facebook Pinterest and stuff like that but the truth of the matter is in the back end of that website and people that have get who get backdoor access they also get backdoor access to allowing us to be able to we've got a lot of people in there it's almost like like for like so if you do this can I can you do that and and we've got people that some of the groups have got 60 70,000 people in the group so what starts to happen is if I say can you do me a favor and search why is James douy the best Su in the world and just check and send me a screenshot of where this website ranks now the truth of the matter is I'm not bothered where this website ranks I just want someone to go and do a search that's got a historical data that's logged in probably to Gmail it's probably using Google Chrome that they're going up opening their Google Chrome and doing a search a real search a real person that's doing a search and then they're and then they're answering and then in return I'm saying like what do you want me to do for you and they're saying can you go and check to see where this is ranking or can you go and check this and I'm then going checking something in return but there's 560,000 people in some of these groups that are doing it so what it allowed us to do was leverage people check things now we have like web designers in that say um could you click onto my website and scroll down to the bottom and check to see whether the contact us page is working now obviously you know with behavioral signals and stuff like that they all clickthrough rate and engagement and dwell time this was all helping people's websites to rank higher because dwell time and clickr Ray and all this and clicking onto multiple pages and not bouncing back in the surup they're all right ranking factors and they're more of a ranking Factor than what people think people just think that it's content and links and stuff like that engagement signals and behavioral signals is huge so this is where it came from and then from that then what started to happen which was very scary I didn't pay for a single one of them why is James Dy the best suo in the world articles people then because it started to come up in AHS started to think because they needed to do topical Authority for SEO they needed to write about this and I think now there's something like 37 articles where someone's gone and written an article saying why is James do the best SEO in the world James D is an amazing SEO he does um link building content optimization he's um he's got some ranking rent sites and they've G to written that off their own back linked to all my social profiles and like you said it's citations on the internet for for that so we know can leverage it for certain brands where we could say why you is I think there's another one that we did um is a little test where we did why is auto blogging the best AI writing tool and I think if you Google that why is auto blogging the best AI writing tool I think there's some guest posts on there and again we've not we've not paid for one of them articles that is now people saying that auto blogging is the best I writing tool and the more and more people are saying it and it's being searched people then who who we not paid for who've got an article that says best AI writing tools go in and add that into their list without us even asking because they feel I know I need to add this in because of correlation yeah surf Surfer AI starts right if you ask Surfer AI certain questions it starts bringing this information and because of correlation that they feel that you need to add that as being one of the AI writing tools and stuff so yes you're manipulating sge you manipulating bad you're manipulating um chat GPT and open AI because you've got lots and lots of documents on the internet that is talking about this okay here's a good one for you on that basis so yes in we just a link building agency but as you know links don't work if you don't have the topical Authority or your content's not up scratch so generally when someone starts with us in month one we'll try and do everything we can basically to improve their existing content and fill those topical gaps yeah but we often get some gentle push back we go for that minimum content score of 70 but they'll say you've mentioned our competitors and we'll say unfortunately in the NLP we have your competitors on there so if you the example I always give is the best business coach you better mention Tony Robbins otherwise Google is going to see your articles incomplete Google's only a machine it can't read the content but it can look for these mentions and entities so you really need to fill the top gaps now what we tend to do is bury them at the bottom and you don't have to you only have to mention them you don't have to say they're fantastic and do a detailed comparison yeah but personally I think it's worth getting them in there

James Dooley: yeah for sure I completely agree um getting the right entities and the right kind of key words that are needed um and getting the semantic triples as well so if you're turning around and you're getting the subject the predicate and the object in the right order in certain sentences is huge like I'm a massive fan of like some of my team geek out every single day I've got a test any now testing team and they geek Out on Just content if I ask them anything to do with B links they don't know anything about bat links but if I go and speak to them about whether to use surf REO or on page. a or Market mov or phrase or page optimizer pro they've got accounts with every single one of them and they're consistently trying to test and and what you're talking about there if you add and even if it is a competitor's name if you add certain entities onto a page then yes you rank better like Kyle Ruth talks about it all the time you can get laips and content and place certain keywords and entities in certain places on the page and you can rank so Google doesn't read the content it's getting better a lot a lot better and it does now start to understand sentence structure a lot better for like featured Snippets but yes it's still it's an algorithm and an algorithm can be manipulated because it's mathematical so an algorithm is an algorithm it always will be an algorithm and they change words into vectors which is numbers if you've got the right amount of vectors on the page more than your competition at some point you will outrank them

James Dooley: very nice I think that's going to be the short form soundbite reel for later and no on that note I remember years ago we had obviously we had semrush with the 40% recurring affiliate program so everyone was promoting semrush as the best SEO tool even though at the time now it's kind of 50/50 personal preference but at the time I think everyone agreed AHS was better but every single article was promoting semrush for that affiliate commission yeah and people were saying if you didn't promote semrush then your article was not ranking properly yeah yeah yeah very interesting how this sort of source data can be manipulated like that yeah for sure yeah H we dwelled on that for a while but often you keep obviously you keep talking about got all your different sites different companies huge team testing groups so I think we should move on to just the operational aspect how on Earth have you done it what was your journey from I saw there was in 2009 you started your first blog so how did you grow that into the massive Empire you got today

James Dooley: and so if I quickly start from starting fast forward in in in a quickest way I can um we started out um for a company called Soft Services Limited I still am a director there today it's grown from 1 million a year up to eight and a half million a year um in the UK that does like tennis courts netball courts playgrounds Sports pitches like 3G football pitches and stuff like that so we really Iz we needed a an amount of inbound inquiries as opposed to me cold calling trying to get councelors to buy a playground which at the time that's that's how it started so we built a website we didn't know how to rank it we we understood that we needed to know how to rank it um roll on five years the first five years I failed miserably um I was I say I failed miserably I we still seen progression but I always felt people could do things at a quicker rate than where we was at um and then I just started to realize that it was just about just do back then anything you did works like you did more content even if it it worked you more links it worked so I got in a very quick in a in a em motion of being we need to be faster to be faster I need more staff and my background was always project management so I kind of if someone says to me do you think that you are a great SEO I say no like I'm the glue in the business and I understand everything that's needed for a successful SEO campaign but I'm not good at semantic SEO and semantic triples and getting the right entity on the page I'm not the best at Silo structure I'm not the best at um technical SEO and sight Speed and Performance I'm not the best at link building and outreaching and it's just because I don't do it dayto day but if I can get the people who I think is the best in the world at Outreach and getting going kind of negotiating the best like prices for links on the best quality sites and content and the geek out and all what to do his content and someone that all what he cares about is internal anex ratios external architect ratios internal linking Silo structure everything like that well then I become one of the best seos in the world because I've got one of the best teams in the world and I think the easiest explanation I can give on this Stewart is if you built an extension on your house would you build that extension yourself no you'd go and get a brick layer to build the wall you go and get a roofer to put the roof on you go and get a joiner to do all the doors and that's all I've done I'm just a good project manager like even building an extension like I want to expand on SEO I've got a very good Bri uh brick layer but what I mean by that is I've got a very good content M that does my content I'm not going to get my brick layer to go and lay my roof so I'm not going to get my content right to go and do my links I've got a very good link Builder that does My Links I've got a very good internal link in person that just does internal linking and I think the more you do something the better you become at it and the more you kind of geek out it and you want to be the best there so I quickly realized I needed a team around me and as the business grew for many years I made nothing I made zero because I wanted to build my team around me and I knew longterm I'd have a lot of assets but short term I I was I wasn't I was they my staff was earning more than I was earning yeah I owned the business and I'm like this is is not right but I knew when everything came together things would do well and I knew that if I looked after my staff if I trained them up to be the best that can be and they could speak to the people that I thought so like at the time it was like Matt Woodward and stuff like that and Charles Flo I thought was the best at link building so I got my link building team trained up by them and then now moving on I've got a lot of other people that train them up on links but then with regards to content I they speak to Kyle rof a lot now they speak to Cory quite a lot now um internal links have speak to people like Andrew Holiday quite a lot who's like very technical so my team members are being trained up by who I think are the best in that lane for what they do and I've got an amazing team around me and they're well looked after they're very well paid with regards to a bonus structure of what they can earn because they build out the assets and they all get 25% of whatever Revenue those sites make that's Revenue not of profit so like it they're making very good money out of it um and and they're scaling it they're happy they're happy I'm happy my customers are happy which is more important as well they're all staying around and I think when the customers are happy it makes my staff happy so we don't overpromise if anything we're under promise and overd deliver which then means that we've got happy clients and when we've got happy clients they're willing to keep paying so that's kind of in a nutshell for start to finish why we built up a successful team and and how we've managed to do it for so long and keep staff that now have been majority of my staff started out with me 10 11 years ago they're still with me today so that kind of says something that the culture in the business is is good

James Dooley: yeah it's definitely the Richard Branson uh mindset of you put the capable of CEO responsible for that project so you can move on to the next thing exactly yeah I think there so many of get stuck in that bootstrap mentality where yeah we start off broke and we do everything ourselves and it's very difficult to get out of that mindset

James Dooley: yeah it's like a classic saying I got I got brought up I would say I got brought up by the educational system in the UK which is to train and educate people how to be poor so you go out and you get a 9 till five job and you pay tax and that is what's best for the UK economy but I got taught that if you want to do a job well you do it yourself that is something of the worst advice that you can be educated for kids who want to be an entrepreneur I've got my niece right that she now works for me does quite a lot of SEO and she's progressing really well and when she was like 12 and 13 she was like I want to be like you I want to be an entrepreneur I want to be like you as an entrepreneur and I remember the teacher turned around and she said what do you want to be when you're older and she said an entrepreneur and she went high and laughed at her and said you've got to be realistic what do you want to be and it's like and they're the teachers of today's education and it's just like maybe we're doing things wrong in the UK and it's not just the UK but like but then they probably don't want people to be trained up to be entrepreneurs because you do need the people that are 905 workers and and I'm glad I found a lot of good business mentors and people who I can learn from including yourself nowadays that you can you're putting out a lot of videos I can learn from you I can develop my skills because every day is a school day and with especially with AI you've got to keep developing you've got to keep learning and trying to if you don't innovate you're going to evaporate that's the kind of classic saying so um yeah back to what you're publishing is is incredible and people need to start subscribing and and getting onto it more

James Dooley: yeah thank you very much no there is something quite humbling about SEO as you as you all know that because it's so quickly H adapting that you just can't afford to be arrogant youone that back seats but I mean yeah we all say we're all denying that we're the best whatever um but realistically how many people do say they're the the best SEO around there's very few most of us are very humbled because it doesn't reward arrogance certainly no definitely not

James Dooley: I mean we don't really do like we kind of try to revert it back where we're speaking to a business owner and we they only give a crap about one thing and that's return on investment so if we talk to them about how much money they're going to make and they only pay us a percentage of what they make that's kind of how we manage to win a lot of the business the business owners over and they love it because they don't want to talk about what Dr the links are and what semantics and what percentage of keyword density or whatever it is that you want to talk about to clients and what what you put in the reports they just want to know how much they don't even want to know about traffic they just want to know about how much money that those inquiries this is if it's an inquiry based office in e-commerce how much product have they sold that's that's all really that they looking yeah obviously an SEO a marketing manager might want to see traffic growth and Impressions and stuff like that but the business owners just want to know what Roi that they make so yeah yeah tot it's something we battled with the qualification because of course um you probably got the same thing that you got a large audience of people who don't have a lot of money but a very high level of knowledge and they're hoping that your help could save them whereas realistically from our perspective we can go to a business that trusts us and it's no longer about price yeah and yeah just a very interesting process in terms of you want to help people but at the end of the day it tends to be the the busy business owner who's got their channels and trust you and there's no longer about price so when it comes to pricing uh you do tend to favor those

James Dooley: yeah exactly I mean they're if they're busy with what they do like if you're a dental if you're a dentist and you're own a dental care practice you are brilliant at doing implants and fixing people's teeth you're probably not very good at business so if we if they if someone can come along and help you generate leads for what you're good at and then you can convert them and just keep doing what you're good at which is fixing people's teeth and doing dentures and doing implants and everything else then yeah like that's they just need to be busier at what they're good at and then they can if they can put the trust in somebody like yourself that runs an agency then and you can generate what they need happy days and you mentioned about um the investment in terms of Roi and the percentage do you actually do any Revenue shared type deals or are you talking about pitching your current retainer as a percentage of perceived outcome

James Dooley: no yes so like what we when we first start in any industry they don't pay for SEO they don't pay for Content they don't pay for bat links they don't even pay for the the inquiries that we send them through like we don't we don't charge you anything Al what we do is we say what is it that you do and say right we build conservatories right okay well if we was to send you leads for conservatories so let's say like Edwardian conservatories is what we specialize in right if we send you leads for Edwardian conservatories how much do you charge currently we charge five and a half thousand okay what is your competitors charge or anything up to 7,000 right do you think if we sent you inquiries that you could win the jobs at £6,000 and they say yes right okay every inquiry we send you for an Edward Conservatory price it up at £6,000 if you win it pay us the5 500 extra that you've added on you keep the 5,500 and you know that probably only cost three and a half thousand you're going to make 2,000 profit are you happy with that obviously they're going to say yes because they're winning work without paying anything so the the only thing they're paying is the the bit the finders fee that they've added on and if they don't win it they don't pay us anything so this is where we say we can get guarantee a return on investment they only pay when they've won the job they've done the job and they've been paid but we're very picky with who we work with because we've got to make certain that that company is good at converting our inquiries otherwise we don't get paid but that's kind of the model that we do we go out every bus pretty much every business owner wants to work with us because we zero risk in it all the risk lies with us yeah and it lies with us because and the reason why we do it is because one I think we're very good at what we do with regards to ranking the websites and two if we don't think it's a profitable Market in 6 12 months time we can do display ads and do all informational posts and stuff like that so there's other ways we can monetize it to get our money back or we put it in the testing bed of websites to just go and try to test things out of what's working in today's algorithm or not so no s's ever wasted but then it what allows us to do is are we are we certain this is going to make an Roi for us as a company no is it worth was going into it yeah like let's still test it so even if only one in 10 niches work we still make a good return on investment but the truth of the matter is probably around I don't know it depend it depends on the niche but a lot of our Industries we enter we normally end up making good money out of it sometimes it might cost us 45 pound to build the website out in full that's like not it might only cost1 pound to build the website but to do all the content all the back links and everything that at longterm might cost 440,000 if that site can make 4 thou 4,000 a month in profit for us after that well that means within one year we've got all of our money back and then every year we're making $4,000 a month clar profit because in local once the ranking there's not too much work that needs doing to them it might it might need an occasional backlink if it's a difficult kind of um service that you're going after but a lot of them if it's like carpet cleaning or specific rug cleaning for like that there's not there's not that many out there that do it so it it works nicely and the clients are happy we're happy and like you said and then it makes my stuff happy if the clients are happy

James Dooley: yeah I think every model whether it's affiliate Rank and rent agency they've all got their own pros and cons obviously yeah but yeah people see the C I certainly do you see the cash flow of agenty it's very appealing but at the same time it's very difficult to actually work with someone else's websites because you often start with someone and find they're either on different platform and then you find they've got they're on WordPress but they've got some sort of custom build and all the things you normally you know that if you put WordPress installation on your hosting it all works you've got the same set of plugins everything together but you find one that's a couple years old they've been through various development agencies and what you're left with a complete mess and you basic but weren't even on your radar before because in your world they've always been they've always been there so I think maintaining that control over the website is always very appealing and like you say from a sales perspective if you've already made that investment you then you're full stack you control where that lead goes

James Dooley: yeah yeah yeah like what you were saying there with regards to the CMS systems and stuff like that we could not do we could not do it because we're not technical enough we do not have a good enough technical te that could you go and update all the plugins if you get a new client they've got 45 plugins and you go and update them all and then it breaks we then got then start realizing how's this broken oh this plugin and this plugin are conflicting with each other we we're not we're just not geared up for stuff like that we Gear Up For Speed we build a site we scale it if it doesn't work it goes into display ads if it doesn't work for display ads it goes into the testing pool rinse and repeat very similar setups to or WordPress someone asked me to do something for Magento or wooc Commerce or whatever it is I don't know how to do it like when that's not my Lane I'm not good at that um I'm never once going to come along and say that I'm good at that um and that's where like you're when like what you're talking about there it's just there's too many moving parts for me to take over somebody else's website to understand what is going to get the best bang for the book for the client it's just it's just we're not get up for that if someone's Technical and they can do it I know lot of people that are earning a lot a lot of money doing client SEO and and it is brilliant in certain markets and stuff like that but for us it's just not something that we GE up to

James Dooley: I remember you know Ross tavendale yeah yeah know Ross yeah big London SEO agency owner and I spoke to him at SEO on the beach in Spain for people watching this is in theory an SEO conference it is basically just a beach party with SE um but we had a good talk where he basically said he's never never really done the affil has got really successful agency but he says actually at the end of the day when you look at overall cash flow agency margins are actually very small and so although the cash flow might seem low from a Content site or lead gen um the actual Roi works out pretty much the same because you're profit at that point

James Dooley: yeah I mean Ross I mean I don't think it helps him too much where having like a big office in London and paying all London wages like for did digital PR and stuff like which is what what he's got a very successful agency in doing you it doesn't matter where they are in the world if someone's good at Outreach or good at getting stuff in newspapers you almost don't need to be paying for the big office in London and all the staff in London like you need to try and leverage vas and stuff like that I think that became can become a bit of a burden where it can be you've got a lot of overheads um like we we've got a lot of very very good stuff in the UK that are expensive but each me they're like my middle managers and my directors but each one of those members of Staff who've got four or five Vaas some up to 10 vas that work underneath them whether that's in South Africa in the Philippines in Venezuela in Bangladesh like depending on who like what type of job it is so like South Africa and the Philippines do pretty well with regard guyss if we need any certain content being done and stuff well we would never use someone in Bangladesh for Content but they're quite good technically or building certain sites out or building like citations so we're trying to leverage that staff that is a lower kind of cost for the like the jobs that just following a process in the if that makes sense so but Ross is a very very intelligent SEO he's a very Advanced guy like I've got a lot of time and a lot of respect for um him he he could he could do some damage if he entered the affiliate or the lead gen space because he's he's he's a good SEO like very good SEO

James Dooley: yeah definitely and I love the guy for that mat as well yeah yeah one the things I love about this community and that on the on the public facing side people think we're all competitors so some people reached out to me saying yes we're going with you but we've got this other website we're going to give it to Julian Goldie and then we're going to compare after a few months I hope that's okay I'm saying I love Julian Goldie great guy we hung out in Thailand um it feels like you know on the public side they think this is some break neet competition thing but then we're all having beers and Chang mice together

James Dooley: yeah no ex I mean the the industry is so big that you could you could both be in the UK and both be in the exact same industry and they still probably both 10 to 15 different sub niches even just within that big Niche so there's so many different keywords that you can go after and the the market is so incredibly big for SEO I think the industry is there in the SEO industry at present it's all about elevating each other and I think because every day is a school day and the algorithms do change regularly it's better to to have everyone on each other's side to help each other out to help each other of what's working and yeah I love the that's why I love my like I've said this a few times if someone said to me here's a billion pound but you can't work another day in your life I wouldn't I wouldn't take it like I love the industry like not the whole SEO Community I like my extended family like I love him I think he brilliant I think it's brilliant that it's one of very few Industries in the world like you said that we don't seem to see each other as competition we actually how can I help you and Elevate each other which is great

James Dooley: I think that's one of the shocking things when I started getting out going to the eventss touring the world is just how open people are yeah I was speaking to Alandra Mayans at get me links whilst in Thailand and he said very early on when he took over get me links H he had a call with Matthew Woodward just like you said and Matt just told him everything about how you run a link building agency and he basically pushed back and said why are you doing this and he just said it's in our interest to help help each other out the pie is big enough was the exact wording he gave me

James Dooley: yeah yeah yeah yeah Matt Matt Woodward's a great guy as well like so living out in CTO Rico is we did a one or two masterminds in London with him um and yeah he's you know what he's another he's like an OG of the industry like I've got um I love I love the content he puts out and Yeah he was more more old school kind of it was more a six seven eight years ago I was like I was I was an admirer of his do you know what I mean so when he came to how you doing um and he doesn't seem to to do quite as much new stuff anymore but he's when I was in London he was pretty much like semi-retired he was like I don't I've made I've made a load of money like what should I do and at that point he was that's when he then started to realize that it's just it's not about the money it's about the journey and enjoying where you've come from and then where you're at now and just appreciating life and appreciating people are around you

James Dooley: that's a perfect point to move on to just a few additional questions I've got from my list I know only got half an hour left um we mentioned London a few times and yeah like me you're still in the UK and I think You' probably got the same battle IEM that especially on day like today in theory we can live and work anywhere why do we still choose the UK and pro well yeah let's open the conversation up to that happiness you were talking about as well in terms of what you value I think you're certainly at a point where you've got very abundant resources um yeah so you so let's start with UK so UK um I love the whole kind of the free NHS system if ever there's a problem we can use that um I love the idea that I don't like I absolutely hate the weather but I've got I've got family I've got friends I like to be rooted I like to know where I've come from I'm proud of where I've come from I Love Manchester as a city um I feel I do feel like London's a great City I do feel Manchester's a great City I think we've got a lot of great places in the UK the one big thing that I don't like is the weather so if I like there is being my base then I also love traveling so like I like here is being home but then I like going like okay once a month I'm going to go away for a week or might go away for a couple of weeks in summer in Winter sorry um sometimes like the whole of January we'll go to like Dubai um just to get some winter sun but I I I genuinely love the UK um apart from the weather I love the UK I love the people that are there I think there's a lot of high level people from the UK in Theo industry as well some people aren't actually on stage some people are um out there and like how how me and you was hustling in Sil so to speak there's a lot of others still to this day that are hustling in silence and very very very successful people that we I normally get to my office and we normally have some private masterminds you definitely need to come to the next one um up in Manchester um Craig Campbell comes to them all like Gary Wilson and stuff like that there's probably about 15 to 20 people it's invite only um we're trying to keep it at that it's high level but there's some very very high level business people in there that we're all we've all got different strengths and we're all trying to elevate each other so yeah there's many reasons why I will always keep the UK's being my home um so that's the first part the second part was how do I deem um happiness so well success some people talk about success and think that success is money I think that's ridiculous I think success is more um health and happiness um now don't get me wrong like money can bring a lot of happiness you can do a lot of nice things with money but I've also seen a lot of people that sets an end goal achieve achieved an end goal onto the next one yeah and then yeah there's another end goal there's another end goal there's another end goal they're always trying to get the next high but when someone does achieve what they seem to be their end goal which could be earning five million 10 million 50 million whatever your end goal is and if you reach it you have this feeling of emptiness and you're like what is that it is that where it's at and I've known a lot of people that achieved their High goal of being like 50 million and I'm done and they've got there and I've had some close friends that have killed themselves and there was the most happy the happiest people I've ever known got very nice Sons and Daughters a really nice wife a happy family they've always been a nice employer the staff around him thought it was really nice and within 12 months of selling he just went into depression and and it was so sad to see and I've seen it once or twice not not kill himself but enter this state of depression and emptiness after achieving what they thought would be their perfect once I get here that is it I'm going to be happy forever and it's so empty so you've got to realize then when you understand that that it is all about the journey and the success and the CL climbing the mountain as opposed to getting to the peak of the mountain the climbing of the mountain is the happiness and and there's a never ending kind of I never Now set myself a goal and this is why I'm saying if someone said to me here's a billion pound but you have to stop i' be like no no chance because that's not where I'm at my where I'm at is going to chamai kind of masterminding with people geeking out about SEO because I do s stff this I actually love SEO as an IND I I not just the people like I enjoy someone turn around to me like you got a day off tomorrow i' probably watch a few of your videos and one or two videos from Craig Campbell and geek out and seeing what's working and what's not like that's I I enjoy it like same um I've had yeah the same problem on a smaller level where yeah I might have hit a certain Revenue goal and thought great I can take things easy now and you do get the certain kind of the what now element yeah and yeah you're absolutely right is that point point of stepping back and realizing actually I do enjoy what I do yeah and you're right it's that Hands-On grinding CU I'm sure you're the same when you're working on a project it's like being a painter or a sculptor it's exactly that exactly that yeah I mean when you I I'm not a painter but I can imagine someone who's gotone and painted it they actually enjoy doing it the end goal of selling it for £100,000 pound but that's great but they actually enjoy doing the painting in the first place

James Dooley: yeah h on that note I also had questions of when we was setting up this call you basically said you tell me when's a good time so I thought this is the person despite the size of the business got a nice open calendar so what is your week look like now and what do you think your ideal week would look like if they're not already the same

James Dooley: so I feel like I've got I don't there's every anything anything that you could say is ideal but ideal at present is the the working program of what I have so what works best for me is I normally get up now this wasn't always the case but this is the case like in up been pretty much all of this year um and it was worked best for my body clock I get up at five o'clock in the morning we go straight into the office probably into the office for 5:30 so me Scott and kazra drive together into the office for 30 minutes it takes to get there we kind of asking each other questions and what did we do last night and just see like normally KRA might have been up till midnight watching some podcast and what do you think of this and what do you think of that and we just chatting we're getting to the office we don't eat anything um we do intermittent fasting till um 3:00 in the afternoon so we work we get into the office for let's say 5:30 we'll work till about 12 1:00 then we'll go to the gym at 1 o'clock in the afternoon work out at the gym then go home have our kind of whatever you want to call it lunch or brunch or afternoon tea or whatever it is um and the reason why we do that is because we realized that when we used to eat breakfast or eat something we felt lethargic after we eaten like within the workplace our energy levels are so much higher when we do intermittent fasting now this