James Dooley SEO Interview on Growing Digital Real Estate Assets as a UK Digital Landlord

In this episode of the James Dooley Podcast, host James Dooley is joined by SEO veteran Dan Grant to walk through Dan’s journey from junior apprentice to SEO director — and reveal the real-world systems, tactics and mindset that got him there. They dig into what it takes to build and scale profitable SEO operations: mastering on-page optimisation, building a robust backlink profile, testing and evolving strategies, and creating a team where each person plays to their strengths. Whether you’re just starting out or scaling up your agency or portfolio, this conversation gives a rare inside look — practical, no-nonsense, and based on years of actual results.

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.

Dan Grant:
okay so i'm here with my boss james he's going to be discussing his journey as a digital landlord so i guess the first question is what made you want to become a digital landlord

James Dooley:
i never really planned out to be a distiller um as the business started to evolve and i realized we needed enquiries with through the business the more inquiries we get the more sales that we'd get the more profit basically would make so i realized that seo was an important part which is obviously search engine optimization and and i knew that owning a lot of the assets was important as well so where i started to speak at a lot of different events and meet a lot in a lot of mass demands and stuff i started to realize a lot of people was doing client work for other people's websites so what i was thinking was if i could build the sites and generate them the leads which is what they wanted to make the profit i'd own the assets and i could build that out in my own way without a client saying i don't like the look of that site or what you're doing here or why you're doing this it was my site so as long as generated in the leads he was happy

Dan Grant:
so i think a lot of people be interested kind of in this industry like what training did you have to do really to learn this training to become a digital landlord

James Dooley:
so they may i'd say the main training you need to do is seo and learn the trading seo everything about seo and then people are probably going to ask well where do you learn seo and there's a lot of online courses a lot of videos tutorials on youtube and stuff like ah a lot of it's outdated a lot of it is incorrect um first four or five years i watched days and days and days worth of videos that never look back and they're all incorrect yeah so um you've just got to kind of learn on the job and you've got a build-out sites test test test so probably our biggest arm at the moment is people that are physically testing stuff still to this day now after a decade of being in the industry we're still checking what content briefs work the best what content optimization tools are the best what type of links are the best what what velocity of links are the best so it's a it's never evolving kind of trade of what you need to do in general you need to learn the seo side unless you're going into paid social media or building up social media groups or running ppc and stuff but generally digital landlord is owning the assets of a website and then renting that out which you need to rank organically

Dan Grant:
yeah i suppose it's like what you've alluded to there like you can't limit yourself to one part of digital marketing if you're going to learn you need to learn about every single part so that you've got enough knowledge to actually implement it yeah probably some people go wrong in digital marketing in general where they focus in on one thing and then they try they do that really really well and then they have nine other 10 other factors that they're completely ignoring yeah they wonder why they don't rank or they can't you know so it's like with the gas missile it's a realistic approach so it's nice having amazing content if you don't have any nice visuals um you don't have any videos on there you can also write the images in google videos on pinterest pinterest is a massive driver of traffic and that referral traffic on the behavioral signals that you get through seo is massive people don't talk about behavioral signals everything's always obsessed by content and links where behavioral signals are some of the biggest part of of the rankings in today's algorithm so whether it's referral traffic from youtube from pinterest from twitter from facebook groups and stuff like that yeah everything is encompassing into being one big digital marketing strategy yeah definitely so with all that training and everything and obviously with it being implemented

Dan Grant:
what do you feel it really takes to become a successful digital landlord

James Dooley:
good question assistance and more assistance like seo is a never evolving industry we've spoke about this a few times where every day is a school day and things change all the time people too many people quit that's what it is there's a classic saying of 97 percent of people quit and they're employed by three percent of the people that didn't yeah yeah so it's about getting through them paying marriage getting through what works in today's algorithm and adapting to what works so it's definitely persistent um consistently looking to improve so if you don't if you if you're on a flat line you're actually going behind because you can compete as a catching up so again i just repeat persistence

Dan Grant:
yeah continuing to grow and continue to actually find different areas that can succeed because i think that's the thing you can be sometimes deterred from something if it doesn't go very well or you think that didn't work so therefore it doesn't work whereas actually it's making sure that you implement it properly and at least give it a try i think in certain elements of seo you're always going to be all marketing in general you're going to be better at certain parts than others yeah and the parts you're you know not as good at it's kind of more of a reason to just keep going

James Dooley:
i think a lot quit too soon as well with regards to um let's say article what's your linkbusting you need a lot of it so some people go and build 20 sites and 20 backlinks and they say it's not works and give up and they might have got himself in the background ranking for maybe three 400 keywords in position number eight on that now generally the top three top five results get all the traffic so if you're gonna build everything up from not ranking to be in position number seven you're probably still not going to be earning any money yeah we've done the brunt of the work and maybe another 10 articles and 10 backlinks out depending on the niche you're not that far away and it's that whole digging for the gold and so far it's looking for the diamonds and you're very close but yeah there's nothing here and you give up and it's just that's where the persistence comes in and making certain that if you're going to do it you need to look to cover the topic in its entirety and be ambitious enough to make certain i'm going to go for this until i win

Dan Grant:
so obviously with all that being said what have you found most challenging during your time kind of in the in the road to becoming a digital landlord

James Dooley:
cool most challenging i'd say on boarding the right staff and so to start with at the time we onboarded quite a lot of seo specialists social gurus seo experts and he came in and they say it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks and and with the algorithm changing so much you need to change so some of these not not branding all older people but people that have got experience and not got the mindset from a young age in being every day as a school day it became difficult so that's why i went down the apprenticeship route i went down the hall they need to come in with a fresh mind to make certain they've got the right mindset to make certain that we're systemizing everything so that the next people that come along the training is up a little bit easier but i don't need to do the training for the next person my middle managers can be doing the training to the apprentices then they progress up the ladder they're then doing the training for the next apprenticeships but it's all takes time and there's times where i could complete a task myself in two minutes and it might take me 10 minutes to do the sop i might light up and just do the task yeah but then it's actually no you've got to make the system because that two minutes is going to be escalated ten thousand times in the years to come yeah so that is breaking that model of being making certain one of the books that i read if we visited changed the way that i still think to this day where it's about being system-dependent not people-dependent and that whole being system is dependent longer further down the line it just saves you so much time but it's just breaking that mold the mindset of just like sometimes you just want to roll your sleeves up and get it done yeah and it's actually better not to do that at times

Dan Grant:
yeah and that temptation could exist obviously from putting in the years of doing it yourself so you're so used to i'm going to find out this problem going to work this out and actually when you've actually got the systems together it's much easier than to take a bit of time like you said get it all you know systemized and then the efficiency of the business everyone can then obviously attack that problem you know tenfold as opposed to just you doing it and it saves you so much time and gives you more room to you know embark on different endeavors as well so yeah that all makes sense

James Dooley:
yep so this one's a bit of a nicer question

Dan Grant:
but what have you found most rewarding about this journey then

James Dooley:
the most rewarding i'd say is the the way we've set out the way that we work with clients is all of our clients get a return on investment otherwise they don't pay so then if they're renting out one of our sites and it's not generating inquiries they don't pay rent so they need to be seen to getting a return on investment so long term we've got clients we don't want to be renting out our website it's not generating them a return on investment which then means that the switching is off we need to find new clients and it's a consistent we need a big massive sales team we don't have that much of a big sales team because it kind of sells itself so and it should be what and the reason why it's rewarding is because when you've got a happy client base your staff's happy because every phone call that your clients doing is generally a happy conversation about wanting more inquiries coming to you for new services that they might be offering or basically telling you i want to pay you more money because this is working amazingly so it's that whole like we generally get invited on a lot of the clients christmas news because they like working with us i think that's really important because there's times where people are doing client seo and sometimes the client might be paying two three four thousand pound a month and not knowing what they're getting and they always see it as an expense where we've also to see what they're paying us as an investment not an expense it's a completely different mindset and it just makes everything happier within the workplace

Dan Grant:
with you saying that as well i'm kind of talking about investment uh could you go expand a little bit more about kind of you know the fact that obviously when sites do do well the investment does get poured back into

James Dooley:
yeah exactly so um the first three four years we're not interested in making any profit whatsoever so when a client starts to enter the site let's say it's frozen for the month we will spend the full thousand dollar month on content on links on social media on videos on infographics whatever it takes for us to build to get them as high up as we can for the keywords that make them the most profit and what starts to happen is the reason why it takes so long to do that is that in six seven eight months time we start to find new keywords in google in google search console this starts coming up when we start to ask the client questions like what does this mean and they're like oh yeah it's really profitable for us yeah so like but they didn't say it at first and they're like oh yeah i didn't really think about that and then you end up coming across new keywords consistently as those new keywords come along you then need to do new articles new backlinks new videos on all them as well so what we want them to keep growing out and growing and growing out and we we don't want to target stuff that might generate them a lot of inquiries end of the day it's not about its quality over quantity it's not about the quantity of enquiries that we generate it's about the leads that convert and make them the most profit and then from that then again they're a happy client they're making money and that's that's our biggest drive to make certain the clients are making a return on investment yeah

Dan Grant:
so we spoke a lot about kind of your own personal growth within the company and kind of become a digital landlord um how important for you do you feel it's been to actually work as part of a team in that process as well

James Dooley:
everything absolutely everything and without a team i am literally i'm zero um there's so many moving parts that you need that you need the team to implement whether it's testing at the front end to make certain that systems that keep being updated to making certain that being me writing content i'm not a content writer so it's you better getting someone who's got the degree in english that loves writing content that loves reading and researching and writing that's not my bag i'm more i'm more of a businessman and more analytical so if you was going to go into any role within seo it probably would be bad links because i like the analytical side of you but you need to make certain you've got the right people for the job that you've got to mold them into their workplace you've got to make certain their mindset is done right as well but the team is absolutely everything like i can't stress enough that how important making certain that you've got the right people for the right roles that they understand that any criticism that i give is constructive criticism for them to improve and then to develop as a person and then to improve their career as well i think it's it's it's definitely the most important part of what we do yeah

Dan Grant:
and i think like you said there like that team doesn't happen straight away it has to be molded into being in its own thing and yeah kind of the ethos of a company needs to be built from the ground up as opposed to i'm going to employ six or seven people and it's all gonna work perfectly it's definitely a there's a lot of training sometimes not necessarily off the job but almost kind of the atmosphere of what people bring to the company yeah yeah how the team works

James Dooley:
the culture is massive as well yeah i mean look at your role yourself you started off as being an apprentice you mainly was in balance and now you're heading up content you're heading up a content team you're doing all the content briefs you're editing existing content that's being uploaded you're doing progressive optimization that's not what your role was at the start you've progressed into that role now if i just had you in that one role you wouldn't have evolved as a person and since you then ended up moving into certain roles you you're the culture of yourself became like more like a hungry for business growth again where and that's where you've got to look within the team and make it certain in the culture that they're at they are happy and it's not seeing why they're not is it the role that they're playing or is it that you've not set them enough targets because people love to hit targets and then min then those are the mini wins along the way it's enjoyable and for everyone within the journey but yes the team is the culture in the team is absolutely massive

Dan Grant:
so during that process of kind of trying to find a team and trying to find your staff that are perfect to be able to mold you know mold into what kind of things do you generally look for in an individual when you're employing someone for your team

James Dooley:
it completely varies on the role that you're taking on um so if it's customer service you've got to make something quite confident on the phone that they're willing to pick up the phone and speak to clients speak to customers if it's content writing they don't need to be that sociable they just need to love english and research and writing and reading and consistently wanting to evolve in the way that content is being written and actually the work they put in they're like really proud of what they've done i think that's really really important and the politeness being well educated just i don't i mean i'm not literally all they have to have straight a's and stuff speaking to them within the interview you've only got 30 minutes to an hour in an interview so you've not got that long so i always like doing is if i think the right role i always take them on for a month so just give them a month kind of trial period see how the mold within the actual office so do they get on with other members of staff because if they don't well they don't make it you know what i mean like you've got to make certain that members of staff get on with each other you've got to make certain that they're always willing to learn so in the first few weeks i will specifically get them jumping from one thing to another and i'll specifically just try to test them out to be like ah do you know what i mean so like but then it's cease to see over the break because if they're gonna break when they've not got that much stress they're gonna break further down the line and they have to keep adapting and changing so it's not just straight some people are just always looking at a cv and going you want me to employ them they're all straight a's they've got to fit within the team as well um and yeah i mean just i think it does vary quite a lot

Dan Grant:
so with all that being said would you say as a final question there's anything you tell yourself or tell your former self sorry about kind of you know what you do differently as a digital landlord

James Dooley:
yeah i'd definitely say it's a lot harder than what this these times where people might read like a four hour work week and think that's it four hours working a week and that's it done but it's a lot lot harder than what you think um you've got to build a team uh building the team's massive and really important and then you've got to have wild crazy dreams like way bigger expectations than what you ever think of but then you've got to break them down into mini goals so when you break learning to many goals and you achieve those many goals the journey is fun but if sometimes people set themselves massive big targets and it might take them years and years and years to get those targets and in in those years they just never happen until they hit the target where if you set yourself a big big target but you do like the kaizen approach where you slowly but surely going up going up going up going up towards it and you're winning you're getting these little wins along the way the journey is so much more fun yeah

Dan Grant:
brilliant i think to be fair that kind of sums everything up i don't think there's anything else you want to add but you know other than that no that'll be that's everything about being digital or not brilliant yeah great