James Dooley calls himself a “digital landlord” — and the scale of his estate makes the title hard to argue with. What began in 2009 as a single website for a construction firm has grown into an empire of roughly 1,300 sites, over 70 million web pages, and more than 600 industries and niches, underpinned by a call centre and a lead-generation operation that once produced more than a million enquiries in a single year. As CEO of PromoSEO, founder of FatRank and chairman of Searcharoo, Dooley has been named “Best SEO in the World” — but in this Unscripted SEO conversation with Mark A Preston, he’s more interested in dismantling his own myth than burnishing it.
The outdated perception of Dooley was pure black hat: manipulation, keyword stuffing, bought links. His own framing is more honest, and more useful.
I’ve just always had money hat, right? So what I’ve ever done is done what works in Google, right?
James Dooley
What follows is a candid tour through the mechanics of a nine-figure SEO business: how he structures a team of apprentices-turned-directors, why he now treats EEAT and disavows as real ranking factors rather than sales pitches, how he sniffs out ultra-profitable micro-niches like disabled wet rooms that no keyword tool will surface, and why he shifted from selling leads to the predictable revenue of a rank-and-rent model. Along the way he’s blunt about the graft it took to get here — and about the fact that clean, user-first content is now what actually holds rankings.
Instead of it being a short term win, now you’re going to get the long term sustainable rankings.
James Dooley
It’s part business masterclass, part reality check for anyone who thinks the “digital landlord” life is passive income.
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The full conversation
What’s your whirlwind tour of your business career within SEO, James?
So I started out in the SEO kind of space about 12 years ago, something like that, 13 years ago, I think it is. I was in construction as a project manager and I needed a website for our own business, and quickly started to realize that a website without SEO is pointless. And quickly had to learn the hard way of how to do SEO. And that’s how it all evolved. I realized right at the very start of my career that trying to ring out to try and get new sales wasn’t the best way of running a business. I needed to build a consistent flow of inbound quality inquiries, and everything now evolved with what we did. We do a lot of lead generation. Some people call it like a rank and rent model, but it’s still mainly lead generation. Some businesses like the rank and rent model, so they know each month how much they pay in. And obviously with it being digital real estate and renting of the properties, that’s where the term digital landlord came from.
How large is your digital real estate?
So in total, we’ve got, I think it’s over 70 million web pages online. I think we’ve got about 1,300 different websites, over 800 different paying, the 500 maybe we haven’t monetized yet, about 800 we have monetized, and there is over 600 different industries and niches that we’re in.
How big a team do you have to scale to that level and maintain it?
It is a big team to be fair. It’s not easy. I wouldn’t recommend going as big as what we’ve done if I’m being 100% honest. I never really set out to have what people call an SEO empire or digital estate empire as big as what it is now, but one thing led onto something else. And one client said, oh, I’ve got a friend who’s a director of a company and they want lead generation. And before we knew it, it’s just evolved. Don’t get me wrong, it’s been a very successful journey. Now, in total, we own a call center as well. So we’ve got over 100 staff in the call center that do quite a lot of sales for the leads of what we’re generating. Because it sounds daft this, Mark, but if you’ve got a mortgage broker, and you’re generating leads for a mortgage broker, and they’re on the phone, and they might have another mortgage broker in their office, if you’re generating them 10 leads an hour, they can’t deal with the volume. And people go, that’s a good problem to have. It is and it isn’t, because if eight of your leads aren’t being dealt with and they go elsewhere and they’re not converting, you’ve wasted those leads.
So we then started to realize that we need like an overflow call centre that could take the leads in if our clients couldn’t deal with them. So if it’s rung four or five times and they’re not answering, they’re probably on a call, our overflow call center will take it, get the information, get everything of what they need, and then we turn it from a cold web lead into a hot lead. In SEO, we’ve got 11 in Wilmslow in South Manchester. And each one of them, I tried to have it that each one of them are allowed up to 10 virtual assistants, so that makes it like 110. I don’t think we’re at the 110 virtual assistants, I think it varies between 80 to 100. But each one of them could be a graphic designer, a videographer, content writer, technical SEO — just varied roles of what’s needed in different industries.
Do all these people work together, or on their own projects?
So that’s a great question. When I first started out, about two years in, I realized that I needed staff to help me with what I did. And what started to happen was I would go out and try to find SEO gurus to come in and work for us, and these people that had three, four years experience with SEO that claimed they were an SEO guru came in, didn’t really know anything. And it was very difficult to train, because I always use the saying, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. So we went down the apprenticeship route in the UK. It’s cheap for labor, and I thought if I can get someone raw coming out of college or university, I can train them up my way. Roll on, a lot of them now have been with me nine or ten years. Six of them that we’ve taken on as apprentices are all directors of the company now. They’ve all got their own assets and built up their own kind of lane — they can work on their own, but they’ve all got their own speciality. So one of them might be very good at quality content, a good editor, good at onboarding new content writers, training up the content writers. If I asked them to do backlinks, then they wouldn’t be able to do it, because it’s a completely different part of the brain. One’s a creative part of the brain, where backlinks is more mathematical — you’re living in sheets and you’re living in data. And obviously the link builders are completely separate to the content, but they’ll all help each other out. So yes, they all help each other out within the business, but they’ve all got their own projects going on as well.
Is it important for the people who work for you to have an entrepreneurial mindset?
So I would actually say no, but hear me out on this. I feel within a business, you need some people that are the entrepreneurs, with the mindset that’s forward thinking, innovative and looking to grow. Maybe one or two people underneath there that are maybe intrapreneurs, like an entrepreneur that’s working inside of the business. But apart from that, you need some doers. You don’t want people to keep thinking about new things and thinking I’m going to do this — you need some people that are just, this works, let’s crack on and let’s do it. If you’ve got too many entrepreneurs, too many cooks spoil the broth, so to speak. So I feel like not all of them need to be entrepreneurs. You need to make certain you’ve got a blended mix of staff. Some just want to get in and work hard and finish at five and go home, and that’s fine. But you do need some of them that are like — you’ve had Kasra on before. Kasra now, he’s got a lot of partnerships with me with his own assets and stuff, but Kasra was initially taken on by myself as a web designer. And then I trained him up with everything that he did, and obviously he is an entrepreneur, so he has elevated himself into building loads of his own assets. But initially I took him on as a web designer, and then he’s blossomed into building up his own kind of lane there that’s been really successful.
How has your SEO knowledge evolved over the years?
So, failing so many times. I was on a podcast yesterday, and the guy’s known me for quite a while, and he says, do you know what I love about you, Dooley? I said, go on, what? He says, you are a hardened SEO. I said, what do you mean by that? He says, you’ve had so many scars from the peaks and the troughs of the growth of what’s happened. You’re quite straight talking, you’ve had all the scars, you understand it. And some of these new SEOs that are coming along that don’t really know — probably the next algorithm update might get a big hit — are they going to be able to bounce back and reverse engineer what’s happened? You’ll know very well when I say how much Google’s evolved, like from back in the day when it used to be keyword stuffing, white text on a white background, content behind images, spamming and loads of other kind of spamming link building techniques. The whole algorithm has evolved massively. At one point I would probably say I was in the remit of almost even black hat, because black hat seemed to work the best. You keyword stuff, you build links and you scale it out.
The truth of the matter is Google’s done a very good job of now ranking real businesses within Google search. I’m now one of the cleanest white hats you’ll ever meet. Everything that I do, I try to naturally acquire backlinks. So I’m trying to write articles that are surveys, data driven, so when they do rank, people want to link back to that or cite the source. All my content that I write, I genuinely want it to be the best quality content that there is out there. If my writer’s not proud of what they’ve done, don’t write it. You need to think, is that article the best it can be? Have you covered the topic in its entirety? Have you gone out of your way to cover every single topic around what you wanted to talk about? And that’s what Google wants. Google wants a good user experience. And I feel like I’ve gone from the black hat stages of trying to create shortcuts into — actually, I’m just going to do what Google asks for and just do it right, scale a good quality team, get them to be proud of what they’re doing, and you’re going to get long term rankings. Instead of it being a short term win, now you’re going to get the long term sustainable rankings.
What happened at the stage when you moved from black hat over to doing it properly?
First and foremost, that’s a good question, Mark. The truth of the matter is, my hat has never felt like — even though I’ve said it was black hat and white hat, because I understand that’s how the SEO people talk — I’ve just always had money hat, right? So what I’ve ever done is done what works in Google, right? Back in the day when I was ranking number one for really big casino terms and finance terms, I couldn’t have done that back then with clean white hat strategies. It just didn’t work. So as much as Google tried to tell you that you just build good quality content and the links will come, that was incorrect information. So if I could manipulate, whether it was CTR or I could manipulate links, I only did it because it worked. I just did what generated me the most leads or what I thought got me to number one in Google. I did nothing illegal. I did no hacking of websites or anything like that, which in my opinion is black hat — where you’re hacking sites and doing things that are detrimental to somebody else. I think that’s bang out of order and I’d never do anything like that. But trying to buy links that I thought would move the needle and get me ranking number one, or running traffic through — and some of it, when I say traffic manipulation, was like PPC or Facebook ads or Twitter ads, or at the time you could leverage Pinterest traffic really cheap. So I’d get loads and loads of traffic through to the pages, and that traffic would boost the site up. Is that black hat, or is it just being clever with what works?
But then what I started to realize was, for long term sustainable rankings, stop cutting corners. Stop trying to monetize every single page that you build — some pages aren’t there to be monetized, some are there just for informational value. Give the user what they want. Prime example, if you’re a carpet cleaning company, write some articles on how to clean red wine off your carpet. Give the people the information they need, even give products to say this product works really well to clean red wine off the carpet. However, if you want a professional to come and do it for you, fill in the form, and then it goes to a carpet cleaning company. I don’t feel like there was ever a line I crossed. I’ve just always done what I think works, and nowadays I feel good quality content, topical authority and trying to get natural backlinks is what gives you the most sustainable long term rankings.
What are your personal thoughts when it comes to the Google guidelines?
The truth of the matter is, the minute you read the Google guidelines, you will be doing stuff to — not saying manipulate Google, but — anyone that does SEO pretty much goes against Google guidelines, because you’re adding certain keywords to a page to try and rank it so that the users can see it. My thoughts are, these times where Google comes out and says stuff, sometimes they shoot themselves in the foot, because they just say things that they know is not true, and the SEO industry knows that certain things are not true, and it’s just frustrating at times. Now I get it that they’re a business and what they’ve got to do is support and make certain that people aren’t manipulating mass at scale. I think the biggest problem they’ve got now, being 100 percent honest, is AI. The mass creation of content — instead of creating an article a day, people are creating 100 articles a day. And Google’s got to try and now crawl all these articles. So they’ve got some serious problems with regards to how they’re going to manage to find, crawl, score, and index each of these pages. They’ve come out saying that they’re all right with AI, but deep down I don’t think they are. I don’t think they’ll come out saying it, because they’re using AI within their own algorithm — it’d be a bit hypocritical if they say we don’t like AI, but we use AI. So I don’t want to talk badly of the guidelines, but again, I still just try to do what works. And I think most SEOs just generally try to, for their clients, rank their website number one to get the traffic and hopefully be able to pay the wages.
What should SEOs be mindful of when it comes to Google SGE?
I completely agree. And do you know why I think that will be, Mark? I think what they’re trying to do is answer questions. So when you’ve got a question which might be top of the funnel that no one’s willing to bid on, they’re going to try and answer that as quickly as they can. Then within SGE, what happens? There’s five other questions that pop up going, oh, you might also want to know this, and this. And they’re trying to very quickly answer whatever you might be wanting to know to get you down the funnel. And the minute you answer that bit, they click onto the next question, which could be what’s the best product for this. Bam, now you’ve got the ads. So they just try to quickly get you from an informational term where they don’t make money, down to — boom, now we can show ads and now we can get paid.
I do worry for some people who build out tens of thousands of pages on a site and they’re all how-to guides and calculators. They’re always informational type posts, and what they do is fill it with display ads — Adthrive, Mediavine, Google AdSense — and that’s how they get paid. Some of them have done really well, some have earned 150,000 a month from doing it, which is not to be frowned upon. But I think a lot of that traffic’s going to get lost when SGE fully rolls out, because the AI is going to answer it. The only thing that puts me off, that might not happen, is they do make quite a bit of money on Google AdSense, like their display ad network. So I still feel they might still give quite a few of the clicks to these sites, but then will they start favoring their own Google AdSense as opposed to Mediavine? I don’t know. We’ll have to see on that.
Why do you believe it’s important for SEOs and businesses to get out of the copycat content mindset?
The people that are pumping out the stuff that’s already out there are actually being taught by these SEO gurus to write correlated copycat content. So the tools that people are using, they’re not adding any new value. There’s an information gain patent that’s out there, and the patent basically turns around saying, what are you providing that’s additional to what we’ve already got? So all these people that are obsessed with correlation tools — you’re obsessed with copying what’s already there? Imagine Google. If I’m sat in Google headquarters, and someone clicks on the number one result, and they don’t like what the number one result says, but the number two result just copies what the number one result says because I’ve correlated my content against them — if I didn’t like what number one said, I’m not going to like what number two says or number three or number four. So they’ve got to try and combat that. And that’s what SEOs have started to do, just be obsessed with correlated content. So now Google wildcards one in: specifically, if someone’s done a really good review about a brand, they’ve almost got to throw in one that’s talking badly about the brand to combat it, so they’re showing different answers and different results. Because if you don’t like number one and it’s all copies, you’re not going to like the rest of them.
With lead generation as your goal, how do you see the user journey?
You’ve got to ask why are they actually searching for that term? You’ve almost got to have in your head what couple of questions did they have before it and what couple of questions are they going to have after it, and try to help them guide through what they need. Something that transformed our business was two things not many people have. We’ve got our own in-house testing team that debunks all SEO myths, and trust me, there’s so many out there. Some people go up on stage and just rehash what other people say that was working eight years ago that no longer is now. So we’ve got our team pushing the boundaries and seeing what works. And then we’ve also got people that are literally doing all of our SOPs and processes and just making them more concise. So if we’ve got a 16 step guide to how to build citations, could we make that a 12 step guide? If we’ve got a 30 minute video of training on keyword research, could we make it 25 minutes? And you go, you’re only saving five minutes — yeah, but we’re saving five minutes times a hundred staff. It used to take us about four months to train somebody up to be an expert in one part of SEO, and now it takes about eight or nine weeks. So we can quickly get through onboarding new staff, training them up, getting them in the lane, and scaling it. That’s what’s worked really well for us.
What does the day-to-day of your SEO testing team look like?
Every single day is different. The algorithms are consistently evolving, so what we tested eight months ago — we could say this and this works, but then when a new algorithm update comes along, we’ve got to retest everything again to see if it’s still as prominent. Now we’re tracking, I think it’s 1.6 million keywords in total. So as soon as something’s happening with regards to any discrepancies with rankings gone up or gone down — not just our own sites, even though we’ve got a lot of data for our own sites — we’re consistently tracking what’s happened here, what’s happened there. And it could be anything from page speed, silo structure, over optimization of keywords on the page, not enough topical authority, over optimization of backlinks, toxicity, lacking in the EEAT signals. Up until this year, maybe the end of last year, I thought personally that two things were just SEO myths. One of them was disavows and one of them was EEAT. I thought disavows was just a sales pitch for people to come in and sell — we’ll do a disavow. I’ve got hundreds and hundreds of websites and I’ve never needed one, so I thought this is garbage. And then I got a manual action penalty last year. So I looked into it further — you have to do a reconsideration request to Google within Google Search Console.
The more we started digging into it, I started to think, wait a minute, this could start rolling out more, and I own a lot of websites. So, me being entrepreneurial, I thought, who’s the best person in the world that does disavows? And in my opinion, the best person in the world that does disavows is Rick Lomas — he’s seen as being the godfather of disavows and getting sites back from link penalties. So I went and met Rick Lomas. At the time, Rick had gone through a bit of a traumatic time, his wife had died, and he said, if I’m being honest, I’ve got a daughter, I want to spend more time with my daughter. And I said, I want to get into this more. So he said, I’ll train you up. And I said I’ll give him royalties. Now we do the majority of Rick Lomas’s disavows. And it’s only now I start to see — every single week, manual action penalties are being distributed out. When you do a reconsideration request, if they feel you’ve still got toxic links and you’ve not tried to outreach to get rid of the links, they don’t revoke it. And if you don’t disavow all of what they see as being the toxic links, they’ll come back and give you some examples. Sometimes these examples could be a DR65 site that’s getting traffic — on the naked eye it looks like a good site. But then when you dig a bit deeper and uncover the last five posts they’ve done, they link to casino, they link to CBD, they link to finance, and you go, ah, this is just a glorified PBN. So the R&D team for that has been huge. There’s so many people, even without manual action penalties, that are sat in a partial penalty where they might be held back two or three positions across the whole site because they were above a toxicity threshold. There’s a classic saying, you don’t know what you don’t know. There’s times we’ve done proactive disavows and seen big jumps, and we’ve gone, wow, we were being held back — no messaging in Google Search Console, nothing.
And then the other one was EEAT. I used to see income school and one or two others talk about EEAT, and I used to think, is this just another pitch for SEOs to sell? And then we got a penalty at the start of the year. We had a Google News site that was talking about finance — we do a little bit of lead generation on pensions, equity release and stuff like that — and we got a manual action penalty in Google Search Console called Offer Transparency. And from there we started to realize, hold on a minute, EEAT is a thing. You can’t really make any money out of EEAT as a service, but just getting those foundations — having an about us page, a meet the team page, a privacy policy page, a cookie policy page, an email address, a telephone number, an address on your website. Because if you didn’t like something on the site, or you’d used an image and it was copyright infringement, can they easily get hold of you? Google wants to know who’s behind the website — what author’s written the article, and are they an expert in what they’re talking about, and what business is behind the whole site. Sometimes you’re busy building out sites, you don’t see the wood from the trees. I’ve now become like a clean white hat SEO that does all things — I probably go belt and braces, I do an EDI policy, a modern slavery policy, I go overkill, but I turn and tick every box. It might cost 200 to get all the policies done and put them on your website, and then they can’t come back to you saying you don’t look like a real business. We are a real business. We’ve got a real address, a real telephone number, an email address, a meet the team page with who’s going to answer the calls — because on some of the lead gen sites we’ll put the clients on the site of who’s going to be answering it. So it’s good for conversion as well. It’s not just for Google, it’s for the user. By doing that, you’re winning with Google, because Google says, oh, you’re giving good behavioural signals.
What are your thoughts on some affiliate marketers using fake personas?
I don’t think it’s the right thing to do. If I go and create a site with a fake persona and you can reverse engineer and reverse image look up that person — how many times has that person been mentioned online, and are you an expert about dishwashers? You don’t even need to be an expert like a dishwasher engineer — are you an electrician, have you ever serviced them, have you ever repaired them? Or at least has that person opened up some of these boxes and done an unboxing and been seen to use one of these dishwashers? If you’ve not, I think Google’s done a good thing, because you probably not bought all 10 best washing machines, you’ve not used all 10, all you’ve done is sorted by who pays the highest affiliate commission to who pays the lowest affiliate commission. In my opinion, and I know it sounds harsh, you deserve to be slapped, because you’ve not got a real business, you’ve not got a real telephone number, you’ve not got a real email address, you’re not a real person, and you’ve not even bought the 10 dishwashers. So for that reason, you deserve it. Affiliates won’t like me saying that, but how can Google start giving this made up person — James Fitzgerald is an expert in washing machines — no, you’re not. So why should people listen to that? At least Reddit and Quora have come up. At least Reddit is 10 different people negotiating which one they think is best, 10 real people arguing, I bought this Flymo and I think it’s better than that Flymo because I’m using it on a farmer’s field. At least you’re getting different people’s opinions, as opposed to someone who’s reviewed 10 washing machines and gone, yeah these are really good, yeah these are really good, and all 10 of them are great, and they’re using the same stock images as everybody else.
How do you make sure that all your lead generation sites have reputable EEAT signals?
Prime example of what we do with our sites — you might say, how are you an expert about carpet cleaning and an expert about casinos and an expert about finance? I’m not. I’m a marketing person that builds a website. But what I do is make certain that if I’m generating leads in pensions, I’ll make certain that I’m generating leads for someone that’s an independent financial advisor that’s accredited in doing pensions. I will not build a site unless that person will allow me to use their details and put their FCA licence number on there. And every single piece of content that I write, he has to sign it off, because if that content is not right, he’ll get in trouble. So for us it’s hard work, because we’re not just scaling AI content en masse on some of these sites. Every single piece of content has got to get signed off. So we’re using real people. If you pick up the phone, you’re speaking to a professional pension advisor. And if it’s a carpet cleaner, it’s someone that’s had their own business for a dozen years, that’s worked in loads of different jobs — let’s say they’ve done all the carpet cleaning for Marriott Hotels — they’ve loads of pictures of them with their carpet cleaning machine, real pictures, so that when they turn up, they see the same person. It’s just a good user experience. We try not to trick Google. We try to make certain there’s a message match, and that the consumer that comes to our site, if they are buying, gets exactly what they think they are buying, and is speaking to a professional in whatever industry it is.
What moment in time did you think you had something you could scale big?
So, in construction. The company where it first started is a company called Soft Surfaces Limited, based in Wilmslow in South Manchester in Cheshire. And it builds playgrounds, tennis courts, netball courts, basketball courts, 3G football pitches, rugby pitches — all different sports and recreation surfaces and playgrounds throughout the UK. When we first started, we only did playgrounds, and then we realized we could do tennis courts. So we moved into tennis courts, then netball courts, basketball courts. But then they wanted us to do the fencing on the tennis court, and we were like, we don’t do that, we do the surfacing, but we can find a contractor that does it. So when we found the contractor, he was asking, could you get us more work? So then what started to happen — and I call it shouldering niches or neighbouring niches — we built a website out for tennis court fencing. Then some of them wanted floodlighting, so we built one out for floodlighting. And then some of them just wanted the fencing, they didn’t want a tennis court. So at that point I thought, I need to monetize these in some way. So I started saying, look, if you can add us 200 quid on top of your job and give us a kickback, you go and win it, happy days.
And then Soft Surfaces grew — it does about 8.5 million a year now, and we don’t really want to grow it much more than that. But it was only at 600,000 a year. We’ve grown it ridiculous amounts over the last 13 years, more than 10x. But then we started to realize we’re making more money on selling the leads — for tennis court fencing, for floodlighting, for landscaping, for tarmac surfacing. And then it led on to people saying, oh, can you do car parks, can you do the markings on the car parks, can you do roadways? And because we mainly deal with schools and colleges and universities, they’d say, join one that does roofing, join one that does cladding, join one that does double glazing windows. So we just started evolving from there. If a roofer came to us, we’d go, right, okay, let’s build a site for flat roofing, biodiverse roofing, heritage roofing, slate roofing, pitched roofing — I didn’t realise how many different types of roofing leads you can generate. So that’s how it evolved. We never set out to do it, it just evolved that way. What I would recommend if someone wants to get into the lead generation market is stay close to what you do. Say you do SEO and you want to do a full package SEO — maybe get into content writing, link building, digital PR, other things that all circle around what SEO is. And now the lead generation has overtaken what the construction does, and I only spend maybe one or two hours a month on the Soft Surfaces side. We’ve got great staff in there now, and they’re able to maintain where it’s at, which is eight to nine million a year.
How do you spot niche industries to go into when the SEO tools don’t give you the data?
Say roofing, for example. You create a roofing site and go, oh yeah, I do roofing leads. But when you start digging deeper, it’s like someone says to you, you do SEO — but if you open the book of what SEO is, there’s a million different things within SEO. When I just thought roofing was roofing, and then you start to uncover it, you’re like, wow, there’s so many different elements. A good example was a plumber. He was paying us about 500 a month. And then one month he gives us a few grand. And I said, what’s that for? He said, oh, we’re just in a wet room. I didn’t even know he did wet rooms. He said, yeah, of course we do wet rooms, wet rooms are way better than shower rooms. I said why? He said, because generally speaking a shower room is what you have in a house, a wet room is what commercial properties like gyms are willing to pay more money for. I said, you’ve never told me this before. And his response was, you’ve never asked. And then when you go even one step further — not every wet room supplier can do disabled wet rooms because of DDA compliance, the door needs to be a little bit wider, you need the pull cords, you need an electrician to come and put the pull cord in. So when you go down the route of plumber, to wet rooms, to disabled wet rooms, you’re going really micro niche, but there’s good money there. And yes, Ahrefs and Semrush, your generic keyword tools, can’t find you that information. That’s where you do need to speak to the client and understand what it is that makes them the money. From one company to the next — a boiler company — you speak to one and they might be obsessed with just doing new boilers, but this company over here might make more profit by just repairing and servicing existing boilers. It’s knowing how their business model is set up to see what works better. So the traditional keyword research can’t be done for stuff like this. You’ve just got to be savvy and good at business and understand what elements make them the money.
Why did you move from selling leads over to the rank and rent business model?
Some still do lead generation. But my issue is, when you scale a business as big as what it is now — and this is no disrespect to anyone listening that’s a client — generally speaking, clients and customers are nightmares. They want to know not only what you’re doing, but why you’re doing it and how you’re doing it. And the minute they’re paying for a lead, they feel like the employer. So they start ringing you up: every single lead that comes through, if they don’t answer it, they say, James, I just had a lead there from Clive and he didn’t answer, so I’m not paying for it, and put the phone down. Or, I just had a lead and it says Donald Duck, I’m not paying for it. I’ve just had a lead and it says Mickey Mouse, I’m not paying for it. Online, sometimes you get fake leads, so you’re having to put a management system in place — you can’t just charge per lead, it’s got to be per lead that they’re happy to pay for. And some of them go, I spoke to these for 15 seconds but they weren’t interested, should they pay, should they not pay? And it’s an argument. So it’s easier at times, once they’ve worked with you for a while — normally, if they were paying 3,000 a month on leads from us, we’ll make it 2,000 a month as a rank and rent. So it’s cheaper for them, but I don’t need my staff checking every single lead, listening to the calls to see whether it was a qualified lead, having those arguments. And it’s predictable monthly recurring revenue for a business, which is key, which then allows us to know how much we can spend to keep growing that site. Cashflow is king for a business. So when we can have a predictable workflow of what we’re getting in, that’s why sometimes we change it over to a rank and rent model — not all the time, but the majority of the time. And the clients love it, and we love it because we don’t need to manage it as much.
Have you ever thought about taking a percentage of the sale value from the leads you generate?
We normally start by doing that. But the only issue with that, Mark, is you’ve a hundred percent got to trust the client, because that client could do a conservatory and charge it out at 12 grand — how do I know what their expenses are for that 12,000? They could turn around and go, we only made 500 quid on that job, so I’m only going to pay you 50 percent of the profit, 250 quid, where realistically they might’ve made three grand and could have paid you 1,500 quid. A lot of people within business want to feel like they’ve got a deal, so every time they’ve converted a job, they want to chip you down that little bit. I don’t like that model, because there are more conversations to be had with the client all the time about how much we’re going to get paid. For some clients it works well — normally when we first start with a client, we’ll do it on that model, because it’s a no-brainer for them: they don’t pay for the website, they don’t pay for the content, they don’t pay for the leads, all they pay for is a commission when they’ve converted a job and been paid. So it’s great for them, but for us, in time, we’d prefer to move to a pay-per-lead model, or ideally to a rank and rent.
If someone new wants to get into affiliate marketing, lead generation or rank and rent, what should they be mindful of?
First and foremost, they need to be good at SEO, because if they’re not good at SEO, it doesn’t matter whether you do SEO affiliate, display ads, rank and rent or lead generation — if you can’t rank, there’s no such thing as a rank and rent model, because no one’s going to rent a site that doesn’t rank. And I hate it when people say fake it before you make it, because that’s just scamming people. This whole fake it before you make it, go and win some clients and charge them a grand a month and use their money to learn on the job — I think it’s pathetic. So I’d recommend someone go and get a job within an agency and learn how to rank sites at an established company, or don’t do SEO until you’ve got some money — go and work 12 hours a day, seven days a week stacking shelves, save up money, and go and get a consultation call with someone who knows what they’re doing. You’ll learn more in that one hour than you would otherwise. And in my opinion, don’t leave a full time job until you’re earning double what you’re earning in your full time job in SEO, because you could quickly lose what you’re earning in SEO overnight with an algorithm update. People think, oh, I’ve been working nine till five, four days a week, and I’ve got a laptop lifestyle. No — for six, seven years, I worked 12 hours, 14 hours a day, seven days a week before I had kids. I don’t think anyone would beat me on a work treadmill. I’d easily do 90 hours a week. All these people doing 35, 40 hours a week — you want to be where I am, but not put the time and the effort in. It’s like saying I want to be a body builder, but they’re not going to the gym. It’s hard work. Some people want me to say there’s a magic pill or a push button. No, it’s difficult. Start off niche — if you’re doing lead generation, go and find five local companies in one town and just do lead generation there. Be an expert at lead generation in one place. You could build up to 10 grand a month in certain industries just in 10 different niches in one town. Don’t think too big, just take baby steps. And go to local meetups — a local WordPress meetup, a local search event — keep learning, because every day is a school day.
Is there anything else the audience needs to know?
Just that it is a little bit harder than what people think. People are going to try to jump ship now from affiliate to rank and rent thinking it’s going to be easier. It’s not easy. You still need a sales team to deal with the clients. Nothing’s easy. The biggest thing that people need to work on within themselves is — you’re going to fail, and you’re going to fail miserably at times. How quickly can you recover without feeling sorry for yourself? Because it’s going to happen, and there’s going to be another algorithm update, and people are going to get hit. How quickly can you bounce back from those failures? That’s the best attribute to have. All the rest of the learning will come to you if you get that bounce-back ability. And you need to keep working on it, because every day is a school day. It’s a never-ending industry, it’s always moving all the time. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, so to say.
Where can people find you, and what conversations would you like to have?
I’m open for all positive conversations. I hate the negativity within certain people — I want it always to be a positive kind of conversation. I’ve got jamesdooley.com, which shows a little bit about what I’ve done and has all my social media profiles on there. So I’m on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and I’m starting to be a little bit more active on YouTube now. I’m trying to build out a personal brand — not a massive one, but I feel with the advancements of AI, a personal brand is needed online. So I’m trying to get my name out there a little bit more, trying to elevate others and help others along the way as best I can, and enjoy the journey as well.
Connect with James Dooley
- Website: jamesdooley.com
- Agency: PromoSEO
- FatRank: fatrank.com
- Searcharoo: searcharoo.com
More from the Unscripted SEO Podcast
- Rob Bonham on Running an SEO Agency in the Agentic Age
- Kevin Indig on Becoming a Fortune 500 Growth Advisor
- Adrian Nikolov on Organic Growth Engineering
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The Unscripted SEO Podcast is produced by SEO Arcade. If you want expert interviews working as an SEO and link-building engine for your brand, explore podcast-powered link building or book a call with Jeremy Rivera.
