James Dooley: There certain industries you can make 100% ROI like literally within 12 months you've got your money back and then you've got a rental property for three four 5,000 a month the R&D team are consistently breaking the ceiling pushing the boundaries of how far they can build links how aggressively they can build links especially Live casino industry you couldn't be earning three four 500,000 a month on a site that doesn't look like it's even doing that much what do you think everyone is doing wrong with their link building they are obsessed with thinking that relevant traffic in DR is the Holy Grail of Link building if you had a brand new site what are the three main things the three first things that you're doing to the site the minute you create your first article as long as loosely relevant to where it was you're going to start getting traffic pretty much from day one all right James well thanks so much for uh for taking the time to join me on uh on my channel today so first of all I have a little story um so we both attended the the Birmingham conference the one Charles set up sets up and um so I was doing this the little little vlog right where I basically was talking to people trying to get as many SEO nuggets as possible from all the all the big guys that were there and absolutely everybody was saying that I had to one speak to Mads to Mad Singers um because he has a specific way of solving problems and he's his business in in his own way and then number two I had to speak to you because you're probably everyone was saying that you're probably one of the most successful SEOs that that they'd been around and uh so it's really cool that to have you on the podcast yeah how are you doing today where are you based right now actually based in Manchester do quite a lot of traveling but generally base out of Manchester in England and then travel like one two weeks here and there so just came back a couple of days ago from Turkey there with the family so yeah and then going to Chai month so are you going to Chiang Mai yeah I'm going to Chiang Mai you going okay yeah yeah I'll be there I'll see you there then that's amazing yeah yeah standing so okay so you're involved in an insane amount of businesses different ventures I found a list online I think it was on Fat Rank about all the different things you're doing there's like a bullet list of like 24 things so we can't talk about all those things but I do want to kind of get to the beginning like how did you get started in SEO what was that first success what were you doing before that so prior to that I was a project manager cons surveyor type role in the construction industry um I realized very quickly within the business that we needed a consistent flow of quality inquiries we wasn't getting inbound inquiries at all so it was a struggle um so we started to go out to some lead generation companies we tried to build a website ourself but it wasn't ranking the lead generation companies just sold us leads but there wasn't quality and like quality leads and stuff like that so we always seemed to be almost like using the phrase of like pushing water uphill it was always seemed to be struggling um in getting the right like right amount but then also the right quality of inquiries that we needed so I felt like so many companies was doing it wrong for lead generation there was just more worried about volume as opposed to quality so over the first 18 months um of us first starting out in in internet marketing not just SEO but in pay per click or whatever it was we needed to get our head around how we could generate a volume of inquiries that we could convert and turn into profit um I felt like so many people in the industry was more talking about um impressions and clicks when it came to all how many retweets that they had on on Twitter and stuff like that he just we just we just give it was literally one thing we just cared about it was ROI return on investment how much we put in and how much we got out um how how many times the form was ringing I wasn't really bothered about how many retweets or likes or impressions or clicks or whatever that was it was just literally how many times we formed what the conversion rate was and what we made on the back of that and that's kind of how it started and that's where we we dabbled for the first two or three years in um in everything really whether it was like social media building up groups um doing PPC doing face uh doing SEO and stuff like that so and then we started to realize that actually the most profitable channel was SEO um because once you did start to get the rankings obviously then there's no apart from hosting there's not really that many costs in maintenance in in certain industries obviously in certain industries you need to keep freshness of content going and freshness of back links and stuff like that but we quickly moved into the SEO market and yeah since the end we never really looked back since then um we've obviously a lot of failures and a lot of hurdles along the way but we did a lot of networking and I think like you I think mentioned prior to it is that the R&D team and the testing team and stuff like that was probably our biggest after two three years when we started to make a little bit of money we moved into an R&D and a testing team and that just allowed us to test everything of what was working in the industry at that that present time yeah yeah yeah we're going to talk about that testing team I think it's incredibly interesting that you have that going on um I had uh Kazra Kazra Dash last week on the channel we talked about the recent uh Google updates which we're also going to talk about he was saying that one of your first things was uh I believe it was a rank and rent model where you basically blanketed the first page full of your own websites yeah could you talk to us a little bit about that and what niche that was in so actually the start was just for our own sites it wasn't even about it was just literally we wanted we had ambitions to grow the construction company and build different things out in our own business so we started to realize that if we could rank number one and number two and number three for our key words then happy days and that's kind of how we grew out and then what started to happen then was um we call it like shouldering niches or neighboring niches so who was we winning work for could we get them busier to get us more work with them as well so whether it was like a fencing contractor a groundworker a landscaping company and that's where then the ranking rent model kind of built up from there so it was always in close niches to what we was already in and could we get them busier that got us more work and then from there then it just built out and built out and built out and I'm sure you've heard today we've got over 800 different industries and niches that we're in so it's um it's just we never out to do that initially it just kind of kept growing and growing and growing and when we started return on investment of what we was putting into what we was getting out it was worth us going into every industry that we could think of think of that someone would pay for leads if that makes sense yeah and so that first the first million for for the business was that was that basically that strategy it was the construction company the first million was made in the construction company and then um it just quickly escalated from there then because then obviously the quicker we started to get our clients busy the quicker the more the more business we had but then probably I'd say four years in we started to realize actually we're making more money now on lead generation than we actually was on the construction company and it was and that's when then we turned the whole model around of right let's scale out and we still have the construction company today I mean that that business has grown from in total it was doing 500,000 a year and now that does 8 million a year um in revenue so we don't really want to grow it that much more than that now it's does like playgrounds and sports pitches and artificial grass and stuff like that and we're happy with where that business is at um sometimes you can you can we could probably grow it to about 15 million in revenue but the net profit line wouldn't grow that much more so we kind of happy with where that's at now we sit at a a high barrier to entry and that's kind of our we found that that's that's a perfect point for that business um but obviously then we started to invest in other companies and stuff like that that whether it was like road markings or um doing tack on um sports pitches on fencing and stuff like that so the the growth happened that way and so could you for someone who's a complete beginner could you break down what rank and rent is today that so rank rank and rent is where you um build a website you rank it for the terms that you want to rank it for that it starts to get traffic and inquiries that a company would want those inquiries so and then at that point you speak to him saying basically it's like a lead generation but as opposed to paying per lead they rent the website from you and that's kind of how it works we've now taken it one step further where we try to get exclusivity with companies that we then will build them out in their branding so it's almost like we're building a site for them that we own that we're giving exclusive leads to them and they're happy to do it because if you're a dental practice you're very good at doing implants or um dentures or whatever it is that you do with regards to the teeth you're not good at marketing like you've been trained to that I I can't do what they do but they can't do what I can do if you get what I mean so kind of works hand in hand where we completely eliminate risk to the to the clients um we charge them nothing for the content nothing for the back links nothing for like building out topical authority building the site out doing the images doing the videos we do everything we possibly can to make certain we're ranking across all platforms that it's Google Images video Google videos YouTube um going on Pinterest Twitter Facebook everything we want every traffic source we can think of and then once they once they're happy with the inquiries that they get and we'll we'll set up they might say we're happy to rent it out at 1,500 a month and we might agree with that figure and then they're happy we're happy they're generating inquiries they're making a return on investment and we're happy to to rent it out at that at that price is it always a a monthly thing or do you guys ever take equity in the company or like a percentage of revenue or so that's a great question it's um every single niche is different um so we we have a sales team as well that deals with this um it deals with this and I get asked this question so many times of what's the best model is it um being an agency and just charging them for content and back links is it doing lead generation and charging them per lead is it doing lead generation and asking them for a kickback on a back end or is it doing a rank and rent model and from industry to industry and it matters how good the client is it completely depends and I know that's a bad answer to give but it's it's not a one size fits all so normally we'll enter it that we'll do it on a lead generation where we say don't pay us anything if you convert an inquiry pay us a finder's fee and that's the kind of model of uh how it works then what starts to happen is or after six months 12 months they then just start to get into we want kind of a fixed rate because it allows us then to know exactly what we're getting on a return on investment on that website and how much we can spend on that website um and then they they want the a lot of times 12 months on the line they just want a fixed rate so they don't have to start micromanaging every single lead and how much profit they've made and what kickbacks to give us so in time the rank and rent model seems to work the best but to start with you can't go out and do a right you can't go out to a new client and say do you want to rent this site for a thousand pound a month because they don't know how many leads you're generate in and what quality the leads are so you kind of have to test the model out they've got to test the model out and then once both both parties are happy then that at that point you can do the the ranking rent model yeah yeah it's funny because I started so when I started in the SEO space which was around eight years ago I started with the same model so I was uh in school in at Vancouver at that time in Canada and I created a fake dentist website kind of just testing learning things online ranked it and then ended up contacting um the top 30 40 dentists saying like hey I have all these leads can I sell them to you the issue that I was having is that most people like didn't believe that well I think well there was one guy who tried to sue me he was like oh you're pretending to be a dentist online what are you doing this is kind of sketchy and uh most people just didn't believe that I was getting those leads right how do you how do you convince the client or how do you come across in a way that's like you've built something and you're ranking it and it's it's a real thing but you're not scamming people right so I mean probably the easiest way to start with is if you choose a certain industry that you want to get into you can build like a directory for that industry so what you can start to do is not not faking it to say oh this is who I am and you might not be then and faking addresses and all the rest of it we kind of don't go down that road because Google are very clever and very savvy um people who are doing like mass GMBs or Google Business profiles and they're all getting suspended all the time and I just didn't like that model of trying to fake it because obviously not only that if you start putting like fake accounts online and stuff like that or fake information and and some people like um editing with Photoshop like um certain bank statements and all sorts of proof of address that's fraud so you're going to you're going to get in trouble so we we we generally do like the um the directory type listing site where we'll just list here the best 10 plumbers in this area and then on on the site there might be ads kind of displayed on there and then once the lead start to come through like because on that site we'll have call to action saying if you want if you want us to give you the best plumber for wet rooms or whatever what it is a leak or whatever they're looking for the lead start coming through there we give them to the plumbers and then normally at that point they start to have a bit of a trust once they've had maybe 20 inquiries they start to trust us that the leads aren't spam they're not being sent to 10 other companies and at that point once they start having that little bit of trust in you they then start to ask more questions like how can you help us with our website and then we do help them with our website as well like we I've got an agency that does content and back links called Searcher so we can help them on their website but a lot of the time we say look if you if you legitimately want to rank for this term it's going to cost you 40 50 thousand and they're not willing to put that 40 50,000 in because we might not rank it for those terms like you can't guarantee SEO so they'll say well all right I'll I'll pay 50,000 if you can guarantee it and you're like well nobody can guarantee anything in SEO so then at that point they they see it as being too much of a risk and then at that point then we say well we'll build you a website and and I'll I'll happily pay 50,000 if you think you can convert the inquiries I'll build your website that I'll pay for you just rent it out and then at that point they say yes and if we can build it bigger than what we kind of planned on doing which we can do obviously just need more content and more back links at that point we might be able to rent that out for 3,000 a month so if I going put £50,000 into a house there's no chance I'm even getting 1,000 pound a month never mind £3,000 a month so the digital real estate and like some people say what should job role and I say I'm a digital landlord like because that's kind of what I'm doing I'm building up real estate online and renting it out and and that's kind of the role of how how we do it and and the return on investment still to this day is is unbelievable you there's certain industries you can make 100% ROI like literally within 12 months you've got your money back and then you've got a rental property for three four 5,000 pound a month so it's a great model but they they don't want to put that money in to start with so you're taking the risk but we're taking the risk because we know we're good at what we do now so many people say oh I want to get started in what you do and it's it's not an easy thing you need to learn SEO to start with you need to know how to rank websites there it's took it's took us six or seven years to get good at what we did and in the last five years at that point we've scaled it massively and we've got the right systems processes and stuff in place that's allowed us to scale it out for a new person who's getting into SEO I would recommend I'd highly recommend going working in an agency to start with um just just you need to get good at SEO you can't just you've got to learn the trade and learn what good quality content is what good quality back links is what good silo structure is what good how to build a technically decent site before you can start everyone tries to run before they come walk and you just got to get the b the core fundamentals correct to start with damn that's crazy okay and so what are you currently doing today how many projects are you involved with if I don't even know yeah how many projects are you involved with and what what does your day to day look like I think that's also really um day day to day is get up about five o'clock in the morning um okay we go straight into the office then um so a lot of staff don't start till about nine o'clock 8 o'clock maybe so that allows me to get like three hours in in the morning like not being distracted at all three hours of flow state doing whatever I need to do I'm I'm not running I don't I don't have any day-to-day tasks that I need to do um it's all just making certain that existing business partners are happy making certain that like the middle managers are happy in what they're doing just just the direction of the business of I'm being honest like I'm kind of working on the business as opposed to inside of the business so that's kind of the role and then once the staff come in um we've got 12 in Williams law in South Manchester and they're all my directors of the of different companies of what we have um each one of them are allowed up to 10 VAs per person some might only have six or seven um and then a lot of time then a lot of my staff or directors who initially started out as being let's say an apprentice they normally end up becoming my business partner so they might be really good in a certain aspect of what they do and then I build a kind of a business around that person um and and that's kind of how we now started to build out a lot of the service-based type um businesses what we have so we've got we've invested in autoblogging doai which is a a product for AI content yeah we invested in Searcher which is a content and link building agency um we created a brand called Eat SEO um just to we needed it ourself like we was buying a lot of websites and the eat wasn't good enough and was like let's just get a system and process set up so it's very easy for me to buy a website plug it into that business and two weeks later I know that all the eat kind of foundations are set up correctly I then started to hit a few problems with um uh link penalties so I went out to marketplace and I must have used about 10 11 different companies that did disavows and Rick Lomas was like by far the best like he's he's the Godfather of disavows and at the time he was having going through one or two problems at home with his personal life like his wife had died and stuff so at that point me and Rick teamed up and we set up backlink.do which is a disavow brand um he trained us up on everything to do with back links now I thought I was very advanced at doing bat links until I spoke to Rick Lomas and he just blew me out the water I was thinking that um a high DR traffic and relevance that's it that's all you need and I was thinking I was good at thinking that because I'm going you definitely need relevance and you definitely need traffic with the Dr that that's the holy grail and then he started talking to me about trust and bad link neighborhoods and toxicity I'm I'm not even heard of any I've heard of trust flow within Majestic but the way he started to analyze what a good link and a bad and a bad link was I was like wow like I know nothing about this so then I wanted to dig deeper because I knew that not only will the disavo company help me a lot on if I get a link penalty but if I can understand properly what a good bat link and a bad bat link is I'm going to save a fortune so we then integrated that into the Searcher database so I think in total we had I I don't know the exact numbers but I remember we deleted 35% of the database in Searcher because there was toxic links so we've got I think it's something like over 100,000 domains that are toxic and and I don't mean to bad mouth any other link agencies because some like I'm not even mentioning any others but some of these others are you're paying two three 400 a link and these people are building you toxic links yeah we know who they are we know who they are and it's it's horrible to see um yeah it's not it's not nice at all uh and it's kind of I suppose they've got to learn the hard way but sometimes they're not going to know if they don't even know what trust and toxicity means they're not going to know and they're just going to keep going ahead with buying these toxic links and it's like I said it's sad to see nowadays but that's kind of the way the world it seems to be okay I do also want to talk about this testing team that you've set up so first of all how did that come about how big is this team what type of things are you guys mythbusting I know you probably can't talk about everything but any crazy thing that you can maybe share uh that people think is just a massive myth so the team came about because I was I was so annoyed with when I first started out in SEO I was so annoyed with listening to a one hour video that give me maybe two three minutes of a knowledge bomb and 57 minutes of them explaining who they are and then them trying to sell me something and and that's kind of what all the videos used to be like there was no there was no packed value it was just them trying to sell you something or them trying to prove that they're the best SEO in the world and a lot of times I was listening to all these I must have listened to thousands of hours worth of training and stuff like that and and I was doing exactly to the blueprint of what they was asking me to do and it wasn't working and at that point I was like there's something fundamentally not right here and then when we started to scale because I'm quite aggressive in the way that I want to scale out we was getting link penalties and people were saying disavows don't work and we was like well I don't minute I've done some disavows and they have worked so with regards to like when eat first came out a couple years ago I thought this is a load of rubbish this is just a load of rubbish there's no such thing as eat it's just a a pitch that people are trying to do I know Google came out with it I just thought they was trying to do smoke and mirrors so but then we started to get off of transparency penalties so I was like what what what even is this so then it it's a manual penalty a manual penalty in Google search console so then we quickly started to realize oh this is a thing so the the R&D team are consistently breaking the system pushing the boundaries of how far they can build links how a aggressively they can build links what type of links that they can build how aggressively can we build articles can we build 500 articles a day on a website and what will that do will it will it consistently grow or will it grow and then fall off a cliff um how many links can we build with the amount of content velocity that we do so we just trying to break everything to see the boundaries and see how far we can push because I had a great mentor when I was younger and they always said that no successful person ever did anything in the comfort zone and and I've taken that kind of philosophy and moved into SEO how far can I push it like because so many people think that oh they can only build links let's say to here when actually you can build it to there now there might be a penalty but there works out nicely so I'm going to be building double the amount of links today than them and I'm pretty certain that I'm not going to get myself in in a penalty so it's just little things how far can you push exact match anchors because exact match anchors work really really well even to this day work really well but if you over optimize it it's one of the first things that cause you to get a penalty so it's just little thresholds of knowing how far you can push certain things um and yes over the years we've we've we've learned so much with what you can and can't do yeah it's a massive advantage also having just that data just at your fingertips and what's what's the size of that team um these well I think I say I always say there's nine I think there's about 40 from being honest but there's nine physically inhouse employed but some of them have like two or three that are consistently running tests on different sites so like some of them might be scaling um the 500 blog post let's say per per day on a site and how far does that push some people are pushing like um physical silos reverse silos um how much internal link and anchors that you can get away with um anchor text ratios from from an external backlink point of view um can you get away with building out sites with with no eat signals and kind of on that we got to a point where it was just like just do things like a real business would do like don't don't cut corners just even if it is slightly overkilled just do everything right to start with get your branded anchors get your naked URL anchors get your generic anchors like all pretty much to the homepage initially to build that up um just start off in like your traffic tiers so going after some easier terms to get some traffic coming through to your site and building it up I think like I think Daniel Carter called it the SEO avalanche approach um and just building it up and building up and building up and doing stuff steadily now the testing team don't do that but that's kind of what we do on our money sites uh and it because we always want to make certain that that Google can't change the dials at any point so what we don't want to do is if there is what you can do if we're here and they test the dial and move it to there well we're going to have a load of sites that have been hit and stuff like that and and sometimes you don't need a thousand referring domains on a on a local rank and rent website you might only need 200 referring domains and that's good enough you might only need 60 kind of blog posts and and that's more than enough in that industry but then obviously you're in the finance industry you might need 5,000 referring and 3,000 blog posts so it's just trying to work out um exactly what what needs to be done and try to do it in the most efficient way yeah incredible yeah um what what have you seen as the industry that has the greatest ROI in terms of just ROI I guess Jimmy what types or whether it's affiliate e-commerce SaaS no I I think more than that just is it the finance is it is it tech is it all right okay so what in so industries so um the local the local rank and rents don't get you a lot of money they might earn you up to maybe maximum 5,000 pound a month um because a lot of time you hit a threshold you can't earn more than that but a lot of time you hit a threshold with the type of company that you're dealing with right they don't want to kind of grow much more than that because it becomes a headache for them more vans on the road and stuff like that so the rank and rent model there's a lot of different industries to go into but they're all relatively small in revenue per per industry the I gaming industry like slots bingo casino especially live casino betting and stuff like that that's very lucrative um so the especially live casino industry you couldn't be earning three four 500,000 pound a month on a site that doesn't look like it's even doing that much um because the player value of the of the live casino players is huge the um so that that's a good industry the casino market's always stood as well and done done as well over the years the finance market in certain industries is very good um we actually own a call center so we on the on the finance side our problem was we was generating too many inquiries for let's say mortgage brokers who might have already been on the phone so then we've kind of moved that into a call center now that we own so we've got over 100 staff in a call center in Manchester Jesus so all that goes into there and they become a sales generation as opposed to a lead generation but we get depending on the within the finance sector whether it's pensions or equity release or loans or what it's like bridging loans equity um invoice factoring and stuff like that depends on whether we get anything from six to 10x more for a hot lead than we do for a for a web lead so some of them we might only get paid a1 pound for a lead let's say for invoice factoring but we'd get paid 6,000 pound a lead if it was a hot lead where we've taken the information done a flat find on them the they're doing over a million in revenue right and then when we send that on to the invoice factoring company they'll pay us a 6,000 pound still not even converted just just for a hot lead um so the finance has done well as well over the years um and then I mean there's so many different ways when we when we come to these networking events I I see certain people in niches that I've never even heard of like like some cream industries and stuff like that and and you're like wow you're making 100,000 pound a month and just in the cream industry and they're like yeah and there's some like acne cream and stuff like that then there's others that are making a lot in SaaS products and stuff like like the um the AI um industry at present that's probably one of the most lucrative industries that they are I think like the the net profit margins on them are normally above 80% in net profit so it's ridiculous kind of yeah like how much you can earn and stuff like that so I feel like there's so many different industries you can enter um one thing I would say to you is some people kind of say follow your passion follow what you like I that i' completely disagree like I know you're doing it on a day in day out basis so you kind of got to have you don't you can't consistently be writing about let's say we what another big one for us is funeral directors right okay funeral directors is not a passion of mine at all do you know what I mean but we we realized everybody in the world's going to die at some point and people need a funeral director and for that reason we think it's a lucrative kind of market to say we can do lead generation for it the the funeral directors don't really know what they doing U it's not really an industry you can do a lot of like nice images on or videos on or anything like that because it's a horrible industry but sometimes the industries that aren't nice from that point of view can be Lucrative an industry you know what I mean so sometimes people say oh I'm going to form a passion and do art and design and it's like well everyone does art and design you know what I mean like it's not you're not going to make much money from that like I know another one that makes quite a lot was talk about the career and they do a lot in skin bleaching cream damn now that's not someone's passion do you know what I mean it's um you just got to find certain markets where you feel you can find an angle and you can give something slightly different to what's already there and and properly enter the market and scale it and it can it can work well damn interesting very inspiring you got my head spinning um so what do you consider your greatest SEO success today like what is that one keyword that you ranked that you were like there's no way we got that done maybe you don't have to say the specific keyword but we've got we've got a few where we've ranked for some very very big we've got like we've still got one those this day and and it earns us nearly six figures a month um for the page but it ranks for over a thousand different keywords on the page that are very lucrative they the in the I gaming industry if you can rank for certain keywords in the in especially in the live casino if you can rank for certain terms in there then great A lot of the time it's not really a big like one big key word it's a collective of I don't want a site that's propped up on one really good key word because if if I woke up tomorrow and that key word dropped I'd be devastated do you know what I mean so like we build out a lot of sites that we want to rank for everything get topical coverage for every possible keyword we can do and if anything I try to go after the little ones and build up and build up and build up and build up until I can get the harder ones to be done so along along the way when you're building up your traffic tiers you get to the point that at some point the big keywords are going to pop and they're going to get to number one because the amount of traffic and behavioral signals that your site has you're going to start getting the big terms I don't really chase the big terms to start with I always go after ones that I feel I can win on and then build up from there nice and so when you when you talk about the iGaming industry do you look at it like you're you're building affiliate websites to just refer clients over and you get that um recurring commission or is it you're building online casinos and online uh slot sites so I don't I'm I'm actually business partners with a couple of people that got very very very successful they own the casinos okay and I've never really got into doing the um the actual casino myself I just prefer the affiliate market I go send them a player I get paid 200 pound per player and five% rev share on anything that they lose for the next two three years and it's just that model only they go into it they run the casinos and they do everything they want with regards to like text message campaigns email campaigns to try and keep him um wagering bets or playing the roulette or back jack or blackjack or whatever it is that they want to play online the um like who um I part on search on with he built out 47 online casinos and he he ranked he ranked for nearly every term you can think so he ranked for like online slots slot games online casino casino online every term you can think of which is a big key word Kyle rank for so he he's a great SEO like so he's one which probably goes a little bit under the radar um he doesn't nor like like myself it's only recently now I've started to do a few of these podcasts yeah he um me and him bounce ideas all the time he uses my R&D testing team he always gives me ideas to test certain things out and because we're in some of the toughest niches it's easy for us to keep testing things because there's so many pages or so many sites that aren't yet ranking we say okay let's let's try and move this forward um so yeah he's he owns he owns a lot of the sites himself the casino sites and yeah he does a great job at on that front damn yeah because just from my understanding I mean I'm I'm aware of the the casino feel affiliate niche but actually setting up an online casino the the legality of it the complications with how to get that license and all that I can't even I'm sure it's quite complex a lot like white label type casinos that you can that you shell onto and stuff like that but okay you need a lot of money to go into it as well and I think especially in the UK with UK gambling commission at the moment it's yeah I wouldn't advise it if I'm being honest with you like the U the amount of taxes and stuff like that that's coming in and um it's not really an industry that's thriving at present if I'm being honest with you so it's not really something that that otherwise I would have moved into it and and set up in my own casino site as well because I've already got the affiliate sites that are driving players right right you just don't know where the industry is going to be within the gambling industry at at present with what thresholds that they might put in for like maximum bets that so yeah and so did you given how well you can rank websites and how easy it is for you to do the rank and rent model did you ever consider just starting up let's say you I don't know you rank for a a gardening gardening in London or whatever keyword did you ever consider just setting up your own gardening um business or taking all those leads for yourself again that's a great question so what start up ops is not no initially no like I didn't like it got I've got two kids now so I've got to be very careful with how many businesses I'm kind of get keep getting involved with right but I'm addicted I'm addicted to success I'm addicted to growth and and wanting my team to grow and everything else to grow so the plan was never to get involved in let's say a gardening company um but yes we have ended up doing that and I think I think what started to and and and I'll tell you the reason why this happened a lot of these companies that started to rent our websites started renting them for two three four years and then the owner of the company normally has some like epiphany and like wakes up in the middle of the night and says hold on a minute I built my whole business now on quicksand like I'm 100% reliant on James Dooley providing me those inquiries and at any point he could switch me off tomorrow and they might have grown from two vans on the road to 20 vans on the road and what what you start to realize is um some of these people know start they're almost like scared that I could switch them off so at that point I I created this was about five years ago I created a vision statement to make it very clear that mainly for my staff not for me but we have to do everything with honest trust and integrity to make certain that we don't just if someone does come and offer us 500 pound a month more if we built a site over a stretch of a few years with a company that have grown with us we can't just switch them off like it's just not something that we can do even if somebody decides to pay us a couple of hundred pound more because it's not right and with with power comes great responsibility and I think what starts to happen is some of these owners start to ring me up and want to meet him and they normally end up saying James I want to give you 25 I want to give you 25% of my business I'm like what why and and they're like but I I want you to sign exclusivity that them leads can never go elsewhere you can still on the site but I need something in there because I've got a lot of staff and I've got a lot of people on the road that are working I can't afford to have all if you turn these leads off that's it I'm done and then we're normally coming to some sort of agreement I try not to just go in and okay on 25% I I value the company I'll give him an investment into the company and I'll pay him for the 25% but that 25% that I'll pay into will be for marketing growth further to them we'll take over their website we'll rank their website but now I'm become a shareholder within their business so yes it has ended up growing to be I'm now involved in so many different business real businesses not just online businesses and that's kind of how it grew I didn't I didn't set out to initially do that okay that's crazy um all right switching things up a little bit what do you think everyone is doing wrong with their link building so with link building um good question they are obsessed with DR they are obsessed with um thinking that relevance traffic in DR is the Holy Grail of link building um they don't look at trust they don't look at toxicity they don't look at bad link neighborhoods um they don't realize that every single domain has got a toxicity threshold so and what I mean by that is from one in my casino industry I know that my toxicity threshold is 1,400 right but I I then because we've got like our own link simulator like in in house of where we building certain things up on we then start to realize that certain back link profiles U might have not enough relevant links so them we need some more relevance or not enough trusted links so they need some more trust kind of signals not enough naked URLs or branded type links we need some more citations or we might go and do a press release syndication blast which gets some 300 links but it's mainly just for the diversity of getting a lot of different referring domains and naked URLs that come back to the site mentions of the NAP if they've got an address um and stuff like that maybe embed or embed of an image or an embed of a video as well mentioning the um the offers that's on the page on the back links so that it's not just on the office is not just mentioned on their one website it's also mentioned across the internet has been an expert so that then because people think eat is just unpaid signals but it's actually it's not it's like the Google quality raters have got to start what they'll do is they'll type in your name minus your website to see what other sources on the internet say that that person is an expert in that topic it's not not on your website so if you can start building bat links that's mentioning that you've won awards that you that that this kind of author is an expert that is probably the whole holy grail of bat links in today's world um but people that are not doing it people are still chasing DR traffic and relevance and and thinking that's that's all they need and that's why so many like some people go in the industry a lot of people seem to do affiliate and so many affiliate sites go like that that then they go above the toxicity threshold and then they get hit and then they react to say what do I need to do and it's normally speak normally it's to do with eat problems are they need a disavow because they they've gone too aggressive um there is there is times where people could say well it's about um the quality of content but a lot of the time it's to do with the quality of content they're probably not got there because Google's never ranking it in the first place anyway so a lot of the times it's to do with toxicity of the bat link profile or eat problems and if they can resolve that then go back into the content freshen it up and improve it then normally that's kind of we we we have a website recovery company that's something that Kazura speaks a lot about nowadays um that's something that kind of has made him take that makes him happy he kind of deals with sites that have been hit and he can recover it um and and he's doing he's doing a really good job on it and there's it's not one it's not like all right what is it that Kazura is doing that's amazing it's not one thing he's just he's doing everything right across the board so he's going have you tried that have you tried that have you tried this have you tried that have you tried that have you tried that he's just going through a checklist process I think there 14 14 steps to the website recovery of what he needs to do um and yeah his results are are great at present it's good it's good to see yeah he gave some really good tips uh last week on how to recover a website things that people are doing wrong so yeah yeah he knows a lot okay what about content AI content are you embracing it on your sites I'm sure the 500 blog post today is probably not human written the the 500 blog post today is AI content I I would not use AI for big money pages just just because I feel it needs like from a conversion rate standpoint you need to have that personality to behind it you need to have the persuasive kind of ad copy in there and stuff like that so for money pages we don't personally now that would go some people will say I completely disagree it can be done for money pages and it can be and there's loads of examples of where it has worked but for money for the big money pages I still prefer writing 100% human written okay for supporting documents AI writes it and then we put a human intervention of editing can is there anything that just doesn't sound right is there anything in the introduction that we could improve on to kind of get the loop the hook like hook in to get them to kind of scroll further down the page can we add any more unique because we use like midjourney for images and stuff like that but can we get a nice image put on there can we get a video put on there as well um because we we try holistically to rank everywhere like not just in web search but in like I said in Google Images can share that then on Pinterest and try and get shares on there um share it on Instagram share it on Twitter we want traffic from every possible source that you can um upload the video um to try ranking Google videos YouTube Vimeo everywhere like if we've created a video I want to I want to maximize where it's being kind of distributed to so yes we do embrace AI I think I think everybody needs to embrace AI but we still have the human intervention of on our main money sites now I could show you 50 different websites where we've scaled some sites out to from zero to over 100,000 clicks a month that are absolutely crushing it just 100% on AI in our testing kind of bed so I might if you ask me again in six months time I might change my tune a little bit as as GPT-4 moves to GPT-5 or whatever it's going to be and yeah I could we I could the open AI is only going to get better so yes I could have better prompts in place for sales copy but at present money pages humans blog like supporting documents AI but but still edited interesting okay and have you felt or I guess the collection of websites that you have have you seen any crazy um impact from the recent algorithm updates or because you focus so hard on eat you haven't yeah I mean I've had two we've probably got around 30 what I'd say big sites like big big sites and two of those sites have been hit like hard right okay and they've got all the E eat signals they've not got like a toxic backlink profile this is to do with content right the latest update is to do with the helpful content update is like and you know what I feel it's the most bizarre update I've ever seen and and and I feel they have to roll it back like I know the saying that they're not doing yeah right but then I've got like this is a complete utter myth right a complete utter myth right but Google realized now that and this is so it's just like my own opinion not me but it's my own opinion about something okay Google have realized that everyone knows become obsessed with correlated content right so I feel that Google have just put more wild cards in and say right okay here's the best two affiliate sites for that product these are the top eight that are ranking three four five six seven eight nine 10 we've already got that content because the number three slot is just written it in Surfer or Market Muse or phrase or page optimizer pro and it's using the same list of 10 TVs saying the same thing probably even listed in the same order because it's it's ordered by what pays the highest commission we don't need results three four five six seven 8 nine 10 because we've already got position one and two that have got that information so I feel like they've kind of gone if this content it's almost like the reverse that if this content is too similar to the ones that are ranking in positions one and two we're now going to get rid of it and and and that's where like Reddit and Quora and all these other sites have just kind of jumped in because it's completely different to what is ranking in positions one and two and they kind of gone and done something with the dialling of being we can't have any pages that are very similar we can only have 20% of the pages on page one that are similar and then we need to mix it up and I feel like they've gone down the road of they've created something within the algorithm that's messed around with with this and so many sites have been hit I'm looking at it and going you've got good quality content you've got topical authority and you've got a good backlink profile and so I'm I'm slightly confused in some in some industries some industries I can see why some of them have been here but some of them I'm like I'm still learning I'm still like we still the R&D testing team have never been busy with all the life because now they're having to go back to every single test of what they've done to say what is wrong with this and we've got got we must have 150 different what I would class as being big SEOs in the industry big affiliate marketers that are doing well over £100,000 pound a month or was doing over £100,000 pound a month that have come to us and so and some it's just difficult to find what the problem is like some it's really clear as day but some it's like surely they've got to roll us back because on on the reverse where I say two's been hit I've got like probably 50 other sites that was probably only doing five 10 grand a month right and some of them have jumped to 50 grand a month and I'm like I've not touched them for three years they should not they should not have jumped up so I'm like it's not just that we've been hit and they're going oh it's because you're not doing things right I've got other sites here that haven't been updated in three years they're out of date content and it's jumped to number one for certain terms and I'm thinking my over sight over here is way better than that and this one's jumped in and shouldn't be there so it's a very it's the strangest update I've ever come across in the last it's very bizarre the update but yeah what do you think are the chances of they roll back I don't I think I think I think they might have to like I don't know there certain especially in some of the some of these some of the results I'm seeing like there was like some Quora pages that yeah no one had done a new answer since 2018 yeah and it was technology related blog and no one's updated it since 2018 and you're like you're telling me that that's the best that that's the best answer for this like no chance so yeah we'll see we have to see I I think the user met I think user behavioral signals are going to come back in and rejig and start sorting sorting out but yeah we'll just have to if if it doesn't we just have to adapt and see how you can do some sort of like forum based type articles on or discussions about which one is the best TV they might not like one or for saying is the best 10 TVs they might want a balanced opinion of different people's opinions of of stuff if that makes sense yeah yeah let's see let's see how that develops okay moving forward here if you had a brand new site what are the three main things the three first things that you're doing to the site building it make certain I've just ticking all the boxes for just get an address get a telephone number get an email address just just get the core basics there's no there's no money involved in doing that there's no like it's just just do what a real business would do get a Twitter account get a Facebook account maybe get a Pinterest account something like that get a YouTube channel just to have them links put on there get the the um the core basics in the footer just just get that set up then go and build maybe 50 pages um if you want to do AI do AI if you want to write it yourself write it yourself um but try to go after low keyword difficulty so try to start having certain pages that you think you can get top five rankings on so ideally keyword difficulty from one to five um that's kind I'd go down that road and then just branded naked URL links to the homepage maybe start off with like citations um forum links just very the the majority going with no follow backlinks they're not going to be powerful they're not going to get your DR up to DR40 or anything like that they just going to get the foundations right and then from there then hopefully you might be able to start earning it might start earning 30 40 50 pound a month just keep then growing it and growing it and do the article velocity and link velocity I don't feel like if you want to rank a site long term don't just think you need the rankings within two weeks certain industries you can rank within 20 24 hours right but they're normally local and they're not going to make you a fortune so like you've got to have kind of a 12 month plan you probably got to have a five to 10 grand budget realistically like it's so many people say if you got 1,000 pound to spend what would you do I'd say go and get a job and save up some more money because like do you know what I mean it's like what car would you buy for 1,000 pound well you're gonna have to buy an old car that's not that good that's probably going to break down you know mean like well I need to get one that's really nice I'm like well you've only got 1,000 budget like it's just save some money up go and learn SEO by helping other companies out work all the time to save up until you've got 10,000 bound but then just do things correctly and build it up slowly all the time love it yeah great answer okay let's do a kind of like a twofer answer if you had to start over today from scratch no money yeah what where would you what would you what Niche what industry how would you what type of business would you would you pick um inside of SEO or not I guess maybe you could also do not SEO um and then if you had 20K capital so the difference between those two right okay um if I was to start off with no capital I would go local SEO okay um I'd go into certain industries where let's say a a brick layer or a roofer um so I went down the roofing kind of idea I'd go and I'd go to like checkatrade or Yell and see who's paying off PPC so he was paying at present for PPC and I go and contact them saying I can start generating some leads what area are you working in and I'd try and get 50 locations and I'd build a 50 page location site around where they work for roofers in Leicester roofers in oh it's New York but all the little suburbs around New York um and you can probably get a site that might be earning you 2300 pound a month um you don't really need that much in bat links apart from citations I'd probably then at that point I'd probably ask them could we use their address to create a GMB and try and get the GMB ranking as well just just to start off with I don't normally do it now because it's it's I feel like it's it's hard to replicate and grow out and manage so many different um GMB profiles so that's the kind of route that I do with no budget if I had a 20,000 pound budget I would buy a domain probably from Ahrefs from Alex Drew ODI the reason for that is it's like you've got um an head start you've already got a site that might have 2,000 referring demands might already be a DR40 I'd go in I'd research I'd find like what I want to go into um and let's say it was so in the US there is I would go into appliance repair so I'd go into like dishwasher repair washing machine repair I'd go into all do all that and I try and scale out that to do repairs of appliances but then what I'd also do is because there's quite a lot of search volume in like washing machine repair in the location I'd put display ads on there so it might have to start off as being um Ezoic or ad thrive or AdSense but once you built it up to a decent size you could put Mediavine on which normally pay a little bit more I try and build it up to try and get enough traffic to put Mediavine on so I'm earning from display ads I try to be selling leads for appliance repair to companies who can go and fix it and also build out affiliate pages on there for like best washing machines because if they're going and look for washing washing machine repair I'd say you can have a call a for £195 for someone to come and fix it but why is buy a new one it's going to cost you nearly the same price and then had internal link through to the best washing machines so I'm getting paid by affiliate I'm getting paid by lead gen I'm getting paid by display ads you could even then in time once he starts getting enough volume you could then start having on the um affiliate page like certain banner ads for extended warranty and you sell like um insurance on there as well extended warranty you get paid I think it's something like £250 or something like that someone signs up to an extended warranty for product insurance so you've got lots of different ways of monetizing the site um and that's kind of how I do it with a with a thing but I definitely start it on a on an aged domain that's got referring demands and some sort of power because the minute you create your first article as long as it's loosely relevant to where it was you're going to start getting traffic pretty much from day one well bomb knowledge bomb golden nuggets I love it um all right last few questions here so the future of SEO SGE what are you thinking you still bullish yes in certain industries I think certain industries who built out a lot of informational type websites programmatic type SEO websites I think they're going to struggle because I think SGE is going to take over and give them the answers that's then not going to get their website to get the clicks anymore so I think certain for for sure certain websites are going to be decimated with traffic like what we used to get a lot of traffic and probably made money by display ads top of the funnel type keywords I think they're going to get hit hard I think the bottom of the funnel stuff they're still going to get a lot of the clicks um if you think of it this way right so here's something back to you Google are business and they're make money by two different ways right prob more than that but two main ways per per click but people forget they make a lot of money from AdSense from display ads so if they do not give the clicks through to websites they're not going to get paid on the ads that's on the sites and they make a lot of money from that so they're not going to nick all the clicks all what they're trying to do and I think it's quite clever if I'm being honest with you and those won't like me saying this they're trying to get the user from the top the funnel question that no one's willing to pay for PPC on on these terms they're trying to give them the answer and then give them the next question to move them down the funnel until they get enough down the funnel that then someone's willing to pay for for for ads on them so what they're trying to do is fast track these people from top of the funnel to bottom of the funnel bottom of the funnel Google gets paid on ads and that and that's what I think they're trying to do as they're not going to say that they're going to say it's all about the user but in a way it kind of is about the user they they're trying to get them to give the answers as quickly as possible to get to the next question to get to the next question to get to the next question to then be ready in the buying cycle or whatever it is they wanting to do to get to a keyw that then can start showing the the ads to so that's kind you've just got to try to work out what's going to get decimated and what's not um right yeah yeah and to be fair I think that for a lot of these hyper informational queries the the experience is probably even better it's just yeah you don't have you don't have to read six paragraphs to get to that to that answer right cool I do want to talk about a little bit not related to to SEO but your horse racing business what's what's going on there how when did that start how did that come it started about um four years ago we I had like five or six really good years in business obviously like once wanted to make certain I sorted my family out sorted my that I'm mortgage free that I'm financially free for the rest of my life and kind of when I got to that point my mom my mom had retired and I wanted to do something that me my two older brothers and my mom we all love and the one thing that we all loved was horse racing so like I like football my brother likes football but my other brother likes tennis so it was like one thing that we all enjoyed and I've always enjoyed is go going not just the this specific racing everything around the racing like the the my mom can get dressed up and look really nice and she can go to the races and stuff like that and the whole going stopping in a nice hotel nearby to the race course and you just make a full weekend of it so we got into basically we bought a horse um then we bought a second horse and a third horse and we've built it out now we've got 14 race horses we've we've had a lot of success from it we didn't do it specifically for we didn't do it for profits we didn't do it for for we didn't really do it I'm not saying we didn't do it for the success obviously we wanted to have winners but we we did it for the fun and love for the sport and they it's it's given us so many amazing memories um it brings me my two brothers and my mom together and all the rest of the family as well we've been to Qatar Dubai Hong Kong we've travelled all the world with the horses we've had winners everywhere and yeah it's been it's been a great success it's been a lot of fun that's insane and it's all from from SEO it's it's it's incredible dude well James listen I really appreciate this podcast so many knowledge bombs so so good um where can people find you where yeah I'm on all social media network so I'm actually starting being a little bit more I'm posting quite a bit more now on like Twitter on Instagram and on Facebook and stuff like that so probably say Twitter James Dooley or Instagram I think it's James zeddy if you go to James d.com that's got all the social media accounts and stuff like that on there that's probably the best way to start off on james d.com sounds good any YouTube channel coming in the future yeah I've got YouTube channel on there again that's on on the James d.com so I think I think it's just James D it might be James D SEO or James Dooley um yeah that that that's going to start having YouTube shorts put on there and stuff amazing yeah that'll be good that'll be good I I need some help from you I love no you you don't need any help from me dude you're doing phenomenal tell you what I can talk about like the editing and stuff like that no chance I'm gonna need well you just you just let me know I'm there I'm there for you I appreciate it thanks about it yeah yeah sounds good thanks so much James good good seeing you anyway see you cheers
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