Local Lead Generation 2026 - James Dooley Discusses with Mike Martin

James Dooley: Local lead generation. Today I am joined with Mike Martin, the founder of Magic Page, the founder of GBP Optimizer, Lead Simplify, and several other SaaS tools. He has been in the industry for a long time. I have got a lot of respect for him. But coming into 2026, Mike Martin, what is different now for local lead generation? Where should people be focusing their attention to generate more local leads? Mike Martin: I think in 2026 we are looking at what we call agentic AI, which basically is you speaking into a machine and getting the result that you want. So when you are driving along, you can get the result. When you are speaking to your phone, you can get the result. A lot fewer people are now going into boxes, clicking in keywords and searching. They are literally clicking a button, speaking to it, and having a chat with it. So the fundamentals have completely changed, and it is going to change rapidly over the next 12 to 18 months. Back in the day, if I needed a locksmith, I would have gone to my computer in the house, switched it on, logged in, searched on Google, and picked the top business. Nowadays, you pick up your phone, chat to it, say get me a locksmith in the local area, press a button, and it is done. So I feel agentic AI is taking over. People need to have genuine, real human interactions with their business in all different directions that can be proved. That will enable them to rank not just in the search engines but on AI, in the maps, on social media, and in lots of different other environments and areas. James Dooley: Yes, for sure. I think AI is the buzzword for 2026. I think it is going to be even bigger in 2027. I think people are getting down the funnel a lot faster. As they move from top of the funnel question-based keywords down to the bottom of the funnel straight away, the Google Business Profiles and the paid ads are dominating. A lot of websites are getting a lot fewer clicks. People talk about zero clicks now for a lot of keywords. I kind of talk about it as being the perfect click. So instead of it being zero clicks, you are getting fewer clicks, but they are already kind of pre-sold. By the time they click through to your website, they are pre-sold. But I want to touch on Google Business Profiles because we have seen massive growth in the volume of calls and the volume of leads coming from Google Business Profiles. You have obviously gone all in on this with your team and GBP Optimizer, which is an amazing tool that allows you to manage multiple Google Business Profiles. Can you expand a little more on why a Google Business Profile is very important for local lead generation? Mike Martin: It is not just a Google Business Profile. Rather than just answering the one question, I think what I should do is outline a map of local lead generation for a local business, the easiest route to success for a local business. There are kind of four pillars, and then obviously you have got the off-page SEO and stuff like that. I think step number one for any local business, and it is free to start, has got to be the Google Business Profile. It is the true organic top of Google. It takes the top three positions. If you can get into the top three using consistent daily actions, then you are going to win. But it being connected to an actual website is also very, very important because of things like your NAP information and various other back and forth signals that are created through schema and other things like that. So I would say probably step number one is to build a decent website, a decent local business website that presents your business to the world as a legitimate organisation that people want to work with. Straight after that, I would say then go after the Google Business Profile side of things and get your Google Business Profile connected to the website. Then get a process in place, an SOP in place for your business that handles the continuous daily actions for your business. A lot of businesses will win just on those two actions alone. But if they then want to start spreading further afield and doing better, then you want to start creating local pages for all the towns, villages, and suburbs around your business. Maybe a three to five mile radius to start with, then go further afield, making sure that your schema points back to your Google Business Profile and so on, and all your branding matches. Then a great way to generate new leads. What I see a lot of businesses do that is stupid, actually stupid, and they do not understand they are doing it. It is not stupid because they understand it. It is stupid because it is stupid when you think about it. That is paid ads. I am not knocking paid ads. I love paid ads. But if I am a plumber in London, you have got to think about paid ads from the perspective of a business. If I am a plumber in London and I am targeting plumber London, and there are 200 other plumbers in London and the ad system is on an auction system, the whole thing is built on that. Your cost per click is always going to rise. Your profit is always going to decrease. Because your profit always decreases, it becomes a race to zero for every single business. So they are all racing towards zero. It does not make sense. But because they are acting out of desperation, they do that. Then what they have to do is figure out how to upsell. Then they have to figure out how to put the prices up. Then they have to figure out how to rip customers off because they have got no other choice, because they are spending that much money on Google Ads. Google Ads are absolutely brilliant. It is the fastest way to fill a pipeline, fill an email marketing system, and build anything like that that you want. But you only want to use it on short-term ads, promotions, and special offers as a local business. Do not get me wrong, for long-term branding, you can throw millions at it and all you are bothered about is getting seen everywhere. It is a different game altogether. But when you are talking about a local business, I have seen businesses go in and spend three, four, five, six grand a month and almost go out of business because they are focused on long-term keywords. You have to have Google Business Profiles and you have to have search engine optimisation to make that work. If you have not, you are not using a profitable business strategy. So what you do is go after short-term promotions and marketing. Let us say I am in Weymouth now. If I am in Weymouth, I would do a short-term promo to local businesses, a 50% off deal for local businesses. I would do an event that I am promoting in Weymouth for local businesses and get lots of people in and generate lots of buzz around my business, which will rank my website and rank my Google Business Profile. But I would never bother, if I was in a major city like London, having locksmith London or plumber London or electrician London because there are 200 businesses and everybody is doing cost per click. Then other people are doing cost per click in a way that you can use a credit card to push the cost per click through the roof, and then they just rip the credit cards off. What a lot of people do not think about, and this winds me up, is because Google gives you, when you sign up as a local business, £400. So if they give me £400 to compete against real businesses with real money, that is like going into a casino and betting against somebody who is using fake money with your real cash. All they are doing is pushing the cost. It should be illegal. They should not be allowed to do it, but they do. So yes, the four pillars are paid ads, Google Business Profiles, local pages, and a local business website. They are the foundations of any good local marketing strategy. Then all the other stuff that we do, like link building and PR and public relations and getting businesses to events and all things like that, come secondary to that. James Dooley: Yes, I completely agree with what you are saying there. I think, just to add a few more things onto local lead generation strategies that are working very well at present, one is checking to see whether there are any Reddit forums ranking. In nearly every single area, if you type in roofing Edinburgh or plumbers London, you will find that on the first page there will probably be a forum in the discussion tab, and normally Reddit is in there. So go onto that Reddit for the specific products and services that you offer in the areas that you offer them and try to add value into those Reddit subreddits and discussions. That is another good way, a cheap way, of being able to generate enquiries. Another one is LLM optimisation, so AI optimisation. Try to get the content that you have on your website, or what you are doing with Google Business Profile optimisation, like the posts, so that it can then trigger into ChatGPT and Gemini and things like that. Try to get the brand in that AI overview to say that you are the best plumber in, or roofer in, Weymouth and places like that. Then I would say the last one, which is a cheap form of running paid ads, is getting the retargeting pixel set up on the website and doing Meta ads retargeting only. They have already been through to the website, which means they are interested but they might not have actually enquired. Then you can follow them on Facebook and Instagram, and it is a cheap form of paid ads just to stay top of mind and maybe get them back. So there are some other strategies there for local lead generation in 2026. Is there anything else there you might want to add on? Mike Martin: You just reminded me of something then. We did something years and years ago. At one point, I found a way to get a free website. Back in the day, I did not have much money, so I found a way I could get a free website with a SIM card. So I went and got loads of SIM cards, built loads of free websites, and got them ranking in all the major cities. Then I started to build location pages off them all and was generating loads of leads and loads of traffic. Then all of a sudden Google must have cottoned on to what I was doing because they took down all my websites overnight. So I lost about 19 websites covering places like Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Oldham, Rochdale. I was number one everywhere, then I was number one nowhere, very quickly. So basically I was like, I need to go and do paid ads. What we did is, rather than setting up a local ad campaign, I set up a national ad campaign. The UK is not massive, but it was a national ad campaign and I put my cost per click at about a pound a click rather than £10, £15 or £20 a click like it was. I set it at a pound. What I found was the phones blew up really, really quickly, but not in Manchester and Liverpool and Leeds and the major cities. It was all the tiny outside areas where we did not have any competition. The phones exploded and we were answering these calls. All I was doing was saying, we charge a £50 booking fee and then after that we will get somebody to come out. What we did is we were getting the booking fees and then phoning local businesses and giving them the job. What I am saying is that the cost per click of the ads was driven down massively because we were doing national campaigns and we were getting the clicks in the areas where there were no ads. The areas where there are no ads are a lot of the rural areas where you have not got major cities and all the competition. It worked really, really well. It kind of kept us afloat to the point where we could rebuild all the websites, rerank all the websites, and do all the other stuff that we did. So it is more on the ad side of things. If you have got actual telesales people that can place the jobs, or if you are a national company, low-ticket ads on a national basis will not ever cost you a lot of money in the big areas, but they will make you a fortune in all the smaller rural areas where you can send your drivers or your vans or whatever it is that you are doing out to these clients. So we found that really profitable. James Dooley: Yes. Hope you liked the video on local lead generation. I just want to plug one last thing with regards to Mike Martin’s tool, GBP Optimizer. Another reason why I absolutely love it, not only because Google Business Profiles have actually started to generate more enquiries, is that I think it is also one of the main trust factors in building reputation. Getting those reviews on both Trustpilot and also on that Google Business Profile is key. It is a zero-sum moment. If someone is a plumber and you are £1,000 and another plumber is £1,000, and they are just going to quickly check who they are going to use, a lot of the time they are typing in the brand name. The Google Business Profile shows up at the top and they want to see who has the better reputation. What I love about GBP Optimizer is the fact that it can drip feed the reviews that are coming in and build that review velocity. Make sure you check out the link in the description. Mike Martin, it has been an absolute pleasure discussing local lead generation strategies for 2026. Mike Martin: Cheers, mate.