Podcast With James Dooley

Is AI the Future of SEO? Learn from James Dooley

Show Notes

Is AI the future of SEO? Discover the game-changing strategies from SEO expert James Dooley in this action-packed episode! Learn how AI is reshaping search engine optimization and uncover proven SEO strategies for 2025 to rank your website number 1. From mastering lead generation to scaling your agency and understanding the evolving landscape of search algorithms, this video is your step-by-step guide to driving more organic traffic and achieving a #1 ranking.

Join Navneet Kaushal, founder of PageTraffic, as he dives deep into James Dooley's expertise. With over $35 million digital assets and groundbreaking success in digital real estate and lead generation, James shares insider secrets on performance-based SEO, white-label services, and the transformative role of AI in modern SEO.

Are you ready to take your SEO game to the next level? Learn how to optimize for user intent, harness the power of AI tools, and build a strong foundation for long-term rankings. Whether you're a beginner or a seasoned professional, this video has actionable insights to help you dominate search engine rankings.

Don’t miss out—watch now to revolutionize your strategy and stay ahead of the competition. Ready to rank #1? Subscribe for more expert tips, and let’s start achieving your SEO goals today!

Chapters:

00:00 - What is the purpose of this episode?

00:59 - How can personal questions enhance business insights?

01:53 - What are the key aspects of the business of SEO?

03:57 - What is the best model for agency owners?

06:53 - How can you effectively scale an agency?

08:23 - What are common mistakes agency owners make?

09:51 - How can you improve lead generation strategies?

11:02 - What is the Performance Based Lead Generation Model?

15:06 - What are the benefits of White Label SEO?

16:23 - How can you convince agencies to outsource SEO?

18:05 - What strategies help in landing your first 10 SEO clients?

20:08 - How can you scale client acquisition for agencies?

21:21 - What are the differences between local and national SEO?

22:27 - In-house vs White Label SEO: which is better?

24:28 - What is the rank and rent model in SEO?

28:02 - How do you transition from practitioner to mentor?

33:39 - What sacrifices and hard work are necessary for success?

36:14 - Why are user signals important in SEO?

41:00 - Are fundamental SEO principles changing?

44:10 - What is CTR manipulation in SEO?

48:08 - How crucial is indexing for SEO today?

54:04 - Is AI generated content dead in the current landscape?

56:44 - Where is link building heading in 2025?

01:01:10 - What metrics should you focus on for evaluating backlinks?

01:05:15 - What is the best link building approach for limited resources?

01:08:53 - What future trends and advice should businesses consider?

01:12:27 - What insights can you share in a rapid fire round?

01:13:48 - How can viewers connect with James?

01:15:10 - What are the final words of wisdom?

Transcript

What is the purpose of this episode?

0:00 welcome to the another episode of the agency Insider show where we deep dip into the strategies insights and

0:06 experience of the digital marketing world's most Innovative mind I'm your host NAIT kosel founder of pace traffic

0:12 and today I'm absolutely thrilled to have with us a true Titan in the Su industry James Julie he's been voted as

0:20 one of the most influential Su at the UK entrepreneurship Awards he scaled over 35 million digital assets and built

0:27 multiple successful businesses in the SEO lead generation and digital real

0:32 [Music] [Applause]

0:39 [Music] estate James welcome to the show today

0:46 and how are you yeah it's a pleasure to have you so yeah I'm looking forward to it now uh before we uh dive deep into

0:54 the depth of SE wisdoms I always like to start uh with a question that helps our

How can personal questions enhance business insights?

1:00 audience connect with our guest on a more personal level what's something about your journey in digital marketing

1:06 that's most people don't know about you the people always want to talk about how

1:12 successful I've been but they probably don't want to talk enough about how many failures that I've had along the way people think that it's an easy ride and

1:18 it's not um growth is never linear it's always a roller coaster of ups and down

1:24 so it the the best most successful people are ones who can ride the waves the most or pick himself back up when

1:31 they get knocked down so they're generally speaking in my opinion from speaking to a lot of different

1:37 entrepreneurs in the world the most successful ones are the ones who can bounce back and you need to get that

1:42 bounce back ability from failures and it's actually good to embrace failure because it means you're pushing those

1:48 boundaries okay uh let's talk about our our first

What are the key aspects of the business of SEO?

1:54 segment is more about the business office SEO and scaling an agency of course you have a good experience in that just one

2:05 sec sorry I'll edit it later you know just one second I think

2:15 uh yeah yeah so I'll repeat uh so uh uh you

2:22 have been in the SE industry for over a year built multiple businesses and helped thousands of clients but let's

2:28 rewind a bit how did you get started in SE and what made you stick for it so

2:33 long so initially um I just knew that I needed an influx of quality inquiries on

2:39 a daily basis to improve my construction company that I was working for so at

2:44 that point there I needed a website to be built and then I didn't understand anything to do with search engine

2:49 optimization so I needed to learn the hard way um which was initially going using different agencies and I'm sure

2:57 people are watching this now who's probably use some freelance agencies and they kind of overpromise and underd

3:03 deliver um so what generally starts to happen is you start to then learn certain techniques of what they're doing

3:09 you find different suppliers um and I've just had to learn via failing quick and

3:16 understanding every every single algorithm update that comes along whether it's penguin or Panda what you

3:21 need to do to kind of counteract it and stuff like that so yeah I just knew that for my own business I needed basically

3:28 inquiries and then when I moved into like say affiliate I needed to make sure I was getting clicks to make sure I can

3:34 send it through to the affiliate if you do an Ecom and you wanted to sell any products again you just need to know SEO

3:40 or PPC to know how to get to the top of the search engine so I knew that I needed to learn it's almost like any

3:46 trade you then got to go in the trenches do a lot of testing see what's working and what might be working today might

3:53 not be working tomorrow okay now you have worked in the rank and rent SEO lead gen and

What is the best model for agency owners?

4:00 performance- Based Services so what's your favorite model for agency owners today so it's it's a difficult question

4:07 to ask in the fact that it depends how good you are with regards to doing SEO

4:12 if you're very good at SEO and you know you've got kind of the formula for what's needed on a rinse and repeat

4:19 basis the rank and rent model can be very good but it's called Rank and rent

4:24 for a reason right you've got to be able to rank and you've got to be able to rank number one for all you key terms

4:30 for it really to start making some good money if you can't do that first part correctly and you've just got a sight

4:36 you're trying to rent out but it's not ranking it won't work for you so for anyone who's starting who isn't

4:42 confident enough and knowing exactly how to rank maybe working within an SE agency and and learning on on the job

4:51 with other clients is the best way to go otherwise you're going to L you're going to lose a lot of money by trying to go

4:57 straight into the rank and rent method affiliate marketing can be great because you can end up getting paid while you

5:03 sleep you don't having to deal with any clients you're just sending through clicks to products and getting paid on that um Drop Shipping and e-commerce can

5:10 be very very good as well um you just got to find the right suppliers understand what the trends are of what

5:16 people want so it doesn't really matter what the monetization model is whichever

5:22 one you choose you've got to be good at SEO and fundamentally understand how the

5:27 algorithms work okay but but I'm sure the affiliate model is taking a little backseat with

5:33 all the Google updates now yeah but it's different yeah 100% but the the point is

5:39 if you go and search where a lot of people think that affiliate's dead or I mean I hear every year SEO is dead but

5:46 where a lot of people say that affiliate marketing is dead if you go and search for best best TVs for students best TVs

5:54 for this or best head streamers for gardeners and stuff like that they's still affiliate websites that are there

6:01 it's just the way a lot of people got trained to do Niche affiliate sites and

6:06 buying links from guest Post Farms that are toxic and not got a lot of trust

6:11 kind of D diverge and go too far on um topic dilution and stuff like that can

6:17 you still rank affiliate sites absolutely you can it's just become a lot tougher and I think a lot of people

6:23 in the Facebook groups and on Twitter of all gone saying oh affiliate is dead and it's like well if affiliate was dead no

6:30 one would be ranking for those affiliate terms and they are so you've just got to kind of pivot and diverse and see what's

6:37 working you might need some more brand building some more kind of not just being 100% relying on Google clicks

6:44 trying to get social media clicks and the more you start to get all that you're triggering nav boost and engagement signals which helps your

6:51 affiliate site rank okay now uh many agencies

How can you effectively scale an agency?

6:56 struggling with the scaling what were the biggest challenges you faed when growing your agency and how did you

7:02 overcome them so I'd say there's a there's a few different struggles first and foremost is getting the right team

7:08 members so it's hiring so once you've got someone that's good make certain you

7:14 you're doing enough to keep hold of them um so not having a churn rate of Staff that's coming and going so you've got to

7:20 build a culture build the team um because SEO is a team sport I mean

7:25 there's not many solopreneurs out there that can that can rank more multiple websites you need content writers you

7:31 need link Builders or people doing Outreach you need technical seos maybe a journalist that's doing digital PR um

7:39 Progressive optimization of content as well so not just writing content and leaving it um there there's lots too

7:45 that needs to be done if you are doing client work you need like a sales team to be able to speak to the customers so

7:52 hiring of staff and then keeping that culture to maintain them that they're not leaving but then also rewarding them

8:00 and training and developing them to not just giving them tasks but give them

8:05 responsibility and once you give them the responsibility it's up to then your members of staff to improve the systems

8:11 and processes and Sops because the algorithms do change very very quickly

8:16 and what might might have worked last week might be some different strategies this week all right now uh what do you

What are common mistakes agency owners make?

8:25 see are the common mistakes agency owners make while trying to escape

8:30 so they don't have the right Sops in place um so what they'll do is they'll hire staff and they'll think that the

8:36 staff will just be able to fix their problems but the truth of the matter is you should have some sort of research

8:42 and development or testing team and and that can be expensive to do that so if you can't afford to do the testing

8:49 yourself you need to be attending like networking events whether that's like masterminds or conferences and speaking

8:56 to these other people that are also might have same problems that you have and then be able to like discuss what's

9:04 working for you what's not working for you they'll say what's working for them and you can find those little knowledge

9:10 bombs that you can then integrate into your systems and processes that when you employ the members of Staff you've got

9:17 those systems to be able to scale out so it needs to become a rinse and repeat strategy that you consistently evolve in

9:24 the Sops but when you've got the staff that just implementing what needs to be done if you don't know how to rank

9:31 that's the that's the the main thing that they're doing wrong they just following what think works but then no

9:39 test data they're just going buying a load of guest Post Farms toxic links non-trusted links but because the Dr dr6

9:46 they think it's a powerful link and it's not okay now now you have built a uh one

How can you improve lead generation strategies?

9:54 thing that stands about you is your expertise in lead generation now a lot of agency owners strugg with getting

10:00 high quality leads what's your top strategy for doing lead lead generation

10:05 today so the main strategy keyword research um or industry research in

10:10 general so it's about trying to find those longtail keywords that might only get 10 20 30 50 monthly searches but you

10:19 know the conversion rate on those could be 30 or 40% if you got those clicks so

10:24 many people Chas search volume that's like 5,000 10,000 searches but the truth

10:30 of the matter is there might be no buying intent behind those keywords so it's trying to speak to the customers

10:35 seeing where they make the most money and then trying to find the longtail keywords that can get that conversion

10:42 rate don't don't go chasing Impressions and clicks go Chas in how many leads that you can generate but what leads con

10:50 turn to profit because then obviously your clients will spend more the more money they start to make the more they'll spend on on scaling out new

10:57 websites new niches and stuff like that right now you have built a performance-based lead gen model can you

What is the Performance Based Lead Generation Model?

11:04 explain how it works and why agencies should consider it yeah so performance best lead generation is the industry in

11:11 my opinion um is full of cowboys um and I mean it in the nicest possible way but

11:17 they don't think about the client first so I'm a customer focused I want my customers to get a guaranteed return on

11:23 investment so what we've done is We've Ended up completely changing the model to being a performance BAS lead

11:29 generation strategy where if if the customer is accepted and it's up to us

11:35 to accept the client if we accept them they will only pay on jobs that they

11:40 convert so they don't pay anything for SEO they don't pay anything for PPC or Facebook ads or Twitter ads or YouTube

11:47 ads they don't pay anything for optimizing the website for doing link building they don't even pay anything

11:53 for the leads that we're generating that only pay on conversion which guarantees

11:58 them a return return on investment it builds that relationship up really really quickly they're very open then to

12:04 let them know where they're making the most money and then from there then it can be a reciprocal relationship where

12:09 both of us it's more of a partnership than it is then seeing them being the

12:15 employer and us being the the employee and them demanding to us what we need to

12:21 be doing this forms in line more of a partnership and we say look we know what

12:26 we can do you've got to tell us where you make your profit let's get this partnership going and if we can both win

12:32 out of it long term we we have like our churn rate is under 1% now you speak to

12:38 any any SEO agency or lead generation agency and I reckon within 12 months

12:43 their T rate will probably be be 40 to 60% something like that where we're

12:49 under 1% because why would they leave us there's no reason to leave us and the hardest thing you can do in business is

12:55 get those new clients so if you can keep them then it it allows us to grow we

13:01 might only need one new client a month and we could see exponential growth by

13:06 one new a month because we know they're not going to leave us I mean we don't we generate several a day but I'm saying we

13:12 could where a lot of others need to be winning two three new clients a week because they're losing clients as well

13:19 and sometimes what's more important is looking at how can you keep the clients as opposed to always chasing

13:25 new so so I mean do you guys do do you pick up any client or is there a methodology because you can't uh deliver

13:33 lead or conversions to every client who walks in um yeah we so like anyone that

13:39 enquires with us we might get um 70 or 80 new business owners a day that come through to us the wants lead generation

13:47 um and then from there then we've got like a very stringent vetting process so have they got a professional email so if

13:53 they've G and got um bigbad James gmail.com I'm like that's not a

13:59 professional email if they're a landscaping company I want something like James commerciall landscaping.com

14:05 because it looks professional we'll be checking even things like um their quote template does their quote template look

14:12 professional would I order from that company so if I wouldn't order from that company there's a good chance that all

14:18 the leads the customers that we generate for leads for that they wouldn't order so we've got to understand what's their

14:25 brand look like online in fact if you went and search for James's Commercial Landscaping if I've got loads of one

14:31 star reviews that's going to affect the conversion of our leads so we want to

14:36 make certain that everything from what they're doing at present is good sometimes they might have no reviews and

14:43 they just might be they're not very good at SEO or brand building but we might think do you know what these are a great company and we might work with them and

14:50 then we might help them grow their brand as well because it's going to improve their conversion rate but generally

14:55 speaking we we we decline more than we accept because we want to make certain

15:00 that the customers we work with can convert the leads that we're generating right now uh White Label SEO is a huge

What are the benefits of White Label SEO?

15:09 opportunity for agencies what's your advice on pitching wh label SEO services to other agencies yeah I mean if if you

15:16 can do it at a rate where that agency can use your your you as being a white

15:21 label then obviously yes it's it's a great model to do because these SEO agencies might have hundreds of clients

15:29 but they just need someone to do the Fulfillment but again it kind of comes back down to are you good at doing the

15:35 Fulfillment and if you are good at doing the Fulfillment then white label SEO is brilliant the only issue like if he was

15:42 in a western country like the UK or the US it's very difficult to do white label

15:47 because staff is expensive but if he was in India or Bangladesh or the Philippines or Venezuela or South Africa

15:55 then white label SEO is great because what you can do is ch maybe 15 cents to

16:01 create a citation and and the white label like the Western company that's selling it might be able to sell it for

16:07 a dollar each and there's a good margin there so both parties can win it's just

16:12 seeing whether white label SE agencies have got small profit margins but it's

16:18 more volume of work right it's a volume business right yeah exactly yeah

How can you convince agencies to outsource SEO?

16:24 now how do you convince agencies that Outsourcing SEO is actually as smart

16:29 business move is it just giving them an example like a do to or 15 cent or are they other ways as well so the way I

16:35 always say it one one of my classic kind of sales pitches that I normally mention in a lot of podcasts would be if you

16:41 built an extension on your house would you build that extension yourself or

16:47 would you get a brick layer to come and build you the wall would you get a roofer to come and do the roofing the

16:52 point is a lot of these business owners they try and do everything and they're not a roofer like if you need the roof

16:59 being done go and hire a roofer because they do it day in day out they are brilliant at what they do I'm not going

17:04 to try and do the roofing myself if I need a new shower being fitted I'm going to go and get a plumber if I need some

17:10 new electrics and cables being installed I'm going to get an electrician so the truth of the matter is it should be a

17:16 very simple cell that a dental practice is brilliant at fixing people's teeth

17:21 but it doesn't mean they understand technical SEO content um within content you've got like entities semantic

17:28 triples you've got causal Clauses you've got so many things within semantico that they don't know all of

17:35 that so don't try and be someone that you're not get more inquiries for for

17:40 for fixing people's teeth or teeth whitening or whatever it is that you do but go and hire an SEO agency to be able

17:47 to do what they're good at which is optimizing your website for search engines so it should be a no-brain it

17:54 should be a very simple sell to a business owner to say look why would you want to do it yourself you're going to

18:00 it's going to you're going to spend time you're going to spend money and you're probably not going to do it correctly

What strategies help in landing your first 10 SEO clients?

18:05 right now if you had to start an Su agency from scratch today how would you

18:11 go about lending your first 10 clients so I would go I wouldn't say I wouldn't

18:17 do this but the classic case of I'd go knocking on a lot of people's doors right so what I mean by that is I would

18:24 want to turn around I would sit down and if my sales team can't do this there's no point in having by it should be very

18:30 easy especially nowadays with AI to go and Outreach to 300 people on LinkedIn

18:35 to go and do hundred tweets to going go into Facebook groups like The SEO group

18:41 or many other groups and just basically tell someone does anyone want a free

18:47 technical audit does anyone want um a free backlink audit right and what you can do is you can go and offer for a

18:54 free te technical audit it'll take you five minutes on screaming frog to go and get some 404 and 301 hours send it

19:00 through to that business owner they're happy that you've just done it completely for free and then they might say can you help fix these problems and

19:08 then next minut you just W on a client and then from there you can upsell oh by the way your content's not very good oh

19:13 very well your internal linking Is Not Great oh by the way um let let's do a server log analysis and where what part

19:20 of the site's not being crawled you you're lacking in back links to this part of the site so it's it's hard to go

19:27 and win your first few clients but you've just got you the classic saying is you can't win a raffle if you don't

19:34 buy a raffle ticket you've got to go and buy as many raffle tickets as you can the more raffle tickets you have the

19:40 more chance you have of winning the raffle so go if you're going Outreach into 50 people a day why not do 100 why

19:47 not do 150 why not do 200 the the more people you reach out to the more doors

19:52 you're open if you win a client they might refer you to another client and Word of Mouth then might start growing

19:58 but people just not willing to put the hard work in and they think it's easier and it's not you just got to go out and

20:03 do the hard work now uh and now for agencies looking to this

How can you scale client acquisition for agencies?

20:11 was for agencies uh who are just starting out now for agencies who are looking to scale their client

20:16 acquisition say from now 10 clients to 50 what advice would you give or will it

20:22 be a same advice no so I mean once you've started to get the clients in

20:28 after that a lot of it then starts to come down to case studies and testimonials You' got to shout and scream about what you do and how great

20:36 that you are because you know what nobody else will right so you've got to show how brilliant that you are any

20:41 awards that you've won you want to shout and scream about any case studies where you've done a good job you want to shout

20:47 and scream about um if you've got um even better if you've got a case study that's working well and you can get the

20:53 client to leave you a testimonial then then great and then bit by bit the more

20:58 more great work what you do the more Awards you'll win the more events you can attend because you're earning more

21:03 money um as you're earning more money you can jump on podcasts like this which might open it up to a wider audience you

21:10 just got to be on the channel on the present shout and scream about your results of what you doing um have a

21:16 great offer so have a hook that's a great offer to get somebody in and then be able to do those

What are the differences between local and national SEO?

21:22 upsells okay uh local businesses versus

21:28 National businesses what would you prefer for an agency to go after first I'd say go after everything um if you

21:34 good to SEO you can you can rank in local local is easier to rank for but lower search volume but if you are good

21:41 at ranking then why not go after the national clients as well if you're not good then star in local just go after

21:48 the easy to rank for keywords like um let's say you you was in the plumbing Market let's say Plumbing in Manchester

21:55 right or Plumbing in a local area but then in time you might go after just like UK plumbers and go after all the

22:00 areas in the UK um go after the longer tale keywords if you're not great to start with um because they're easier to

22:08 rank for um it's like CC car talked about like the Avalanche approach or working through your traffic tiers so

22:15 start with easy to rank for keywords and then build yourself up and keep building it up and stuff like that but there's no

22:22 reason if you're good why you can't get both local or national okay and one big question

In-house vs White Label SEO: which is better?

22:29 agency owners face is whether to build an in-house team or Outsource via let's

22:34 say for example white label SE how should an agency owner decide between the two so it depends on how good they are

22:42 at recruiting and building that culture maintaining the staff um there's an argument for both so there's not I don't

22:49 think there's a one-size fix all saying Freelancers are better than in-house or

22:54 in-house are better than Freelancers I know a lot of people that have just got Freelancers and got only like a few

23:00 members of staff and they're doing a million a month in profit but I also know people that have got large teams

23:07 and they can do all the quality control and everything else they are not relying on any Freelancers who can let them down

23:13 and they're also doing a million a month so you can either way you can have it that both can win it's just what suits

23:21 your lifestyle better and your business model better for me we use both so like

23:27 I want my a player to be in house I want to train them up with everything that they need to know

23:33 and then I want each a player to have 10 virtual assistants like Freelancers that's working underneath them so if

23:40 I've got like 14 in-house staff and each of them have got 10 vas that's 140 staff

23:46 right that's more than enough to rank for nearly any any industry there is in the world as long as you're good at what

23:52 you do and then from there then on top of that you can be using freelance um

23:57 digital PR agencies link building agencies technical SEO agencies you can

24:03 do stuff like by you mentioned Alex drew before so you can use age demands to

24:08 Kickstart your websites to be a lot faster there's so many different things of what you can do to give yourself a

24:13 head start or just know know what a good link and a bad link looks like know what

24:18 good quality content looks like and just make certain that you're ticking all the boxes and doing it correctly so you're

24:24 getting longterm rankings right now you're Rank and rent model has been

What is the rank and rent model in SEO?

24:29 become somewhat legendary in SEO circles for those unfamiliar could you explain

24:35 this model and how you developed it yes for sure so a ranking rent

24:40 website is a website that ranks for keywords that specifically a customer or

24:46 contractor might want the inquiries that's generating from that website they're brilliant AR rof is brilliant at

24:53 Roofing so they're not very good at doing SEO for their own website in my opinion the reason why we went there in

24:59 the rank and rent model was because I don't like client SEO and the reason why

25:04 I don't like client SEO is because if I'm working on their website and they like the design of it but I don't think

25:11 the Design's good for conversion weate optimization I've no got to argue with the business owner about why I'm going

25:17 to change the site how I'm going to change the site come up with a big design where realistically I don't want

25:24 to be a designer what I want to do is I want to split test what buttons work the

25:29 best what color buttons work the best what text around the buttons work the best and I don't want have to keep having to get that signed off by the

25:36 client so with regards to B links the the client might be um heard some

25:42 blackout techniques that he wants to use or he might be very white out saying you can't do link building I just want to

25:48 get a website do it my way because I know my way works not having to explain

25:53 what I'm doing and just be able then to give the contract to the Le needs what

25:58 they want where they can make and earn some good money from and we split the profits so they're not I'm not having to

26:05 explain everything what I'm doing of why I'm doing it and how I'm doing it and what frequency I'm doing it at I don't

26:11 need to explain that a business owner cares about one thing and that's return on investment and that's what I'm going

26:18 to talk to him about the rest of it he doesn't need to know about okay and and

26:23 what challenges did you face when scaling it to over I think 600 website right yes so obiously there's lots and

26:29 lots of challenges um of doing it so it's hard to get um real businesses um

26:34 sorry real addresses for a lot of the sites and having an address and a telephone number and stuff are big trust

26:40 signals especially in local SEO um so we've we form Partnerships with these

26:46 companies that are real genuine businesses that we then might be able to use their addresses their telephone

26:52 numbers and stuff like that so they was they've always been challenges um making these websites look real and legit

26:59 making certain that we're initially being able to speak to the client saying can we use some of your testimonials and

27:05 case studies because if if I go and set like an exact match domain up for

27:10 commerciall landscaping.com are for James's Commercial Landscaping I

27:16 might not be able to use them on this website because it might be that like for another brand for another website so

27:23 there's lots of there's lots of pitfalls there's lots of like issues along the way of what you need to try to do but

27:29 it's building up the brand building up the trust building up the power that people can trust that site to want to

27:36 inquire to say yes this is what I want and they're going to inquire with that company when you've not got a legitimate

27:43 business or brand behind it the conversion rate drops even if you're ranking high if they don't think that

27:50 you look trustworthy they're not going to inquire with your brand so it's trying to get all the trust signals in

27:56 place that essential customer and people who's clicking on site will convert right now I've noticed that you

How do you transition from practitioner to mentor?

28:05 transition from being primarily an SEO practitioner to become a mentor speaker

28:10 and a investor now what drove this evolution in your career and how has

28:16 your perspective on the industry changed yeah so I mean what starts to happen

28:22 when you start speaking to quite a lot of successful entrepreneurs they start to want to give back to the community

28:28 Community that's helped them um throughout their Journey um a lot of them become philanthropists where they

28:35 want to give back do charity work or do certain things I'm at a point now in my life where I probably well I don't need

28:42 to work another day in my life and I can have whatever is the most expensive meal on the menu for breakfast dinner and

28:47 lunch and so can my kids for the rest of their life but that doesn't motivate me what motivates me is Success growth

28:54 Innovation every day is a school day wanting to Tech things on to the next level so not only is it about how well

29:01 that I do I want to make certain that my business partners are all looked after and that they can learn and I want to

29:07 make certain that my staff and my employees that they might set up their own brands in five years time 10 years

29:13 time and then might flop the nest and do their own things and I want them to do brilliantly and now I want to give back

29:20 to people that have helped me but I also want to give back to suppliers that have helped me if they've got any customers

29:26 that need help I'm I'm here to try and help as many other people as I can for them to do well and sometimes like

29:34 there's certain people in life that when it's Christmas day they might prefer to receive a gift and open it up and like

29:40 oh what's in there but I prefer giving gifts I prefer giving it and seeing

29:46 let's say my son and my daughter open up the gift and then being really happy I'm I prefer giving than receiving so that's

29:53 just might just be I'm not certain if everyone's like that but that's the way I'm like and I get more of a kick out of

29:58 given and I think at times yes I can build out a load more sites yes I can earn a load more money but at times I

30:05 want to help others that they don't go through as many failures as what I did along the way for the first seven or

30:11 eight years it was tough very very tough I was in debt I was struggling to get

30:17 like things to work well like I didn't come from a background of money I didn't have money from my mom and my mom and

30:24 dad passed me down a load of money and I was just able to make it work like I was doing it on my credit card I was having

30:30 to get it to work and if it didn't work I was going reaching out to two 200 300 people every single day to try and find

30:37 those long Tales to try to get to earn some money which allowed me to reinvest

30:42 so it's tough It's hard I want people to understand that but a lot of people that want to grow need to understand they've

30:49 got to roll up the sleeves and they've got to put that work in and yes it might mean that we got to sacrifice a few

30:56 things for a few years they might want to have this big holiday and they might say instead of going on the big holiday

31:02 reinvest back into more websites instead of like having a nice fancy car put it

31:08 back into growing and building the business up more and too many people want nice luxury things and then they

31:15 start moaning when someone is super successful going oh I wish I was like them well you talk the talk but you're

31:21 not willing to sacrifice what you need to sacrifice to get there and the classic like like the Rich Dad Poor Dad

31:27 scenario start getting yourself some assets stop stop acquiring liabilities stop

31:33 acquiring nice fancy cars bit having nice big like expensive clothes and

31:39 stuff like that put it back in the business grow it and in three four five years time there's a classic Bill Gates

31:45 saying people massively overestimate what can be done in one year but

31:50 underestimate what can be done in 10 years and in 10 years if you had a 10-year plan you can retire in anybody

31:57 who in the hard work and reti in 10 years if they are willing to put some certain sacrifices in you still want to

32:03 be a good parent you still want to see your friends and your family and do nice things but you need to sacrifice certain

32:10 things to get there and once you do it like you'll see exponential

32:15 growth that that that is very true I mean myself been in this business for almost 23 years so I know we I also

32:22 don't come from a rich family so we all are first uh first generation and entrepreneur I would say that way and we

32:29 all have and we all have worked our asses off so it's people people like yourself like I would my one of my

32:36 biggest concerns at present is that I don't want to bring up my kids to be spoiled like I came from a rough

32:42 upbringing where it's made me resilient It's Made Me disciplined it's made me turn up every single day and you know

32:50 what that they're the best attributes that any human being can have because then they start to make their own money

32:55 and start to do their own things I don't want to pass my kids don't any fish I want to teach them how to fish and if

33:02 they can learn it their own way which is VI resilience and hard work that's the

33:07 best thing and like you said there first first generation wealth it's so important not being passed down money

33:14 and that's one of my biggest concerns at present is making certain that my kids are going to put that hard work in

33:19 themselves right right but I I myself don't want my kids to be spoiled I don't

33:25 want them to know it's a comfortable life because yeah we we know that's not

33:30 how the world is going to be out there you have to put your hours in and trust me I'm on all on with it what you are

33:37 saying I get it yeah right now uh you mentioned in some previous interviews

What sacrifices and hard work are necessary for success?

33:43 that maintaining trust and integrity is crucial in the Su business now could you share a situation where your integrity

33:50 was tested and how did you handle it yeah for sure so um my my vision

33:56 statement in life is every should be done with honest trust and integrity so I know that any one of my clients and

34:03 I'm confident that any one of my clients can not turn around saying that I've scammed him in any way shape or fault I

34:09 know that so when I know that I'm happy to be challenged on anything right so

34:15 there's been times where I've had other seos or other lead generation companies saying you cannot guarantee a company a

34:21 return on investment yes I can and they go no you can't that's impossible I'm like no because the only pay when they

34:29 win the job when they do the job and they've been paid for the job they could win a job and not get paid from the

34:35 client and I don't get paid even though they won the job so this is a very different business model so when people

34:41 start to say I can't guarantee return on investment I can't the issue is there's

34:46 a lot of people in the industry that tries to guarantee a return on investment for doing SEO that cannot be

34:53 guaranteed because algorithm updates can come along and who knows what profit

34:59 that they're making but my model I can guarantee a return on investment so I've been challenged a lot on that you can't

35:06 guarantee Roi I'm like I can because I'm taking 100% of the risks and because of

35:12 that I can guarantee my clients a return on investment so there's always been times where people have tried to

35:18 challenge me which I absolutely love by the way I love being challenged and I think everyone should not like get the

35:26 backup and feel like someone's having a good you I want to be challenged every single day I want to be a better version

35:31 of myself today than what I was yesterday so I'm all for it it's just yeah I mean honest trust and integrity

35:38 if you can go to bed at night knowing that you can sleep that you've not scam someone life is so much of a better

35:44 place and just try to provide value for your clients you are right I I I'm a firm

35:51 believer of Integrity I mean there are times when uh I find my Integrity being

35:56 question and I have actually gone ahead and fired the clients because I don't want to my Integrity to be questioned at

36:02 the end of the day if I sleep it should be like I can sleep that what you said I have not scammed anybody in my life and

36:09 I can have my heads up yeah perfect yes now uh let's move to the second segment

Why are user signals important in SEO?

36:16 of our uh show which is the current state of se you know how things are and we're going to talk about a little bit

36:22 about this now SEO has evolved massively and they're always something new from your experience what are the biggest Shi

36:28 shift happening in Su right now that agency owners needs to be aware of I'd

36:34 say the biggest shift is user signals um everyone obsesses over content and links

36:40 where what people need to start doing instead of fighting against Google and being annoyed with how Google's doing

36:46 their updates um they need to start looking at how can they make it as

36:51 cheapest possible for Google to crawl and index your website so Technic

36:58 making certain that it's fast technically making certain that you've not got lots of pages that gets no

37:03 Impressions so people are obsessed with topical Authority and the truth of the matter is 95% of people don't even

37:10 understand what topical Authority is and what I mean by that is that they think that topical coverage is topical

37:17 Authority and that's not the case so by covering all different articles on a subject doesn't mean you've got topical

37:24 Authority it means you've got topical coverage but topical author it is topical coverage plus user signals now

37:32 if all these Pages you're creating get no social signals no back links and have

37:37 no Impressions or clicks that's actually detrimental to your website you're going

37:44 too wide you've got to then try to start making certain that every article on

37:49 your site is getting some form of historical data being built up and if

37:54 you're not you're just wasting Google's craw buget yet so you've got to improve the content improve the internal linking

38:01 improve the amount of external links coming through to the website and then the user signals like can you build up a

38:08 Twitter following an Instagram following a Facebook following can you be sharing um your your new article that you've

38:14 done on all those platforms can you be sharing the images on places like Flicker and Pinterest to get traffic

38:20 back to your website can you be putting a video on YouTube and ranking that video which might link back through to

38:25 your website so you've got to be trying to be on the channel on the present have

38:31 diversification of traffic and building a brand and that's what a lot of affiliate sites didn't do they just

38:38 became obsessed with writing best TVs best head scammers best lawnmowers best

38:43 gaming chairs with no brand presence they had no branded searches they had no

38:49 social media presence and you know what and know a lot of people won't like me saying it a lot of them deserve to get

38:55 hit because all what they did was use AI content and I what they did was go and

39:00 put a top 10 list of the best gaming chairs and guess what was number one the one that paid the most commission they

39:07 had no research behind it they just looked at it going I'm going to put the number one result here these pay 30% in

39:13 affiliate commission so I'm going to put them number one and it might not have been the best gameing yet and then number two was the second highest

39:20 affiliate commission and you know what it wasn't good for the users and that's why people started to go to Reddit

39:27 because Reddit had different people's opinions and they could have arguments and stuff like that and people preferred

39:33 to have different people's of opinions than one person that just wrote it using

39:39 AI that didn't put really any thought process into it apart from what paid them the most money and wasn't what's

39:45 best for the user so you've got to think outside the box you've got to be doing a

39:50 lot more than what a lot of these other Affiliates are doing and maybe these Affiliates just need to become more of

39:55 an expert on a single topic so making certain that they are like the lawn

40:02 mower experts instead of doing all G all of gardening just do just lawnmowers and

40:07 just give like maybe you start you even if you can't afford it Go and rent that law Mower and use it and get a video of

40:14 them using it showing them how you kind of your gauges of different depths show them how you change the different gauges

40:19 show them the how powerful the blade is and stuff like that give that extra value if you can and if you're not

40:26 willing to do it somebody else is willing to do it and therefore they deserve to outrank you um so you've just

40:33 got to think bigger and actually start building Brands and getting diversification of traffic and I know

40:39 that a lot of people won't like hearing that because they want to cut Corners they want to just build a website very

40:45 quickly and build a load of guest post to it and that used to work it now no longer works you've got to if you want

40:51 to stay in the game you've got to shift and you've got to start improving the quality threshold of what everybody is

40:58 d right also now many SE experts are debating that diminishing returns of

Are fundamental SEO principles changing?

41:04 traditional SEO tactics do you believe fundamental SEO principles are changing or are we just seeing more

41:10 sophistication in how they are applied just a quality threat it's the

41:15 same algorithm as what's out there all that they've done is just ramped up quality control so content needs to be

41:23 better um if someone doesn't understand properly what a semantic triple is right they don't deserve to rank because

41:30 that's now how the knowledge graph is being used apart from in local where it is still word based it is still placing

41:37 words in certain places on the page but generally speaking you want to feed that Knowledge Graph and the way you feed the

41:44 knowledge graph of Google is by your semantic triples so he getting this it's getting the subject the predicate and

41:49 the object the subject verb verb and object in the correct sentence format

41:54 not having much fluff in there getting the right entity is being put on the page but in the correct sentence format

42:01 it's about when you're showing up for quees is your page matching the intent

42:06 of the query and answering what they want and if it is then great if it's not then make certain that it is otherwise

42:13 you shouldn't be showing up for those queries and you're going to start getting bounce or or like what's called

42:18 short clicks within nav boost and you need to try to be getting the longer clicks more more the the longer clicks

42:25 the more pages visited the better dwell time the the less pogo sticking that's

42:30 happening on your website the more you're going to start ranking nav boost now has become probably the number one

42:37 ranking Factor you want to be making certain that you're looking at everything related to your user signals

42:43 CT dwell time Pages visit Pages visited like so many affiliate sites they're

42:49 clicking onto it within 10 seconds they're clicking off and they're not like the dwell time's not very good and

42:56 they're not end in the like they no Google's no realizing they're going here

43:01 and going to there can I not just send them here directly and a lot of the time they're now trying to send them directly

43:06 there and missing out the affiliate part whether you like it or not it's probably better for the user so like are they

43:14 making it are they making the algorithms better A lot of times yes I actually believe that they are a lot of seos

43:20 don't think that way because they genuinely just want to earn more money by doing SEO techniques yes attribution

43:27 of clicks is a lot less but they they do the research they know what needs to be

43:33 done if you don't like it go start ranking on Bingo or on YouTube or on Reddit do you know what I mean like

43:38 you've got your playing on their playing field you've got to do what they want and you've got to abide by their rules

43:44 and and do what's winning in today's algorithm and yes it is very different to what used to work in the fact that

43:53 you need to understand Trust on links have low toxicity on links and good

43:59 quality content and then understand that topical coverage isn't topical Authority and then trying to build up branding

44:05 elsewhere if you can building it up to get traffic diversity coming into your website yeah you talk about uh dwell

What is CTR manipulation in SEO?

44:13 time and of course click rate so what is your take on as uh CTR manipulation CTR

44:19 manipulation works very well um so that's the short answer the long answer is a lot of people do it and they try

44:25 and cut corners and they use rotating proxies which are spammed and blacklisted and that doesn't work very

44:31 well so you've got to understand a lot of things to do with selenium um web RTC

44:39 headless browsers so what tools are not being detected as being fake by Google

44:46 and you've got to make certain you're getting good quality logged in users that's doing the clicks not just every

44:53 single click coming through to the site is a non-logged in user that's using a blacklisted IP and then saying that CTR

44:59 doesn't work that's like saying link building doesn't work link building works better than ever if you're getting

45:06 trusted low toxic and Powerful relevant links that might drive traffic they work

45:12 unbelievably well if you're going doing GSA directly to a money site then it doesn't work very well so it's about

45:19 understanding that good quality links work well toxic links don't work very well but then you can't then say links

45:26 don't work they do work if Done Right CTR works very well if done correctly

45:32 try and manipulate it and doing GSA direct how it doesn't work like trying to do clicks doesn't work so yes CTR

45:40 works very well um there's lots of different platforms out TTI works very

45:45 well for like um Google Business profiles and gmbs and doing driving directions and all that that all works

45:51 great um you want as much engagement from as many different places as you can

45:59 right now uh you work with businesses of various sizes what difference Do You

46:04 observe in Su strategy Effectiveness between an Enterprise level business versus small to medium businesses so

46:12 Enterprise larger businesses generally speaking are a lot better to work with and the main reason why they're a lot

46:18 better to work with is they understand the shortterm fixes are not going to fix

46:24 your rankings so many many people come along as an SEO agency and they think

46:29 they can get like results within three months nowadays A lot of the work that you do might not be being seen and might

46:37 not be rewarded until the next big algorithm update it's not a lot of time

46:42 it's not real time right it's generally speaking on algorithm updates so you

46:47 might have to work really really hard for six months see no progression but it could be a hockey

46:53 stick approach where no progression no progression in six months time all the hard work you did for those previous six

47:00 months htic exponential growth as the algorithm update comes along and longer

47:06 term like big clients understand this is a long-term investment the a lot of the

47:12 smaller kind of agencies or a lot of smaller companies they want to see results tomorrow and it's so difficult

47:18 to unless you're doing blackout techniques which can give you instant results but not long-term results they

47:24 need to understand that SEO is a long term investment that you need to be

47:29 doing it's not PPC where you can generate leads today it's a long-term investment and that's what bigger

47:35 companies understand and they understand when they're putting the marketing budget in place they might base that on

47:41 18 months they might give you an 18month contract where a lot of the smaller ones might want a roll in contracts or a

47:47 three-month contract and the truth of the matter is in three months you can't fix a lot of problems that might be

47:53 wrong with the site all right now you also spoke about indexing and uh you

48:00 mentioned of course a lot of time your site doesn't even get indexed unless there is properly unless there is a big

48:06 Google update how crucial is indexing for agencies today and what are the best

How crucial is indexing for SEO today?

48:11 practices do you recommend to make it faster so I'll give you a few knowledge

48:17 bombs on indexing because we've done a lot of testing in the last 12 months right

48:22 so number one is obviously if you've got a website make certain you've got Google

48:27 search console and uh bing Web Master tools being set up making certain that you've got your site map submitted so

48:34 every time a new post gets done it's submitting to Google search console and being Web Master tools that's just basic

48:40 SEO right making certain that um the amount of people that don't have Bing

48:46 Web Master tools and that should have it and the reason why it's so important is because if you can keep indexing with

48:52 index now within Bing Web Master tools all your page and get them indexed

48:58 Bing's feeding a lot of GPT answers so you want to be trying to get not just

49:03 ranking in bing but in GPT search which is growing quite a lot the next part is

49:10 so many people build links like citations or press releases which can do

49:15 well right they like pillow links foundational links whatever you want to call them and they don't index them and the

49:22 point is a lot of these citations you might go and buy 150 citations not load them into an indexer so last year we

49:30 invested in three different indexing tools Giga indexer index exceptional and

49:36 B link indexing tools right and those three platforms we've made certain we've

49:42 got the testing team on it we've made certain that those three have got the highest indexation rate so okay the

49:49 previous best company that used to do it was a company called Index minow right

49:54 they had the highest index minow there's like speed links um there's Amiga

50:00 indexer Co link there's lots of there's lots of others but the the index rate is

50:06 a lot lower than what index manau was so we knew we needed to be better than index Mano and now Giga index are index

50:13 exceptional and B link indexing tools got higher indexation rate than um index Mano and we've like linked it to make it

50:21 simple within chat GPT if people want to load in all the URLs but the best know bombs that we've actually founded right

50:28 he obviously index all your back links and stuff like that but if you get a new client right on board as an SEO agency

50:36 something that we found and we don't know the full I'm gonna guess on this

50:42 bit so don't hold me to this I think it's got something to do with link Rock

50:47 right or link Decay right so a link over time starts to become less powerful the

50:55 older it starts to become right and people call it link r or link Decay if you get your new client let's say you're

51:01 doing 10 new guest posts for that new client go and Export all of their backlink profile existing backlink

51:08 profile that you think are good link so there's no point doing the toxic like scrap links all the good links and they

51:15 might have 2,000 referring demands go and load those 2,000 referring demands

51:21 into index exceptional right and what in even even if they might be in already

51:26 inex next right go and load them into index exceptional index exceptional goes

51:31 and pings Google bot three times three different occasions over five days Google bot comes and craws those links

51:38 three times over the five days right okay and the power of what you get from

51:44 that existing bat link profile it's like it kind of re reignites the bat link

51:50 profile and literally you what you can do if you are an agency if you own the

51:56 website do it if you're an SE agency in month number one it can make you look amazing like oh my God look at these

52:03 results and that's just from the power of their existing backlink profile and Al what you've just done it's almost

52:10 like doing tier tws to all the back links you're getting googleing recrawling it and as it comes recrawling

52:16 it it kind of reassigns that quality score from the bat links that if it's

52:21 not been crawled for 12 months it just kind of removes that link decay that

52:26 link RW and that's a big thing that people should be doing every so often every six months going into the back

52:33 link profile loading them into the indexer even if it's indexed and that's the big bit because why would you load

52:38 into an indexer if it's already indexed is to get Google bot to come back rescoring them those links and giving

52:44 you the credit again for those links it's it's like a botox injection you put it in yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I

52:53 I I I love that I would I would definitely give it a try and will let you know the results in sign sign up to

52:59 it and drop me a message and I'll go and give you like 5,000 credits for free um

53:04 go and sign up to it and you on the next podcast you you show you results if you don't get results Bas say I spoke to

53:12 James and I didn't get the results I can pretty much guar I can't guarantee it but like we've seen it time and time and

53:18 time again where we've done it and we've just gone boom boom boom boom and it is

53:23 it's a great strategy and we never want I never once fought it was one of the testing team one of my people in the

53:29 testing team that did it and I'm like I was questioning why would you index a URL that's already indexed why would you

53:35 put it into an indexer and he's like well people talk about link I want to see whether it kind of like gets rid of

53:42 Link Decay and it and it seems to and and it might be something else someone might be watching it and saying it's

53:48 nothing to do with link Decay it's nothing to do with link Ro it's because of something else within the Google

53:53 patents or something I don't know but what all what I do know is reloading your back links into the indexer gives

54:01 gives a boost especially if it's not been crawled for six to 12 months

Is AI generated content dead in the current landscape?

54:06 wow okay now ai generated content Google updates have made ranking AI content

54:12 harder do you think AI content is dead or is there a way to make it work you can definitely get it working um I've

54:19 got thousands of examples of AI content ranking um if you just go into chat GPT

54:25 and say WR me an article about an SEO agency in Manchester then it's not going to rank um it's not good enough in just

54:32 giving it a single prompt you need to understand what you need to prompt it you need to understand it's garbage in

54:38 garbage out so you want to be making certain that the prompts that you're doing you're getting all the right entities being put onto the page you

54:45 getting all the right questions and answers to rank all your secondary keywords that your content structure

54:51 your heading hierarchy has got the most that the most Rel and the highest

54:57 popularity at the top and it comes down into the macro to the micro content and

55:02 it's sorted by relevance and popularity um that you're answering the questions

55:07 to your headings directly underneath Standalone content using semantic

55:13 triples um if you get all that put into the prompts and once you and the point

55:18 is when I first started using AI I was having to write 5,000 words of prompts

55:25 to give me a 2,000w article and I'm like what's the point with AI but then what

55:30 you start to realize is once you've got that prompt you can just reuse that prompt saying use this here's the title

55:38 here's the like Source context of what I want from the page and here's the desired outcome that's another thing a

55:44 lot of people don't do with AI they don't give the desired outcome why why are you creating this page it might be

55:50 you're creating a page for SEO agency Manchester and you're not saying to it that James D SEO is based in Manchester

55:59 throughout the content try to get him to inquire with James dly SEO that's your

56:05 desired outcome if you're not telling the AI that it doesn't know it doesn't

56:10 start mentioning your brand it doesn't no one doesn't try to start doing sales content to get them to fill in the call

56:16 to action button and stuff like that so the source context desired outcome as well as the title of the page and the

56:23 prompts of how you want it being set out if you do that then AI content is

56:29 incredible it's better than me writing it like I'm not ashamed to turn around

56:34 and say that AI is more intelligent than me at writing content when I give it the right prompts and for anyone to turn

56:40 around saying I'm a better writer than AI probably just not giving it the right prompts okay now let's move to our final

Where is link building heading in 2025?

56:48 segment which is the link building now many agencies rely on link building as their main SE strategy where do you see

56:55 link building heading in 2025 and Beyond I'd say less is more so make

57:01 certain that you start first and foremost make certain you get all the foundational links there citations press releases to get referring domain count

57:08 up to get loads of no follow anchor text and uh yeah sorry no follow links uh

57:15 naked URL anchor text so you've got those foundations put in place that when you do start doing guest post and doing

57:21 exact match anchors it's very very low on the percentages because you got lots of naked URL or branded

57:28 anchors but then after that I would prefer to have three I call them now

57:35 power posts So within seero which is an agency that I invested into I TR to have

57:40 three power posts then 10 guest posts and you go well okay what's a power post

57:46 and I what a power post is is a guest post on steroids so it's a guest post

57:52 that's written very well using the same prompts that just been talking about so

57:58 it's semantic content that ranks well that's actually trying to rank for the keywords that you want your money site

58:04 to rank for some people might want to call it parasite SEO right because you're trying to rank your guest posts

58:12 and you power those guest posts up with tier tws to that guest post and you're

58:17 getting some sort of virility to that guest post so you tick in the box that it's got social it's got traffic it's

58:24 got tier tws and it's well written WR on a third party website I soon have three of those articles which we call power

58:31 posts the intent guest posts that's got no tier tws no virility no social

58:38 signals it's a thousand words of content that's very generic and might not even index so just it's quality over quantity

58:47 nowadays try and raise the bar and you might need to spend more for the power

58:53 post than you do a guest post but I think they've got 10 times more power and they're not 10 times the price so

58:59 people might need to start understanding there's still a lot of money in link

59:05 building are still a lot of gains to be buying links but go with the higher

59:12 quality ones improve the content maybe add internal links if you can some web Masters say they can some say it's 10

59:19 pound per internal link sometimes if you can do it on a powerful existing page

59:24 and internal link it through to your new guest post that can give you some great power then you might not need tier tws

59:30 if you're not getting any internal link juice power get a few tier 2s through to it to ignite and pass through all the

59:37 page rank of what you want through to your designated website so when you mentioned these three power post I

59:43 understand but when you mentioned those 10 guest post does those 10 guest post need to link to these three power post

59:49 or to the money site no no no I was saying just I would prefer to have fre power posts instead of 10 guest posts

59:57 okay don't need the 10 guest posts but if you do basically all what I'm trying to say is if you go in with 10 guest

1:00:03 posts try and raise the bar of the content that goes on them on them guest post try to make certain that they get

1:00:10 in some sort of viability like sharing on social media maybe even running Twitter ads through to that guest post

1:00:17 to get some viability that comes through to it so if you went and ran Twitter ads from India that's a lot cheaper than

1:00:24 from the UK but that ility and real logged in users kind of ignite that page

1:00:30 and give it reason for Google to crawl all the page and pass the page rank distribution through to your website I I

1:00:37 have a an internal kind of thing where I believe a lot of guest posts have got

1:00:42 zero power until you give it reason to have power and the zero power to give it

1:00:49 the power needs to be social signals traffic being loaded into an indor tier

1:00:54 2s internal links good quality content try and do all them things and it

1:00:59 doesn't cost you that much more and by doing all them things that the that

1:01:05 little the quality is that little bit better you get so much more than from your guest

What metrics should you focus on for evaluating backlinks?

1:01:10 posting okay that's actually a good advice now uh there's a growing

1:01:16 sentiment that traditional back Ling metrics like domain Authority might be less relevant now so what matrics do you

1:01:24 focus on when evaluating the quality of potential backlinks so the whole AG of a bat link

1:01:32 is to have a powerful trusted low toxicity relevant with traffic bat link

1:01:40 that is the Holy Grail of a bat link but as you know and you're probably going to

1:01:46 laugh if anyone went off those metrics they'd never build a bat Link in the life because every bat link that you do

1:01:53 has got some level of toxicity every B link that you do is never going to be a do follow dr90 link it's never going to

1:02:01 be a trust flow of 50 link like it's just non-existent right so you need to

1:02:08 understand the parameters and you need to understand what type of links your competitors are buying and all that you

1:02:13 need to do is do enough to win so there's a classic saying that I first heard from Kyle Kyle rof that you don't

1:02:20 need to be faster than the bear you just need to be faster than the people running away from the there because like

1:02:27 so all what I mean by that is you don't need Perfection you just need to be better than your competition you only

1:02:34 need to rank number one and that doesn't need a perfect SEO strategy it just needs a strategy that's good enough to

1:02:40 beat your competition so knowing that that's the Holy Grail not but not every

1:02:46 link can do that right there's times where if can you get a powerful relevant link I'll get that tick can you get a

1:02:53 high trust relevant link i' get that tick take can you get a nonrelevant but it's loads of trust and loads of power I

1:03:00 want that take so not all the times can you get at the one link to tick all the

1:03:06 boxes but if you can be getting links and they're passing something through

1:03:12 then great now what you don't want to be doing is getting a non-p powerful and high toxic link do you know what I mean

1:03:19 so it's you just got to look at the boundaries and work out is this link worth it is this link going to move the

1:03:26 needle and if if you're not certain and it's going to cost you 100 don't get it but if you're like if there's one for2

1:03:33 200 but you think yeah I think this definitely will then get it then get it and at times instead of buying lots of

1:03:39 50 pound and 100 pound links you might just need five more more expensive ones

1:03:45 that you knowing are going to move the needle than lots of the cheaper ones that are guest Post Farms the dr's been

1:03:52 manipulated to a dr65 that they've got no traffic that the link to pawn websites Casino

1:03:58 websites CBD websites you just know that there spam and but people go but it's a

1:04:04 dr65 and it's 30 pounds and so what like I diso that link I don't want the link

1:04:11 like you give it me for free I do not want that link I'm not bothered that it's a dr65 and that's the difference between

1:04:18 understanding what a good link is and what isn't a good link one thing more I would add is when we are building we

1:04:24 build lot of links for our clients in agency what kind of a backlinks that guest post site is actually ranking for

1:04:31 you know sometime it is ranking for all those shitty meaningless keywords even they have all the uh tick it has high

1:04:38 traffic High da high D everything but end of the day if it is ranking for a non-relevant keyword we don't go for

1:04:44 that even what cheap or expensive I've seen that doesn't work out yeah I mean

1:04:49 so many of them now are starting like manipulating the Dr and manipulate the traffic metrics by ranking for like

1:04:54 error code or telephone numbers codes and stuff like that and it's just it's so obviously a Spam site

1:05:02 and the linking out to everyone so it just comes part of a bad link neighborhood like you're been seen

1:05:08 alongside loads of these porn sites or toxic websites and yeah you're completely right there you don't want to

1:05:14 be getting those type of links now for uh businesses with limited resources what would you uh recommend

What is the best link building approach for limited resources?

1:05:21 link uh link building approach that offers the best return on invest for them so do you know what I'd probably

1:05:29 start to do it depends on what Niche that they're in if they're in a a competitive Niche you need money so

1:05:35 don't enter a competitive market if you've not got money it's as simple as that I don't want to sugarcoat it in any

1:05:41 other way saying oh you can rank in competitive like you need Authority as

1:05:46 long alongside like building good quality content but if you want to go after like a low to medium keyword

1:05:53 competition a lot of sites you you can end up ranking by having good quality content and then just getting like your

1:05:59 branded link so getting like um your your Twitter your Facebook your

1:06:04 Instagram your YouTube and then doing like web twos like your Tumblr your wee

1:06:10 blit your Rebel Mouse your blog spot and you're going and get all your social Fortress around your website load them

1:06:16 into the indexes so like load them into index optional or something like that go and maybe do some at that point you can

1:06:23 do some cheaper type of Links at tier two like GSA still actually works so you

1:06:28 can go and get some GSA at tier 2 to those profiles um money robot still

1:06:34 works SEO Neo SEO autopilot all these cheap forms of bat links can still work

1:06:40 but I just wouldn't direct them directly to my money site so you could go and get some cheaper links pointing to your

1:06:46 branded social Fortress which then's passing relevance through and then un like medium.com go and get some decent

1:06:54 quality articles WR on medium.com and power them up and they will start ranking for longtail keywords like you

1:07:01 could start ranking for link building agency in and then an area if that's

1:07:07 what you're wanting to go after or SEO agency or PPC agency or um Facebook

1:07:13 advertising agency in different areas even just with medium medium.com post

1:07:19 LinkedIn pools these these places still actually Rank and then obviously as it starts to rank like I was saying at the

1:07:25 start of the video Don't Go buying an expensive car or expensive clothes reinvest that money get some good

1:07:32 quality links and as you start to get the good quality di site you start ranking for more you start earning more

1:07:37 build a second website build a third website and so on and so on but start reinvesting that money and have that

1:07:43 three-year plan of being like consistent and disciplined to saying I've got a

1:07:49 freear plan that I'm going to build it out because I hear all the time if you've not got money if I've not got

1:07:55 money if I've not got money well the majority of times if you've not got money go and get yourself a full-time job go and work overtime go and work

1:08:02 weekends go and earn that money and then start building out your site so you do have money because it's like saying oh I

1:08:09 want to be a plumber but I don't want to buy a van and I don't want to buy my tools well you need a van and you need

1:08:14 the tools do you know what I mean so you need s some money to start off in SEO

1:08:20 like you need some money to be a plumber because you need the right tools to do the job you want to cut down a tree you

1:08:25 need a chainsaw if you've not got a chainsaw what what you going to cut down a tree with do you know what I mean it's

1:08:31 going to take you a long time you need the right tools for the job and the right tools for the job of SEO is you

1:08:36 need you need some links so you need to somehow earn some money whether that's

1:08:41 consultancy agency getting work stacking shelves of a weekend whatever that needs

1:08:47 to be do it to get the money for you then to reinvest in building out the websites okay yeah let we just

What future trends and advice should businesses consider?

1:08:54 approaching uh we actually overcross the time so I'm just going to run few questions very fast now uh for the

1:09:00 future Trend and advice is what emerging Technologies or Trend do you believe will have the biggest impact on SE and

1:09:06 digital marketing in the next couple of years AI okay now uh what advice would

1:09:12 you give to agency owners who are trying to differentiate themselves in an increasingly competitive

1:09:18 market um be [ __ ] awesome um just do everything like LIF

1:09:24 lift up your fresh should of quality be good um be just be great for the

1:09:30 customer stop trying to cut Corners try to overd deliver an under promise and

1:09:36 then long term what you're going to do is if you under promise and overd deliver clients are going to sing and shout about how awesome that you are

1:09:43 they're going to get the testimonials you're going to get the case studies if you're not certain how to rank keep

1:09:48 learning every day is a school day I'm still learning today on so many parts of the algorithm so if I'm still learning

1:09:54 today and I've been in it nearly 20 years and I I own thousands of websites then I'm sure a lot of people watching

1:10:01 this will be like well wa on a minute if he's got one of the largest testing teams in the world and he's breaking the

1:10:06 the algorithms every single day and he's still saying he's learning maybe I'm not great at SEO as well and maybe I should

1:10:13 always be learning because you need to be innovative ideas like we've was

1:10:18 touching on on the last question then ai ai is evolving every day and what what

1:10:24 you can do now like the new gbt's just come out the new Sonic's just come out like everything's becoming more

1:10:30 sophisticated and better and you need to stay on top of those Trends and like where was talking about reaching out to

1:10:36 200 people a day nhn I don't know if you've ever heard of that on

1:10:42 make.com both of them two platforms you can create AI agents you can start to

1:10:47 write statuses in your tonality so it looks like everything's you you've got 11 labs to do um audio kind of cloning

1:10:55 your audio you've got um hen that can do videos and stuff like that in a year's

1:11:02 time you could be interviewing me and it could be the AI Avatar of me say and I might not there as well exactly yeah you

1:11:10 could be interviewing me it both me and you drinking a panina CL on the beach

1:11:15 right very much possible yeah how do you personally stay ahead of the curve and

1:11:21 continue learning in such a fast-paced industry you need you it's all comes down to mindset it all comes down to

1:11:28 understanding that every day is a school day you want to be a better version today as you was yesterday you want to

1:11:33 be speaking to the right people that are doing amazing things not being shy to reach out if you see someone do has done

1:11:39 something great reach out to them and I try and offer some value to them like can I help you by doing this this and

1:11:46 this or if someone posted a case and you found a problem on the site of what they posted a case study on reach out to that

1:11:52 SEO agent say oh just making you aware looked at this site and there's this this and this and so you're not going

1:11:58 direct to the client you're going to the S agency they're very thankful or thank you very much for pointing that out just

1:12:04 provide value um if someone's asking questions in Facebook groups try to answer it if you know the answer to it

1:12:10 um getting your name out there but just consistently wanting to learn um and

1:12:16 opening doors every day speaking to new people attending the net networking attending these

1:12:22 conferences um and yeah just being Innovative in the that you think okay now we come to the last

What insights can you share in a rapid fire round?

1:12:29 segment of our show which is the rapid fire round so short answers whatever

1:12:34 comes first in your mind you ready yeah okay what's the number one SEO mistakes

1:12:39 you see agencies making not doing disos okay one tool you can't live

1:12:45 without for SEO AI okay biggest myth about Su in

1:12:51 2025 biggest what sorry myth

1:12:57 and that highd links work okay if you had to rank one thing

1:13:02 content link or technical SEO what matters the most

1:13:09 content okay what's the best piece of advice you have ever received in your

1:13:17 business good question um I've had a lot of good advice because I've had a lot of good mentors I'd say getting a getting a

1:13:24 good Mentor getting a good consultant and Mentor that's going to keep you in shape keep your feet on the ground and

1:13:30 consistently keep saying that you can do better because like you want to keep striving to improve because also it's

1:13:36 good for the mindset to strive to consistently want to improve all right now James this has

1:13:43 been an absolutely Illuminating conversation before we wrap up I have two final questions for you yeah first

How can viewers connect with James?

1:13:49 what's the best way for our listeners to connect with you and learn more about your work so I'm quite active on my

1:13:55 YouTube channel or any social media um if you go to james.com then you'll see

1:14:00 all the links to all the different social media platforms probably say um probably say YouTube's probably the best

1:14:07 watch a video leave a comment if you want if you want any answers qu uh any answers to expand on what that topic is

1:14:14 about um or you can yeah go on to james.com okay and finally if there's one piece of

1:14:21 advice you could give to a digital marketing professional that would make the big impact on their business what

1:14:26 would it be to understand what their weaknesses are and then try to partner

1:14:32 up with someone that kind of is an expert of what they're weak at um I do believe that SEO is a team sport I

1:14:39 nearly every single Venture that I do I normally do with a business partner too many people think I don't want to give

1:14:44 50% of away of my business but sometimes if they can do things that you're not

1:14:50 very good at then that 50% is called Synergy and one plus one equals three so

1:14:56 combined forces together can give such a better Force um that might open doors

1:15:01 and other opportunities as well so I'd say start doing more Partnerships and joint ventures with people that

1:15:07 complement what you're weak at okay uh and I want to thank you sincerely for sharing your insights and

What are the final words of wisdom?

1:15:14 experience with our audience today of course your perspective on SEO link building lead generation indexing and

1:15:21 especially on building successful agency partnership has been incredible well value and uh to our listeners if you

1:15:28 enjoy this episode please don't forget to subscribe to the agency Insider show and leave us a review it helps us reach

1:15:33 more agency owners and digital marketing professionals with this valuable content yeah one one one more thing I'm just

1:15:40 going to cut you in there if anyone's watching this and they've got any questions leave a comment in the comment section I'll personally come back and

1:15:47 answer any question that you have on anything that I spoke about if there's anything you was uncertain about leave a

1:15:52 comment in the comment section and I'll come back to you with any answer thank thank you for very much for that

1:15:58 and if you are an agency owner looking to scale your SE offerings without expending your in-house te visit petra.com to learn more about our wh

1:16:05 label SEO Services designed specifically for agency like yours and once again thanks again James and thanks to

1:16:12 everyone for tuning in don't forget to subscribe and leave a review see you into the next episode and thank you