James Dooley on SEO, Lead Generation and Affiliate Marketing

Everyone in SEO knows who James Dooley is. In this episode of the podcast, Olesia Korobka sits down with him to find out how he thinks, how he runs his businesses, and how he approaches both people and SEO. Expect practical lead generation tactics, candid takes on the casino and affiliate niches, and a few lifehacks along the way.

Key takeaways

• Engagement is a core ranking lever. James uses email lists, Facebook groups, Reddit and Quora to drive real clicks and behavioral signals to pages and videos, for both global and local search.
• He is a strong advocate of barnacle SEO, what most people call parasite SEO. A well written article placed on a high authority, Google News approved site can get indexed and rank within seconds, and he calls it the best ROI strategy in today’s algorithm.
• Lead generation should become sales generation. His roughly 90 person Manchester call centre aims to reach financial leads in under a minute, then cross sells and upsells to raise the average transaction value.
• He sees himself as a project manager and entrepreneur rather than a great SEO, pulling in specialists for content, links, schema and knowledge panels the way you would hire a bricklayer, a plumber and a roofer.
• Network is net worth. He helps people freely, believes what goes around comes around, and defines success as happiness rather than money or a number one ranking.
• In the casino niche, do not chase head terms like ‘online casino’. Win with long tail keywords, specific GEOs and sub niches such as slots, free spins and no deposit, and ask affiliate managers which programs pay best.
• Affiliate SEO has been hit hard by the reviews and core updates. His R&D team is testing content pruning, removing fluff, more aggressive disavows and full rewrites, and has found that casino, affiliate, YMYL and local each behave like different algorithms.
• On the page, title tags are his favourite lever, since a single change can move a page from position three to one, backed by keyword research grounded in real search intent.

What James Dooley covers in this episode

• 0:25 Why Manchester
• 0:42 How to inflate keyword volume on Ahrefs and YouTube
• 3:50 How to rank for best online casino
• 4:40 Parasite SEO
• 6:02 Call centre for lead generation
• 7:08 Cross selling and upselling
• 10:35 Being people oriented
• 14:30 Good SEO versus good entrepreneur
• 20:30 Family
• 22:30 Getting into millionaire circles
• 24:32 How to connect with James Dooley
• 28:31 Partnering in business
• 31:30 Favourite niche
• 33:27 How to start ranking in the online casino niche
• 35:56 Affiliate management
• 39:30 Future of affiliate marketing
• 45:15 R&D department
• 51:20 What James likes to do in SEO himself
• 53:25 Clients

The full conversation

Olesia: You also told me that I can ask you anything.

James: Anything you want.

Olesia: What do you think about questions which are too straightforward? Or, what do you think about people who are asking too straightforward questions?

James: Like what? Explain. Give me an example.

Olesia: Can you show me your income report?

James: Yeah, I can show it, no problem.

Olesia: You could be based anywhere in the world, right?

James: Yes

Olesia: Why Manchester though?

James: Obviously, my office is based there, my home and my family are all there, so I like being based in Manchester even though I don’t like the weather. I think it’s a great city. I think it’s one of the best cities in the world, if I’m being honest with you. Um, but I do like then going on holidays to warmer places in the world.

Olesia: Let me share my screen. You once posted, it was, I think, a year ago, uh, right? ‘James Dly is better than Craig Campbell, with volume almost 5,000.’

James: Yeah.

Olesia: How did you do that?

James: That was just done by using CTR tools, like SERP Empire and CTR Booster and stuff like that. So because they’re using different IPs, it was able to get picked up in Google Search Console, and then Ahrefs must be buying some data that is using Google Search Console or click data, clickstream data or something like that. And then it can show the Google search volume in there.

Olesia: Do you do that for your competitors, like, for example, for guiding them in the wrong direction?

James: Um, no, not normally. We do autocomplete and autosuggest for certain keywords. I always try and do it in a positive manner, so I’m always trying to like, let’s say, for certain brands, I’ll use the brand name with awards so that people can they might want to click through to that to see all the awards that that brand have won. I never really do anything from in a negative kind of negative SEO way. It’s just not the way I do business.

Olesia: I’ve also noticed that you do the same for YouTube, and you use the same clicks tools? Yes?

James: Yeah, yeah, we use engagement and behavior signals for everything, so images, videos, web pages. I feel like engagement is one of the key factors of SEO.

Olesia: Do you mean the engagement as key factors for YouTube and local on Google only, or for global search as well?

James: So, we try on global search and also for local. A lot of the searches, what we try to do is we try to get real engagement. There’s nothing better than real engagement, so we’ve got massive email lists of people that might be interested in certain blog posts that we write about or videos that we do. We’ve got certain kinds of Facebook groups that we’re in, where we can post certain things and ask them certain questions, like, ‘What did you think about X, Y, and Z?’ And then what they’ll do is they’ll go and click through to the video, watch it, and they might give a like, or they might give feedback with regards to comments and stuff like that. We’re asking that information for people to try to, see what their thoughts are on it. Yeah, yeah, I’m a massive advocate of behavioral signals and engagement for everything.

Olesia: What tools do you recommend? Or, do you use anything else?

James: You’ve got different sites that you can use, so you’ve got microworkers, you’ve got Mturk, certain CTR tools. But the best way of doing it is being active in, like, Reddit, in Quora, on all these different kinds of social media platforms, getting like large Facebook groups and stuff like that, and then sharing in those groups and trying to get real people to click through and stuff like that.

Olesia: Are you afraid of Googlers entering these Facebook groups and chasing you afterwards?

James: No, because I’m not doing anything in a fishy way. I’m trying to get real people to go and click through to a website, to give me genuine feedback of what their thoughts are on a site. Like, I’m not asking someone to, in the Facebook groups, I might ask them to go and do something that they don’t want to do.

Olesia: Will share my screen once again. Koray posted that he showed you how to rank a fresh domain for ‘best online casino’ in 15 seconds.

James: Yeah.

Olesia: What did he show you?

James: That was just banter. It wasn’t. That’s not the case. That was just a joke. If you wanted to know certain ways of how you can rank certain things pretty quickly, I’d say if you wanted to go down those roads, where we have like, it was tongue and cheek banter, where he didn’t show us there and then. But parasite SEO, if you get a well-written, semantically well-written article and put it on the right site, you can rank very, very quickly, especially if it’s a Google News approved site. Google normally picks it up and indexes within 15 seconds. So, there was a little bit of truth in it, but not specifically something that he showed there and then. It was more banter and a joke.

Olesia: And do you often use parasite SEO for your properties?

James: Yes, we use it. Yeah, we use it for everything. I don’t like, first and foremost, I hate the name ‘parasite SEO’ because ‘parasite’ is where you’re leveraging a third party at the expense of them being harmed by you doing it. But actually, if you look at parasite SEO, which is also known as ‘barnacle SEO’ or ‘piggyback SEO’, actually it’s a win-win-win situation, if you do it right. One, the content writer that produces the article is given a well-detailed article, and they’re getting the exposure on a powerful domain. Two, the person that owns the hosted domain that you’re placing the link on, they’re getting traffic and engagement from the audience for the article that you’ve had written and probably written it for free. And three, the users. If you write a well-detailed article that is good for the user, the visitor, and the user gets a good user experience. The person that’s actually publishing the article, who runs the website, gets a good experience. And the content writer gets exposure that probably couldn’t have got on their own website. So for that reason, yes, I’m a massive advocate of barnacle SEO being a great solution for you to use. But I don’t like the word ‘parasite SEO’, but that’s what everyone seems to call it.

Olesia: You have lots of lead generation websites, and you are famous for being like maybe a leader in some niches for lead generations. I’ve heard that you’ve got a huge call center, maybe more than 100 people in that. Is it true?

James: Yes, so we’ve got a call center in Levenshulme in Manchester. think it’s down to about 90 something staff that’s in there. That’s mainly for financial lead generation type stuff. So mortgage brokers, could be business debt, liquidation, administration, personal debt stuff like that. So we start to do quite a lot of lead gen in the finance sector and we started to realize that if you didn’t get hold of the people in under a minute, we always tried to have KPIs for 23 seconds, but if it’s not been done in under a minute, then the lead could get lost because they’re going to fill it in with somebody else. So having the lead generation and changing it to a sales generation has given us massive extra profits on the way we do business.

Olesia: And also I don’t know, I can cut it off if you don’t want it to be in the video, but I’ve heard about your interesting model of how you do that. So you take your lead at the starting point, but then you like sell them everything else in the process. For example, if they are moving, you then can also try to sell the mortgage and everything like that. So, can you explain your model a bit if it’s not a secret?

James: Yeah, so not a problem. So, like, if someone calls and fills in, let’s say someone is looking for a new mortgage, right? At the time of getting a new mortgage, at that time, is when you’re most likely to think about life insurance, because you might be moving in with your misses, or with your fellow, or partner, whoever it is. And as you’re moving in with your partner, at that time, people might be thinking about life insurance. So why, when you’ve got a mortgage inquiry, if you can mention, ‘Oh, by the way, we’ve got some good deals on life insurance,’ they’ve not inquired about that. If you ask the question, ‘Are they interested?’ A lot of the time, they are. If someone’s looking to get, let’s say, a will that’s being written, which means that they’re passing like the assets down to the kids when they pass away, at that time when they’re thinking about that, they might also be looking at things like equity release or pensions, because they generally, when you’re looking to have a will written, generally speaking, audience is an older audience. So if you could look to cross-sell certain products and services, then it makes sense. It complements. If you were doing SEO, and someone was asking about content being written, they might, you might also ask, ‘Are you thinking of getting any backlinks to these articles that you have written?’ and stuff like that. So we’re a massive advocate of cross-selling and upselling in everything that we do.

Olesia: And how do you do that? Because most people, it’s very hard for them to think about that or to propose something like that. So how, how did you decide to do that, and how do you help those who work with you to do that?

James: That’s a great question because it’s very difficult in trying to educate people unless you know the industry very well, what other kinds of services complement what you do. And that’s why you’ve got to try to be careful that you’re getting the right people in place who know everything about the industry that the leads are coming in for. So one of the things that we’ll do is we’ll go when we first enter a market, we’ll have a big whiteboard session, like, ‘What else might be they be interested in?’ So in marketing, if someone’s interested in PPC, well, why are you interested in PPC? What’s the reason for you wanting to run ads? And they might say, ‘I want more inquiries.’ Right, okay, have you also thought about SEO? Have you also thought about content? Have you also thought about backlinks? Because your end goal is to get more inquiries, we can help you in X, Y, and Z. Could be the same with Facebook ads. You then could cross-sell PPC and cross-sell Twitter ads or other platforms like that. So it’s about knowing who your customer is and once you know who the customer is, seeing what other things you can sell. So I’m a massive advocate of your average transactional value, which is known as your ATV in business. If you can drive that up, you don’t need to keep looking for new business; you’re just trying to get more money from existing clients. They’re happy, they don’t need to deal with different companies, and obviously, you’re happy because you’re making multiple sales from that one inquiry.

Olesia: You are quite a proponent, from what I’ve observed, of who you know and who you connect with, and that people help each other, and you, I’ve seen you helping people all across the Facebook in different groups and even in private messages without any particular benefit to you personally, and you answered all the questions in a straightforward manner. Why is it so important to you? Why are you so people-oriented?

James: So, I, I’m a massive advocate that your network is your net worth. Every day is a school day, and what I know today might not work tomorrow. So if I can help everybody out in what I know works today and from my own understanding of making a lot of failures, if I can stop other people from making those failures, then I feel like I’ve achieved some sort of accomplishment to help others and elevate others along the way. But I also do believe that in return, that if you help others, and you don’t ask for money, and you just do it for the benefit of one, trying to help them, I believe in karma. So I do believe in the ‘what goes around comes around.’ So if you can help other people out, that if tomorrow I’m struggling with something, and I ask someone that’s an expert in server log analysis, or let’s say, you’re an absolute unbelievable expert with regards to knowledge panels and schema, that’s a massive witness on my behalf, so I know that if you help me out in schema and knowledge panels, I know I’m going to do everything I possibly can to help you out in return, whenever you’re struggling with anything that you might be struggling with. So I’m a massive advocate, like you said, your network is your net worth, and you should be trying to elevate others, and not only that, it’s rewarding internally for the mindset, to try to help others. You feel like you’re doing some good in the world.

Olesia: Also, there is this saying, ‘I put my mouth where my money is.’ How to connect this all?

James: Right, yes. So, every single day, I practice what I preach. So if I turn around and say that I feel that these types of backlinks work the best, I’m saying it because that’s what I’m using. If I say that this is the best way of writing an article, I genuinely say it because that’s what I’m doing at that time. Now, I might have said things previously that I don’t no longer do anymore, but along the way, you’re always learning and trying to develop in stuff of how you try to improve, but yeah, it’s, I don’t want to say something and don’t genuinely believe what I’m trying to say is right for others to be able to do.

Olesia: But SEO is such a competitive space, there is only one top-1 place, no more. So your competitors may also read you, and they track you, and also use you in some way.

James: Yeah, sure. I mean, there are so many different, so like, I’ll only try and help people that I think are nice, genuine people. If I feel someone’s going to be a direct competitor and they’re going to go behind my back and stab me in the back, well then, I don’t want those people around me. I don’t want negative people around me. I want other people around me that I feel will help elevate me in my journey. And I, when I say ‘Elevate,’ that’s not just from SEO rankings, that’s in life in general, the outlook of life, of success. What is success? In my opinion, success is happiness. It’s not money. It’s not ranking number one in Google, even though that helps me be happy. It’s trying to surround yourself with the right people, and it doesn’t always mean the best SEOs in the world. It could just be people that have got a smile on their face that I think, you know what, I like being around them. So it’s, um, and at that point, it’s choosing, it’s choosing the right partners, it’s choosing the right kind of members of staff, even. You spend a lot of time with staff and VAs and business partners, that you’ve got to try to make certain that you like them as well. They’re cool, they’re nice people.

Olesia: Do you think that being a good SEO and being a good entrepreneur are two opposite directions or characters?

James: Definitely, yeah. Um, I’m not a good SEO, um, and I say this all the time. Like some people say, ‘Oh, you, like, you’re saying this, you say this all the time, you are a good SEO,’ stuff like, but I genuinely don’t think I’m good at SEO. I just feel that I’m good at pulling the right people in to do SEO. So, prime example, you, back to you with the knowledge panels and the schema. If I can get help from you on schema and knowledge panels where I know nothing about that, well then, happy days. I’m not the best at writing content and getting the right semantics and the subject, predicate, and object on the page. If I can use a content agency that’s brilliant at that, that understands getting the right entities on the page and understands everything about content, well, if I can leverage them for what I do, then that’s what I’m going to do. If with regards to backlinks, I’ve got certain agencies that geek out in Google Sheets and they’re very mathematical and they know what a good link and a bad link is, that’s who I’m going to use. And I always use the kind of, this saying of, if I built an extension on my house, would I build that myself? No, I’d get a bricklayer to do to build my wall, I’d get a plumber to come and do my taps and my water and the showers, I’d get a plasterer to come and do the plastering, I’d get a joiner to come and do the doors, I get a roofer to come and do the roofing. I leverage people as a project manager, and I feel I’m a very good business person and project manager, and I seem to motivate my business partners and my staff to do great work. Day-to-day, I don’t do much of that work, I just know what pieces need to be put together to build the extension on my house.

Olesia: Where did you learn these skills? Are these skills or were you born with this mindset or something like that?

James: That’s a great question, is it nature or is it nurture, and there’s a lot of people that some people say it’s nature, and you, and you’re born with those entrepreneurial kind of traits and the mindset you’re born an entrepreneur, but then I’ve seen people that are introverts and they’ve worked very, very, very hard at being an extrovert and getting up on stage, and still, at the core, they’re an introvert, but I do feel that if you genuinely want to be an entrepreneur, anybody can be an entrepreneur. It’s just about taking action and taking those risks and moving forward in doing it. You, it, no successful person in the world ever was successful in the comfort zone. You’ve got to get out of your comfort zone, and you’ve got to work hard, and you’ve got to fail, and you’ve got to push the boundaries as best you can, and, and I think it’s a mixture of both. I think you’ve got to have some sort of instilled into you, maybe at a younger age or born with it, but then I also do think if you genuinely want that, and you take the bull by the horns, then you can do it. You can do anything in life. People have had horrible upbringings, or they might not have been born with a disability, but some of these people are now the most successful people in the world because they’re so driven and determined to make success. Then I’d say it’s a mixture of nature and nurture, to be honest.

Olesia: And how did you get this for yourself? Where did you learn, did you have a coach, did you develop these traits?

James: I’ve got a lot of coaches still to this day. I always try to be a better person. I want to be a better person tomorrow than I am today, and I’ve got that mindset every single day. And I think the truth of that was probably instilled into me via my dad at a young age. So my dad was a successful steel business owner, and he instilled in me to never be arrogant, always strive to improve. There’s always, if you’ve got a big boat on the marina, there’s always going to be somebody else that’s got a bigger boat than you. Always strive to improve, always be humble, always know where you came from. And yeah, like, my dad was an amazing business mentor for me. Now I look at it, but actually, he was just teaching me good just to have respect for people at a young age. And I feel that using what he gave me at a young age now in business, of how I use it, he instilled a lot of the business traits that I have today, of just being a nice, genuine person, and what goes around comes around type mentality, that if you do help others, others generally will help you. If you do have the drive to always want to improve, then business, you never, you like, there’s no such thing as achieving your end goal in life because I know so many people that try to create an end goal, and when they achieve it, and they do get there, they become depressed. So you’ve got to work through your life as never having an end goal, life is always going to throw like, it’s like a roller coaster, growth is never linear, it’s always up and down, up and down, up and down, and the, if anything, at the, at the drops in business, more millionaires are made in the recession than they are when it’s good times. So if you understand that, and you understand that the recession actually at times can be good, well then, you never feel down, you never feel deflated, you’re always striving to improve and grow.

Olesia: Also, like once again, you’ve mentioned your dad here, and you seem to always mention your family, and it seems like it’s a very important part of your life. How, how do you think, for like, it should be for a general person, how much important the family and what purpose it serves in your overall success?

James: So, in my own personal world all of my success, I bring down to my family and friends around me. So my family being my wife. I couldn’t do what I do today if it wasn’t for my wife looking after the kids. Like, she’s an amazing mom. I try to be the best that I can be, but she allows me to go to work and do things, and if she didn’t, then I’d be held back from business because I’d need to spend more time during the day with my kids. So behind every successful man is an even more successful woman. So she’s a great wife, she’s a great mother of my kids. My mom, my mom made me, so I feel like she did a great job, now, but my, I wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for my mom. My mom’s been there, not just obviously because she gave birth to me, but, uh, my mom and dad are a brilliant parents, and I’ve got two older brothers that at a younger age used to push me in sport every single day to improve, and I feel that pushing in sport helped me to now have the drive to always want to improve in business like I was doing at sport. But the caviar to this is, I’m lucky that I’ve got an amazing mother, an amazing father, and two amazing brothers, and a nice wife. Now, some people are less fortunate, that they might be orphaned, they might not have a mother, might not have a father, they might not have brothers or sisters, and in that scenario, you can’t choose your family. So when I say family is important, sometimes to other people, family is not important, but your friends, that you can choose, which you do have a choice with being. If you choose the right friendship and you are genuine, and you are genuinely honest, and you’re nice, generally, you’ll find friends that have got the same traits as you, that are nice, that are honest, that are trustworthy, that do things with integrity. And at that point, your friends can become your family. And from that, then yes, it’s not always about family as such because you can’t choose it, but you can surround yourself with very positive people that make you a better person.

Olesia: Some people now, it’s like a fashion, so to say, they try to surround themselves with, get into the millionaire circles, you know, all these kinds of things, themselves not yet being there. So what do you think about this practice, like when people are trying to get into some circle where they are not belonging right now?

James: I feel there’s a saying that you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with. So whether that’s true, whether that’s not true, that’s in history, people say you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with. I feel there’s some sort of truth in it because if you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room, right? You need to be trying to hang around with people that are smarter than you, that are probably more successful than you. But what I would say as well is that just hanging around with millionaires because you want to be a millionaire doesn’t mean you’re going to be happy. And, and I’ll repeat again, success isn’t what, how much money you’ve got in the bank, success is happiness. And people have got different traits of what is happiness, and some people love having a big bank balance. For me, having a bank balance is nothing, I, you know, have everything I’ve got with regards to family and friends and the journey that I’ve been on, and have normally in the bank than have some money in the bank. Like, money to me isn’t the be-all and end-all. But for people who want to strive to improve in business and strive to improve in having more money, if you can hang around with people that are more successful, are better than you in business, I do feel you start getting certain traits, and you learn from them, and they’re setting good examples for what you should be doing to be where you need to be at today.

Olesia: You are like that type of person everyone wants to hang out with, and you are pretty busy. It’s very hard to get to you, even on a conference, like you’re always surrounded by a large group of followers and people wanting to get closer to you. How can a shy person, or introvert, a good, nice person, get to know you better, and to hang out with you a bit, when you have time or anything else? Maybe can they make, make you their coach?

James: So, that’s a great question, and I if you come over to me in a nightclub, I will get you up on stage and get you playing the drums, like I did with you. He was very good on the drums, as well, by the way. No, but if someone’s an introvert and they haven’t got the confidence to come over and speak to me because in a nightclub or in a bar if I’ve got five or six people around me, and then someone tries to get my attention, it might not be the best time because I might be already speaking to somebody, and then it’s almost someone being rude coming over trying to grab my attention. That might not be the wrong surroundings. But I’ve got JamesDooley.com, I’m on Twitter, I’m on Instagram, I’m on, leave a comment on my YouTube. Like, just try to get to, normally, leave, like, give me a tweet, give me a DM on Instagram, give me a DM on messenger, try to do it in a nice way, or try and try to find something that you feel that I’m not doing very well and say, ‘James, I love your attitude, and I love what you’re doing here, but I feel you could improve in this area.’ And you know what, something like that, I’ll be like, ‘Thank you so much for that feedback. I really appreciate that feedback.’ And then I’ll try to help them out in return. If someone just comes along saying, ‘Hi sir, please can you teach me SEO?’ I’m just going to delete that message because I don’t know who they are, I don’t know they know anything about me, why do they want to learn SEO in the first place? I’m not going to spend all my time in learning who they are. They need to come to me with something that I feel, and it might not even be good. It might not even be for me. I might listen to it; they might try and offer me something, or some sort of value, of being, ‘I feel you need to do this better.’ I might disagree with them, but at least they’ve taken the time to go and look at who I am and what I do. And if you go and do that, and yes, I mean, I try to give time to as many people as I can. Like, I don’t try to ignore the introverts and only speak to the extroverts. Some of the introverted people are the most successful people in the room. Sometimes the extroverts, the loud ones, aren’t the most successful people. And this is why I always try to like hustle in silence and let success be the noise. It’s only been in the last six, seven months I’ve started to do podcasts and do interviews because I was always like, you know what, I want to build brands, I want to build businesses, and I want my business partner, who is the founder or whatever, to go and excel in that business. I ain’t, I ain’t bothered. Like, I don’t need the fame. I don’t want the fame, if being 100% honest. It’s only now where I feel that a personal brand and AI is taking over a lot more that personal brands are becoming, I feel like they’re becoming more important, and I want to portray my own message about me before somebody else tries to portray a message about me. If some people look at me that don’t know who I am and say, ‘I’m this loud-mouthed party animal’ that that’s all he is, and actually, at my core, I’m quite a successful businessman. But I’m no more successful than many others that are in the industry. And I just want to come across as being, I’m quite humble, I love my family, I love my friends, and yes, I’ll speak to anybody, whether you’re an introvert, an extrovert, whether you’re black, you’re white, you’re male, you’re female. I, I don’t, I don’t have any sort of, well, I can’t speak to them. I’ll speak to anyone, and the door’s always open if anyone wants to hit me up and speak to me.

Olesia: That’s how you decide how to talk to people. How do you decide where to invest in business? So you see some website or some niche, how do you evaluate, do you want to deal with that or not?

James: So the day-to-day of going into, let’s say, lead generation for a niche, I don’t really get too much involved in that anymore. I’ve trained staff up in knowing what looks like a profitable niche and the search volume and stuff like that, and then go into it. And if it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t work out, we’ve got the money in the bank to basically turn around and say, ‘Let’s enter this market.’ When we first started out entering niches, I need to be very careful and very strategic in what works. But the more successful we’ve become in lead generation, the more we’ve started to realize it’s actually the obscure niches where you make the most money. So instead of it just being plumbing, like wet rooms, we’ve realized that, which is one and topic and service that a plumber does, that makes more money. Instead of roofing, heritage roofing is a lot better. Now, I would never have thought heritage roofing is even good. I didn’t even know what heritage roofing was until one of the members of staff entered that market. So from a lead generation, let them do their due diligence and go and test it, and if it works, then great. From a business partner point of view, I generally look at what I’m weak at and see whether I can partner up with someone who’s very good in that lane, and if I can help elevate them, be better at what they do, and help them build their business, but I can leverage that business for my own products as well, and my own services, then happy days. I try to create a win-win situation. Now, I don’t know, to this day, not one business partner of mine will ever speak badly about myself, who’s a business partner. And I’ve got a lot of different business partners, but I try to make certain I go above and beyond to help them more than what they would help me, but actually, the help that they bring to me is massive. Again, it’s almost like the synergy of… synergy is like, you combine forces, and like one plus one equals three. So the combined forces of working together give it a bigger value than you can ever think of. So I’m always trying to elevate others, I’m always trying to choose people that I think I can work with them, and when I’m looking at business partners that I think I can work with, one of the first things I ask myself is, ‘When things go wrong, are we both going to roll our sleeves up and work through this together and help each other out get through these bad times? Because we’re going to have bad times. And am I willing to go through the trenches with this person? And is this person going to have my back, and am I going to have his back?’ And if the answer to that is ‘yes,’ then they’re a good business partner to do business with.

Olesia: You seem to have lots of niches covered, not only lead generation, though lead generation is massive, of course, but you, you seem to work with crypto projects, with gambling projects, right?

James: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Olesia: You have business in racing, if I understood it correctly, horses. Which one is your favorite?

James: I’ve got a passion for horse racing, um, from a young age. I think it comes from my parents; they used to like horse racing. It’s one sport that brings us all together. So yes, I genuinely love horse racing as a sport. I enjoy not just the actual sport of the racing but I enjoy going, visiting my horses, going seeing how well kept they are, that they’re well fed, that they’re loving life out in the field. Some people think that horses are mistreated and stuff like that, but actually, if you came to any one of our stables, you’ll see that they’re better looked after than me. The, like, the stables are brilliant, they’re out in the field, they’re loving life, and yeah, so I, I love, I love horses, I love the sport of horse racing, and I love how it brings all the family and friends together, the whole weekend of the event of going to the races, getting dressed up, going, having a nice meal, and everything around it. So for that reason, I enjoy doing SEO for horse racing because I love the sport. But then I enjoy SEO as well, I’m being honest. I see SEO as being a game, like, in the fact of trying, trying to find out how to get to the next level, to find out how I can be top of the league, and how can I be top of the league for the industries that I’m in. And it’s almost like doing Sudoku, and, and certain games to go, ‘Okay, if I put that there, then what’s this, and what’s the next step here?’ And I’m quite strategically driven. So I also do love SEO as an industry as well.

Olesia: If I wanted to go for an online casino, change my niche completely, go for online, what would you recommend for me to do if I’m not with someone, or like, I’m one by myself? Is it at all possible for a person to enter the online casino niche on their own and earn something there?

James: So the, there are two answers to that. My first answer would be, don’t be naive to think that you can enter a market as big as that and go rank number one for ‘online casino,’ because to try to rank for ‘online casino,’ you’ve got no chance. You’ve got people that are spending two, three, four hundred thousand a month just solely on backlinks, never mind on content and everything else, or own the brand, what they’re trying to rank for. It’s a very, very, very tough niche. But could you make money working out the bedroom on your own in the casino industry? Yes, you can, is the answer. So, but you’ve got to find long-tail keywords, you might have to find certain GEOs, like, it could be certain foreign markets, so it could be, like, say, in Sweden, in Denmark, in different countries that might not even be the norm, like in Canada is quite a good-paying industry in the betting industry, uh, Brazil’s quite good, or India, uh, South Africa’s quite good for football betting. So you’ve got to try to find ways of knowing how to monetize it, and if you’re saying, how do you find that, speak to your affiliate managers, ask them what they want more players on. They might say, ‘I want more slots players specifically for,’ and you say, ‘Okay, what’s the best 10 slot games that people are playing at the moment? What’s the 10 newest slot games that you can do?’ So then you might then go and build a site out specifically just for slot games. So you don’t talk about poker, you don’t talk about baccarat, you don’t talk about roulette, you don’t talk about all this, it’s a slot game site. Or you might just do a free spin site, or you might do just a no deposit site, or you might just go after like high roller players that just want the maximum wins, and stuff like Mega Way Slots. So, there are lots of little sub-niches within the casino market where you can make some good money. But if you’re trying to go after the primary terms, you’re going to struggle. If you’re going that route, you need to think of the long tails that you can win on and understand that you need to move through your traffic tiers and understand where you are at as a company or as an individual in comparison to where other people are at.

Olesia: Do you have an affiliate management system as a business yourself? So do you got…

James: We’ve got, you know, we’ve got a sales team that deals with all the affiliate managers. So, like in the casino market, I think there’s something like 48 different affiliate accounts that you need. I think there’s something like 500 different casinos, but like some affiliate accounts might have 40 casinos underneath the one affiliate account, but that’s still over 40 different affiliate accounts where you’ve got to fill in all your information, give all your bank details, give all your tax information, give everything through to that affiliate platform, and have a relationship with that affiliate manager. So, yes, you need somebody that, unless you’re going to just go after one white label affiliate platform that can give you their sub-affiliate links, that’s how you might want to start initially if you’re an individual. Because in time, you’re going to need two or three sales managers that are consistently talking to the affiliate managers to get the latest information of like, you also need to make certain your site is compliant, especially in the UK with the UKGC, compliance and stuff like that is key. Otherwise, you just get your account shut down. So for that reason, yeah, you need to have some sort of sales team or do subaffiliate links from like Catena or different media buying agencies that might allow you to do subaffiliate links.

Olesia: Can you recommend some affiliate program particularly?

James: In the casino market or in general anywhere?

Olesia: In the Casino Market.

James: In the casino market, probably the easiest way of doing it is whatever geo you’re in is go and type in ‘best casino sites,’ go and click on to every single one of them casino sites, scroll down to the bottom of the page in the footer, it’ll have who the affiliate platform is. Go and click through to that affiliate platform, sign up in an account with them, and say, ‘I’m interested in pushing all of your brands. What brands are promoting? What brands are best performing at present?’ And they might give you one or two casinos you’ve never even heard of that might have only just been released. The ones that are in the tables for the best casino sites or free casino sites or no casino sites or free spins no deposit or whatever terms it is that you want to go after, those generally speaking will be the best paying casinos because the existing affiliates that are promoting them are promoting them because they’re probably paying the highest CPA, the highest rev share, or a hybrid deal. So you might be getting like 200 pounds for a new player and 30% rev share for each player that you sign up for this casino. But then you might find one or two of the other ones that are more well-known, they might not be worth pushing because they might already have market saturation where they’ve already got quite a lot of players signed up to them, and their affiliate platform might only be giving them 50-pound CPA and 30% rev share. So you can get four times more from a new casino brand and majority of the casino players haven’t yet signed up to that account. So at times, it’s worth promoting those than the aged big trusted brands.

Olesia: Do you remember at the beginning, I asked you about income report?

James: All right, yes, yes, yes.

Olesia: Would it be possible if you showed something for a Casino associated or for some Casino affiliate website?

James: Yeah, that’s fine. Yeah, that’s, yeah, we can, we can show financials of what, like, what a certain site earns with regards to what platform it is, and how much you’re earning, how many clicks that they’re getting, what rev share deal that you’re on, how many unique clicks and how many FTDs and stuff like that, that you get. So yeah, I can, I can send that to you, no problem.

Olesia: Okay, thank you so much. What do you think about affiliate in general? Because like, after, especially these reviews update and core update as well, but mostly after reviews update, people have started noticing that many affiliate sites, they just vanish from the top results and they get now a fraction of traffic of what they used to have before. So what do you think about this affiliate in general? What’s its future? Is there any future for it?

James: I think at the present time, it’s in a very, very, very bad situation at present. Do I feel it’s going to improve? Yes, I think it’s going to improve, and I feel the reason why I think it’s going to improve is that at present, in today’s algorithm, parasite SEO or barnacle SEO, or whatever you want to call it, is probably the number one SEO strategy for a return on investment that you can do. So, go getting an article on a third-party high DR site, going doing some tier 2 backlinks and some kind of behavioral signals through to that page, and you stand a much better chance of ranking on that site than on these niche affiliate sites. And this is still to the date, and this is Google saying that they’re trying to combat parasites SEO and all the rest of it, but at present, it’s still working very well. I do feel that Google at some point is going to start punishing these sites that, at present, are ranking the best. The big newspaper sites that are ranking for all his terms that I don’t feel are any better than these affiliate sites. These affiliate sites, at least, have gone and done a review of every casino that there is and then they’re doing a roundup of the best casino sites. These newspapers are just going, getting the affiliates to write content on their site, and Google is now showing this newspaper site because it’s a highly authoritative DR 94 site or whatever it is, to now be ranking. But does that mean it’s better? Does that mean that they’ve gone and reviewed and done everything in a better way than this niche affiliate site? No, I don’t think they have. In fact, I don’t think they’ve actually done it as well as some of these niche affiliate sites. So, I feel that they’re going to have to, like, dial down the tone back to promoting some Affiliates because all they’ve done is dialed up the tone of parasite SEO. And it feels like they’ve tried to combat affiliate, but then all the black hatters of the world, all the ROI haters of the world, have now started to leverage these high authoritative newspaper sites, and that’s what’s working at present. But I do feel these are going to have a resurgence next year in 2024, where they’re going to roll certain things back.

Olesia: But, uh, maybe they don’t. Yeah, maybe these newspaper sites will continue ranking, maybe they’ll hire these affiliates that went bankrupt during the updates.

James: This is all guesswork, like, and that’s just my one person’s opinion. A lot of people say SEO is dead, affiliate is dead, and all the rest. I don’t think SEO is dead. I definitely don’t think that, because obviously, there’s lots of industries where you can make good money in. There’s also the display advertising platforms, not the affiliates that have been hit hard. And I don’t know whether there’s, some sort of something that they’ve put in the algorithm that, for X amount of pages that you have versus X amount of outbound clicks that you have, those are the sites that are being hit. So, obviously, like newspapers have got a lot of news articles, not just the affiliate sites. Is it that there’s not enough informational posts on these affiliate sites, or these display ads sites that are just been built to make money off display ads, like Ezoic, AdThrive, Mediavine, and stuff like that, that are linking out all over the place with these ads? Is it the amount of affiliate and outbound clicks from display ads that are being penalized? I don’t know. Is it that the content, everyone scaled the content using Surfer SEO and copycat content? Is it that, that people are doing, that they’re not bringing anything new to the table? There’s no information gain that’s been brought to their articles. And, realistically, also, if I look at it from Google’s point of view, someone that’s going, doing a review, or going ranking for ‘top 10 lawnmowers,’ and it’s just a small affiliate site, do you genuinely believe that they bought those 10 lawnmowers and used them all, and they’re comparing them? They probably haven’t. So, there becomes a point of should that affiliate site be ranking for ‘top lawnmowers’ when they’ve never even used the lawnmowers before. Do you know what I mean? So, like, sometimes these affiliate sites, some affiliate sites deserve to be hit because they’re not an expert in gaming chairs and lawnmowers and head streamers and everything else that they try and go after. So maybe some affiliates need to learn; they need to become an expert in a subject and stick to that subject and not do topic dilution across the whole site and try to be an expert of everything when Google knows that you’ve not bought all those head streamers and lawnmowers and everything else. So that’s where, like, the experience and E-E-A-T, or something, comes along with, ‘Have they used it? Is there like…?’ I know a lot of them now trying to do unboxing of products to try and prove that they have used the product. Is that going to help them out, recover? I… I don’t know. But that’s, we don’t know what’s going to happen in tomorrow’s algorithm. I can only look at what’s happening in today’s and try to optimize for today’s, and if it changes tomorrow, after to adapt.

Olesia: You’ve mentioned somewhere, I don’t remember where, you’ve got an R&D department for SEO, right?

James: Yeah.

Olesia: How many people are in that department, and what are you currently working on?

James: In the R&D team, it fluctuates from, is anything from six to fifteen members of staff in that, in that industry, in that, sorry, in that office. But in that office, the way it’s set up is, if we’re too busy on a project that we need to get out there very quickly, I can also move them from doing R&D to, let’s say, ordering backlinks, or doing anchor text, or doing the silo structures, and stuff like that. So I can use them for different tasks. But then what starts to happen is, when anybody has a question, whether that’s a customer to any of my agencies that I own, or whether it’s just an internal question for any member of staff, like, ‘What works better, this or this?’ We put it into the R&D testing team, and they go and test it, and check to see what works. The truth of the matter is, that with regards to R&D, it’s so difficult to test things in a live environment because there’s so many moving parts, so there’s never a ‘Here’s one test, and if this test says that X is better than Y, that X is better than Y,’ because there could have been a backlink that’s been done to that page at the same time of the test that’s had, or Google picked up an old link and gave it credit now. So, it’s a never-ending, it’s always an evolving R&D testing team. At present, probably one of the biggest things that they’re testing, because some of our affiliate sites have been hit hard as well, and I’m like, ‘Wow, we’ve had a massive decline,’ like I’m talking like 80% down on some of our affiliate sites to where some people go, ‘Oh James, you’re doing really well.’ Yes, some websites are thriving and doing very, very well, some of our agencies are doing very well, but some of our affiliate sites have been hit just as hard as everybody else’s. And I feel that these affiliate sites, the content’s good, I feel it’s good for the user, I think they’ve got a good backlink profile, I think the silo structure is good, so if at present Google doesn’t like our affiliate sites and we’re trying to fix, obviously the R&D team are now trying to fix it. So what they’re doing is a lot of testing, different types of disavows, being a lot more aggressive with the disavows, and almost removing everything. They’re doing content pruning, which is the opposite of what everyone talks about with regards to building out topical authority to cover the topic in its entirety. We’re actually deleting pages, we’re completely rewriting pages to try and remove all the fluff. So like, we used to, let’s say, use MarketMuse or Surfer, or Page Optimizer Pro. If Page Optimizer Pro came back saying this needs to be 4,000 words, our content writer will write the article in 4,000 words. Realistically, could you have written that article in 3,000 words and delivered all the messaging in 3,000 words? Yes. Well go and do that, remove all the fluff, because you’re only writing in 4,000 words because a tool is telling you to do it in that amount of words. So we’re trying to see, does removing the fluff help? Does content pruning help? Does disavows help? Do we need more backlinks? Do we need more link article velocity? Is the silo structure, the internal link over-optimized with the anchor texts, which I don’t think it is, but I’m, we’re just trying to work out everything. And the truth of the matter is, at present, it’s inconclusive. Like, we don’t fully know how to time and time and time again recover a site. I thought last month we were close to knowing what was working very well, and then we tried it on several sites, and it didn’t work. But then on some sites, it did work. So there are so many moving parts, and there are so many different nuances from niche to niche with what works and what doesn’t. The biggest surprise that I learned from the testing team is, what works in one niche doesn’t work in another. The biggest eye-opening moment for me has been, there isn’t just one algorithm; there are different algorithms for ‘your money your life,’ there’s a different one for casino, there’s a different one for affiliate to local. In local, you can still get away with a lot of spam, with duplicated content, with spun content, with like, lot of what I would deem as being low-quality type of links. That still works in local. That still works in some foreign countries in the non-English-speaking countries. Sometimes, spam still works as well. So these are the different things of what they’re testing to see what works best. We’ve tested this quite a lot. So certain pages just got completely pretty much de-indexed on our side. We were ranking position number one, in fact, one of them is the horse racing site that we have was ranking position number one for some big gambling keywords, and now when you went and copied and pasted a full section of content and put it into Google, it wouldn’t even show up as being any content on the internet. So it was like the page was still indexed, but the content on the page, none of that was in there. So it went from ranking in position number one to not ranking in the top 100, completely gone, with the content. So we got that page completely rewritten it, removed the fluff, and then we jumped onto page one straight away. Now, it’s almost like you completely need to change the page, like you’re saying, remove everything on the page, and then go and try and re-index the page, and then it jumps back. And I feel like people needing to do, I don’t know what kind of classifier they’re putting in place, but it’s almost like, ‘We don’t like this content. If you keep carrying on with this content, you ain’t going to rank. If you change it, we’ll bring you back.’ And yeah, it’s scary times, really, to try and find out what it is, because so many people say, ‘Oh, wait until the next algorithm update and you’ll come back.’ Yeah, but then if you make drastic changes and then they do roll it back, and then you could have been ranking number one again, it’s like, ‘What do you do?’ At the moment, you’re not ranking. Do you change it? But previously, years, it was working really well. I suppose you just got to try to foresee what you think is the right thing for the user, and long-term, it might work out the best for you.

Olesia: You said that you actually like doing SEO. What do you like to do the most? Do you like to make titles or H1s?

James: Oh yeah, I do like the titles. I like doing title tags. These times, you can change a title tag, and it can literally jump you from number three to number one. Literally, the optimization of title tags is quite good. I love keyword research. I love trying to dig deeper in understanding the source context and the intent of each page that we write because previously I used to waste a lot of money and the writers used to just write for SEO purposes and not understand who the demographic and the audience of the viewer is. And I think that that’s quite important, and I quite like speaking to my content team, of understand, for educating them, okay, so how are you going to write this page? Not just the entities you’re going to get on the page, what kind of tone of voice are you going to use, and stuff like that. So I quite like all elements if being honest. I quite like speaking to my link-building team and seeing what the best links are working at the moment, which can vary from time to time, or in local, like citations still work pretty well, or even press releases still work pretty well with getting like the GMB, the NAP listed, and put into the GMB, the video, the image, and stuff like I put in there, that can give like a big velocity of links in a quick space of time, as long as they’re like branded anchors and naked URLs. They work pretty well still. So just, I like understanding what’s working in today’s algorithm, but then I also love the SEO community. I think it’s one of the very few communities where people do genuinely try to help each other out. Where if I was a plumber and I had another plumber down the road, they almost wouldn’t speak because they each see each other as being competition. Where in this industry, I think because the industry is so big and diverse, and there are so many different ways how you can make money, I almost don’t see any other SEO as being a competitor. I try and befriend as many as I can, as long as they’re nice. And yeah, from there, then I think the community is amazing within the SEO, like, industry.

Olesia: Why did you decide to make an agency? Why did you decide to take clients at all?

James: So, we, I don’t deal, I do not like dealing with clients. I love dealing with people, but I don’t like dealing with clients. And the reason why I don’t like dealing with SEO clients is because it’s one of the very few industries where they don’t just pay you to do a service, they ask you what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, how you’re doing it, and stuff like that. They have to question everything that you do. But if you went and ordered a bricklayer to build you a wall, you let him just go and build the wall, and you leave him to it because he’s the expert and he’s the bricklayer at building walls. You don’t start asking, ‘Why did you hit that brick three times, but you only hit that brick twice?’ This industry, clients see you as being an employee, and they feel that they can ask you all these questions and not let you get on with your work. So the only reason why I’ve got certain agencies that do client work is because there was an existing agency that did client work, and we used them, and we were spending 50, 60, 70,000 a month on content and links with that agency. And I was thinking, if I can buy into that agency, one, it’s going to bring my expense bill down because I’m going to get it at a cheaper rate, but two, I can start demanding better quality control. So if I don’t like the content that they’re delivering, I can explain why I don’t like it and how the content needs to improve on semantic SEO. Or if the links, I don’t like some of the links because they seem to be toxic, I can start to remove them out of the database or remove them out of when they’re doing their outreach using Pitchbox, they can be removing what I deem to be not a good link. And then, for my own projects, I’m getting better quality control at better prices. The agency can still run itself, and the founder and the managing director of the agency can still deal with clients and deal with that, but I don’t personally deal with clients on a day-to-day basis because I don’t like the SEO industry for clients.

Olesia: Yes, me too. Yeah, and uh, what, what, uh, didn’t I ask you but you wanted to tell me?

James: For anyone who’s watching that’s in the casino market, if you’ve got a casino following, to work through your traffic tiers. If you’ve been hit hard at present, try to leverage barnacle SEO or parasite SEO, whichever way you want to call it. That’s what’s working in today’s algorithm. Is it going to be working tomorrow? I don’t know. Google is saying they’re going to clamp down on it. Just keep trying to look to grow your network, speak to other like-minded people, and just, yeah, just keep going. Like, don’t become too demotivated. It’s, you’re in a blip if you’re an affiliate, but I do feel, diversify your income streams. And yeah, that’s, I think you’ve asked me a lot of good questions, if I’m being honest. You’ve asked me a lot of questions. It’s very different from a lot of other podcasts, so I think as an interviewer, I think you’re very good at what you’ve done.

Olesia: Oh, thank you so much. Thank you. It was very nice to talk to you.

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About James Dooley

James Dooley is a British SEO entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of FatRank and PromoSEO. Known as a UK investopreneur and digital landlord, he has built and ranked more than 1,000 websites for lead generation. You can read more on his Fajela profile or visit his personal site.