Scaling PromoSEO: Advanced UK Lead Generation Strategies for Local Service Businesses

Carl Hutchinson: How James Dooley has grown a super successful business called Prom SEO that hosts over 650 businesses and many more ventures. And today I'm Carl Hutchinson today's podcast I'm joined with James and we're going to go through everything that he's done to get to this point with Prom SEO. And yeah, let's get into it.

James Dooley: Yeah, so Prom SEO is in over 650 different industries within the UK. Never really set out if I'm being honest with you to enter so many

Carl Hutchinson: Anyone who knows James, you know that was always going to happen though.

James Dooley: That's true, yeah. Yeah.

Carl Hutchinson: So why so many markets?

James Dooley: Um literally there was no plan. So it was just we started out in the playground industry. It led on then to landscaping, hard landscaping, fencing, flood lighting, doing blacktop like macadam surfacing, and things just kept progressing from there where it was we did a great kind of offering and then from there then we got referred in to others.

Carl Hutchinson: So out of the 650 what was the kind of starting point which which which niche did you go into first?

James Dooley: First niche was wetpour it's called which is like a rubberised safety surface for what like children play on. And that was just because that was the business it was soft services limited. We've drawn that from half a million a year to 10 million a year. So we've 20x there and in the last three or four years we've kept it and maintained it where it needs to be. We don't really want to take it any further than that you need like a second warehouse. So we've just looked at profitability but from there in the last 15 years from that start from soft services things just led into who do we work for? We work for playground equipment companies. So if we could get them busier it would get us busier. Landscaping companies we needed landscaping going around the park.

Carl Hutchinson: How you've ended up going to like different niches, basically almost like I don't know, like a sub niche or like a partner niche.

James Dooley: Yeah. So, they go hand in hand with each other.

Carl Hutchinson: Yeah, exactly that. Yeah, so we call it like growth by shouldering niches or neighbouring niches. Um and like one would feed the other. And then it just then started to lead on to someone was in finance, someone was doing mortgages, someone was doing pensions and wills, um legal.

James Dooley: So, so wait a second.

Carl Hutchinson: Wait a second. Wait a second. We're just in brick and mortar, now we're in pensions, mortgages. And anyone who knows these niches knows these are hard hard ass niches to rank in, right? So, how or what was the strategy involved with, you know, ranking in so many different niches as well? I I assume there's, you know, different strategies involved.

James Dooley: Yeah, there is different strategies for sure. Um it was just literally someone I think the first one in the finance was car finance. Um someone was basically was like, "Oh my god, I'm paying quite a lot for vehicle finance. Um you should get into that." It was like, "Oh, that's a good idea." Me being me just jumped straight into it. And there was definitely different nuances to the lead generation strategies of what's needed. Um they're much tougher industries to go after. Um but kind of liked it because it mean the team had to level up. And when they started to level up on ranking for finance related terms where maybe like authorship came in a little bit more into it, EAT signals. Um it's like your money, your life type industries that you needed to start building a little bit more trust um on that. Where previously it was mainly content and links. Now there's a trust element to it of what you needed to do as well. Um so, yeah, it it built out from there, really.

Carl Hutchinson: So, how do you then manage all of those cuz I assume obviously there's going to be with 650 different niches, there's going to be multiple partners almost in those niches. How are you managing those relationships?

James Dooley: So, we've got a large sales team. Um so, you need account management. You need to make certain that the clients are getting a return on investment, that they're happy with what they're doing. So, it's there's a large sales team. It's not like there's a lot of things now where you can go and click claw to kind of implement a lot of stuff, but I think the face-to-face sales team of what we have is is what makes us great. Um we're able to sit down and listen to our clients. Um as we sat down listening to the clients, we understand where they make profit and double down on those keywords where I think traditionally in SEO, I think a lot of people are obsessed over keyword search volume and CPC, like cost per click, and they think the highest cost per click means it's the most profitable service. It's not always the case. So, in local lead generation, there's so many keywords that can make 10 15,000 a month that might even show as only getting 20 monthly searches and

Carl Hutchinson: I've seen that myself where literally it doesn't even say sometimes say zero search and then obviously all of a sudden you you rank for it and it's like, "Wow, this isn't zero search."

James Dooley: Yeah, yeah.

Carl Hutchinson: It's not zero search.

James Dooley: So,

Carl Hutchinson: why have you only done UK? That's the next sort of question. I know like obviously you are huge in the UK with the the Pro SEO side and all the lead generation strategies you do, but why only UK?

James Dooley: It was mainly to do the the only other one if I was going to or the other two that I was if I was going to do it would be Australian US, right? Huge markets, different time zones. I believe that I'm one of them kind of people that people like dealing with people local to where they are. So, UK like buying from UK people. Um US if they're dealing with a UK person, it's out of hours. It's just a whole new operation similar to we didn't want to grow our services too much more cuz we needed a second warehouse and stuff like that. It's a whole new operation. Yes, it's a the similar algorithm, but you still got different citations and different links out in the US and different press release service in the US to the UK. So, there's are different models of what needs to be done. There's tens of millions to be made in the UK alone. Um and I think at times I think Jason Annesley was a great mentor in the fact that sometimes you need to have a no man in your life. And I just think sticking in my lane in the UK and trying to become the largest lead generation agency and have the best service for growing businesses. And sticking to the UK and sticking to what I know is kind of why I've kept Prominence SEO as a UK lead agency. But we will always go wider in more industries. Like if you interview me next year, it could end up being we're in 900 industries cuz it's still we're still not even touched the sides of how many niches there is.

Carl Hutchinson: I was going to say the crazy thing about cuz obviously I'm very very very friendly with James and own many businesses with him. Um but one of the crazy things about James is he might be in 650 niches, but he's probably got a thousand websites in each of those niches. So, it's a I think I referred a server guy into him recently to have a look at some server issues. And this server guy I was like, "Oh, I think he's only got three servers." Cuz I I wasn't aware how many servers and James goes, "Oh, yeah, I've got 26 servers." I was like, "I told you he was a good contact for you, mate. Like he's very good." So, he was like, "Oh, do I'll do things for free for you now."

James Dooley: Um but when it comes to like obviously operating so many websites, what's your infrastructure there? How How's that been set up?

Carl Hutchinson: Yes, you've got I mean, there's a large team involved. Like a lot of people go, "How do you manage to So, manage over 6,000 websites in over 650 different industries?" And it's difficult. Like we have a lot of stuff. Things have become easier with AI, for sure. Like graphic designers now can leverage image 2.0 and ChatGPT and it's brilliant. Logos can be done on ChatGPT and it's brilliant. Or you can use Nano Banana for image creation. The the the footage now that we do with podcasts can now be clipped down quite easy into shorts using certain AI tools. The AI content can be used using like say autoblogging.ai to implement good quality content. So, we can leverage AI to scale out what we do. But yeah, there's still a large team. The infrastructure behind it is there's a large sales team and they're bloody good at what they do. Clients are generally always happy cuz they always getting a return on investment. I think the offering is is brilliant in what we have. And then we've got we've got link builders, we've got semantic SEO content writers, and we've got technical SEOs within the team. And we've just got good account managers that do the keyword research right. And I think that's where the key part is listening to the clients, understanding that where they make the money, and doubling down in them areas. When you do find them keywords like you said that get more search volume than what AH Webs or SEMrush is showing, and then saying, "Okay, this is a profitable keyword. There's enough search for this." We might be able to dedicate a site out for that specific service.

James Dooley: I guess it is sort of like panning for gold, isn't it? Where you have to just keep on digging and eventually hit that little keyword and no doubt James already has an AMD for it.

Carl Hutchinson: But what what would you say is the future then of Promo SEO? What what do you envision the next 5-year 10-year plan?

James Dooley: So, the the 5-year or 10-year plan, we want to be the largest lead generation agency in the UK.

Carl Hutchinson: So, what are you now, the second largest?

James Dooley: I'd say Checkatrade probably Checkatrade is probably the largest. They're like a 4.1 billion pound business. Uh I want to build it to get a billion valuation. Um so, we're we're on our road there. We're not we're not there yet. Um so,

Carl Hutchinson: So, does that work from um does that work from an asset value of the websites that got to you your model is you own the websites, right? So, then the customer sort of almost get the leads.

James Dooley: Um so, does that just increase the asset value from the websites or do you also then get involved in the other businesses and do they fall under those part of PromoSEO?

Carl Hutchinson: No, so the the businesses that we invest in, so in time what starts to happen is we actually get um certain businesses too busy. Um it's a good problem to have, but it is a problem. So, at that point sometimes they come to me as an investorpreneur saying, "We want you involved in our business." And at times I might be looking to do that and help that business to be able to deal with the leads better. The speed to leads important and the conversion rate of the inquiries of what we're generating is important. So, at times it could be an investment standpoint, but that's different to Promo.

James Dooley: Yeah.

Carl Hutchinson: PromoSEO, we own we own the websites. It's completely risk-free for the business owners. They get the leads and they only pay on conversion. So, it's a no win, no fee model of what's being set up.

James Dooley: Yeah.

Carl Hutchinson: Um and yeah, the future is to get the billion-pound kind of valuation. Probably won't even sell it then. Like, I want the team to kind of blossom and them to kind of grow out.

James Dooley: Let self-run on more.

Carl Hutchinson: Yeah, exactly that. Um I don't a lot of time though I don't do business just for the monetary value. I enjoy what I do. I enjoy going on the Christmas do's with all the business owners and having a good time and stuff like that. Like, we like who we work with. We can be very selective with who we work with. Um it's probably probably generate anything from 80 to 100 leads a day from business owners coming to us wanting our lead generation service. So, we get a lot now of business owners coming to us saying, "We want the PromoSEO no win, no fee business model that you have." And we might reject 95%. They might not be ready yet for our leads. So, if they're emailing from a [email protected], that email's not a professional email. It doesn't look good. They need to have a professional email being set up. The brand needs to look good online. They need to have a sales person that's going to be responding to those leads quickly. Cuz if they don't respond quickly to the lead, they could be wasting our leads. And therefore, we don't get paid anything. So we could we could generate brilliant high quality leads, but the customer is not good enough at converting them. So for that reason, we've always got to make certain that we're doing quality control. That's what the account managers are there to do. Choosing the right businesses that got a great brand, and then in time we can help them build the brand up and grow my SEO grows just as much as the clients we work with grow. So yeah, overall, it's a great business model. 650 different industries. Probably next year it'll be more, but I love it. And yeah, the the plan is to just carry on, continue to grow.

James Dooley: Do people get in touch with Promo if you if you've got capacity to take more on?

Carl Hutchinson: Yeah, so I mean, they can reach out to www.promo-seo.uk. Fill in the contact form there. The team will go through, check to see the industry that you're in, check to see the areas that you cover, and then from there then we can check to see are you ready to take our leads yet? If you are, we can build out the websites. We might already have some some sites in that industry. And if not, we can build them out very quickly and within two to three months we can start generating the leads.

James Dooley: Awesome.

Carl Hutchinson: Cheers.

James Dooley: Cheers, dude.