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Prolific site owner James Dooley joins the podcast to give a masterclass into the rank and rent business model.
This is where you rank a website and rent it out to a local business seeking inbound inquiries.
It’s an approach that has helped him become a millionaire many times over.
And with over 14 years of experience and over 850 paying sites in 650 niches, he has lots of important advice site owners of all types need to hear.
In general, he emphasizes the importance of having a strategy for your site.
For the rank and rent model, in particular, he suggests starting with a broad domain and creating industry-related content to attract traffic and engagement.
He believes traffic and behavioral signals are key ranking factors. And with this ranking site, you can engage local businesses to understand their needs and discover the most profitable subtopics within the industry.
This strategy involves building location-specific pages targeting niche keywords, using various on-page optimization tools, creating a diverse backlink profile, and foundational links like citations, a social fortress, and internal linking.
As you can imagine, there is a lot of overlap with building affiliate marketing content sites, and the conversation covers the similarities and differences between these types of sites.
James also has a lot of important advice regarding maximizing the profits of all kinds of sites, common mistakes found, and easy solutions.
Overall, this is a dive into the rank and rent model, with valuable insights and strategies all site owners can benefit from. Don’t miss it!
Watch The Interview
Topics James Dooley Covers
- How he got started online
- His current business
- Digital landlord
- The rank and rent model
- How to get started
- Keyword research
- Ranking signals
- Foundational links
- Simple ranking strategies
- Internal linking tips
- Monetization strategies
- Lead generation
- How to get paying customers
- Site structure
- Common mistakes
- And a whole lot more…
Links & Resources
transcription
Jared: All right. Welcome back to the niche pursuits podcast. My name is Jared Bauman. Today we’re joined by James Julie, uh, James Dooley. James, welcome on board.
James: Hey, how are you doing? You okay?
Jared: Doing great. I’m very excited to have you. The topic we are talking about today is so, Oh, it’s so exciting to me. I think it’s going to get a lot of people’s brains.
Um, absolutely fired up. Uh, why don’t you, before we dive in though, to, to the rank and rent model and everything that you’re doing with that, can you give us a little background on yourself? Maybe catch us up to when you started doing this.
James: Yeah. So, um, we started about 13, 14 years ago. It was now where we had a construction company in the UK that built playgrounds and tennis courts and football pitches, stuff like that.
Um, we wasn’t, the phone wasn’t ringing. We needed more inquiries. Um, so when we knew we needed a website to be built, we wanted inbound inquiries coming in. So we got the website built and realized that. We, we need an engine behind the website, which is SEO. Um, I didn’t really know anything about SEO at the time.
I didn’t understand how the algorithms work and it was a formula and it’s, it’s in a way, basic math. So changing words into numbers and making certain you’ve got the right quality kind of links, um, things just progress from there really. So we did it for our own website. We then started to realize that we, um, needed to get our clients busier for us to be busier.
So if we, let’s say a prime example, architects, if we could get architects more work and it was doing, um, designing playgrounds or sports pitches in schools or universities indirectly, it would get us more work. And that’s kind of how the, the kind of the whole business model grew. Um, it was never set out to build a rank and rank business.
It just evolved from there. The. One is like a domino effect. One thing led on to something else, which led on to something else, which led on to something else. And then fast forward 14 years. Now we’ve got. A successful kind of digital real estate portfolio online.
Jared: Tell me a bit more about where you’re at right now with this.
And then maybe we’ll dive into what RankinRent is and kind of unravel it from there, like what, when you say a portfolio, like, uh, at the stage for us.
James: So in total online ranking on page one, I think there’s over 56 million web pages ranking on page one in the UK that we have. Um, that is, we’ve got 850 different paying sites.
I think there’s 650 different niches and around 850 different Paying clients. Um, there’s been a lot of failures along the way, so it’s not, we’ve not built 850 sites and monetized all 850. Um, there were certain ones that didn’t work for the way we set it up, but I think every single site that we’ve built that didn’t work, we’ve moved into display ads or PBNs or set ’em up in different ways.
Just testing beds are really, um, I think our biggest growth came from, we’ve got our own in-house. Testing team. Um, I think that’s massive because when the, when the core algorithm updates came of like Penguin and Panda back in the day, we needed to understand exactly unravel what was going on. And I think there was too many people online that was sharing myths and sharing information for personal benefits.
So when we had our own in house testing team. Um, that helps us a lot. And then just having some good people that are good with like man management. So like Mad Singer came in, helped us out with like building up a team, having the right systems and processes in place to be able to basically rinse and repeat.
We’ve got a strategy that works and where some people say, how have you managed to do that? And it’s like, once you’ve got a strategy, it’s almost like Henry Ford when he was building Ford cars. Once you’ve got the warehouse and knowing how to build a car. It’s having the right staff and systems and processes in place to rinse and repeat that process.
Jared: It’s still phenomenal. I mean, you know, 850 is a staggering number of sites to grow and build. And, but I do think it also makes you a pretty good resource when it comes to this model or this, this approach to building websites. Because, I mean, like you said, you kind of teased it a bit. Like at 850, you’ve probably almost seen it all.
I mean, maybe not everything, but almost everything.
James: Yeah. Yeah, we’re in, we’re in 650 different industries. So, and, and what’s crazy about it, Jared, is that, um, the algorithm people think there’s one algorithm out there and trust me, there’s not. There’s so many different nuances from one niche to the next niche.
So, uh, some people think that, oh, it just needs topical authority, good backlinks. That almost is the case. But at what dial do you need topical authority? And on what dial do you need powerful links over relevant links? And do you just need local links like citations and forum links? Or do you need to go hard on guest posts and niche edits and stuff like that?
So, and, and it does vary significantly from, from one market to the next.
Jared: We could do a whole podcast on that one topic right there. I will be coming back to that just to try to get as much outta you on that, uh, a little bit later. Hey, so we’ve talked about rank and rent, right? And a lot of people listening are gonna be very familiar with it.
It’s a, I won’t say an age old strategy, but it’s been around a while, this concept. But hey, for people that are new. And, uh, it’s a foreign concept. Maybe just give a one to two minute overview of what the rank and rent model is.
James: So the rank and rent model is where you get a website and rank the website, and then you’re able to rent that website out to a customer that would be willing to rent that site out.
So in the, in the real estate portfolio, when you buy a house and then rent it out, it’s like that. But doing it digitally with websites online. So some people could say that I’m a digital landlord. Um, I own digital assets. I own digital real estate and I rent those websites out. Why? Why would people want to rent those sites out?
Well, If you are a plumber, you’re brilliant at going fixing taps and installing shower rooms and stuff like that. You’re not good. And you don’t understand how the algorithms work with content and backlinks. So we just need to understand what they’re good at. We’ll kind of present what they’re good at online, which generates them the bat generates them the inquiries that.
They want to receive and then from there, then they’re going to get returned on investment and they’re only going to pay us a percentage, um, which is our rental fee. So it’s a great, absolute amazing deal for each one of our customers. The good thing is we don’t have customers that leave us because they’re paying us out of their winnings.
So if, if they came to us saying that 5, 000 per month is too much, we can really, we can renegotiate it. A thousand, two thousand per month, if that’s what the figure needs to be. But the truth of the matter is the more they pay us, the more websites we’ll build for them. The more backlinks we’ll kind of present to the site, which then gets better rankings, more traffic, more inquiries.
We’ll work with The customer to get them where they make the money. And I think that’s the most important part. Some people think, Oh, I’d like to get into rank and rent. Well, that’s fine. But the first thing that you need to understand is the very first kind of word in the saying rank. You need to understand knowing how to rank.
Do you know what I mean? You can’t just build a website and rent it out. It’s called a rank and rent for a reason. Because if it’s not ranking and not generating traffic and generating inquiries. And not only inquiries, the right type of inquiries for your customer, they’re not going to rent it out. So, so many people are coming to me at the moment asking me, Oh, I want to get into a rank and rent.
And I say, do you know how to do SEO? And they think that they know how to do SEO and you’re like, how many sites have you ranked? Um, none yet. Well, you can’t do a rank and rent. You’re just doing a, a non, a non ranking site and rent, and no one’s going to do that. So there’s still a lot of elements people need to understand and get right this fall.
that can go down this kind of Path of having a successful portfolio. I
Jared: think the dichotomy that maybe a lot of people will be thinking is the difference between working and by the way, let’s use that plumber as just the analogy for the rest of the, uh, the show. Cause you know, construction, plumbing, veterinary services, doctors, like you go down any kind of trade, but let’s just use a plumber for sake of it.
But. Uh, I think the dichotomy that might exist, maybe you can just shed some light on why you chose rank and rent, uh, is why not just do SEO services for that plumber, uh, why not build them a website? And I think I know some of the things you’re going to say, but maybe walk down that path a bit so people can understand the differences there.
James: So I absolutely despise, um, client SEO for, for a few reasons. And the reason why, um, I dislike it is because. And I don’t mean this in a harsh way. There’s so many cowboys out there. There’s so many people that get taught to fake it before they make it. And there’s no legislation. There’s no regulations in place for people for who is a good SEO and who’s not.
So someone could go and start up on their laptop tomorrow and say that they’re the best SEO agency in the local area. Go and take three, four thousand pound a month from a plumbing company. If that’s going to be the example, not rank their website. The client’s not going to see a return on investment could end up being in a worse state than what it was prior to them, what there was in.
And, and then what starts to happen is these, we find that a lot of people, especially in the UK and in the U S a lot of business owners have been burnt previously with SEOs trying to rank their website. So what’s coming along saying, yeah, but way better. That you’ve already got someone that’s kind of in a position where they don’t trust SEOs.
And if I tried to start doing SEO on your website, and there’s a, there’s prior to me even starting working for you, this is lack of trust for SEOs. What starts to happen is when I start doing something on your website, they start asking me what am I doing? They start asking why I’m doing it. They start asking how I’m doing it.
Now, if I was to go and get a bricklayer to build an extension on my house. I’m not going to stand over that bricklayer who’s building the wall to say, uh, excuse me, what you’re doing, uh, excuse me, why, why did you tap that brick three times? Excuse me, what grade of cement are you using? How are you doing that?
You just allow the bricklayer to do what he does, which is build the wall because they’re professional in what they do, but in this industry, that’s not the case. So we found personally that there was too many questions being asked and actually 50 percent of budgets being spent on client SEO. Was managing the client’s expectations and building nice glossy reports.
This method it’s, it’s very risky. We’ve we’re very good at what we do. We know how to rank websites. We know the SEO is very predictable and doing the right quality content, getting the right answers on the page, doing the right kind of silo structure, doing the right topical authority and the right links and carrying on until you get to number one.
When we know how good we are at what we do. And I don’t mean that in an arrogant way, because if you’re not good at it, this model isn’t for you, but if you are good at it and you are genuinely as good as what you say you are at ranking websites, you can rank a website and it might cost you 50, 000 pound, just throwing a hypothetical figure out there.
But if you can rent that out for 5, 000 pound a month, and that plumber is happy to pay that because it’s ranking it’s already generating inquiries that they specifically want. Well, within 12 months, I’ve got all my money back of me investment back. So what better you tell me an investment that you can do where you put 50, 000 pound in and you make a hundred percent yield in year one.
Like you don’t, I mean, I’m not saying you can get it within year one. It might take a year to rank it, but within, within two years, you’ve got 50, you’ve got, you’ve got your money back. And then after that, then you’ve earned in that time and time and time again. So the model’s a great model. If you go to SEO, if you’re not good at SEO.
Maybe sell a service, uh, or maybe go and learn or do what others say where you fake it before you make it. But I’m not in that remit. I don’t, I like making certain that all of our customers get a return on investment. And if you’re good at SEO, the rank and rent models, it’s a good model to. Kind of get into
Jared: it’s certainly a simpler, simpler sell for a lot of clients.
It’s like, Hey, you know, you mentioned, I mean, I run an SEO service based business for, um, and you’re right. The biggest hurdle is overcoming the negative perceptions that a lot of people have had from SEO because it. Can take a while and instead going to them and saying that you’d skip all that just by the leads just by the site that’s already ranking and we’ll give you the lead.
So there’s certainly a compelling simplicity to it. Um, let’s spend some time talking about maybe the tenants of how to do this. Uh, I know that, um, you and I kind of put together a little bit of an agenda for today. And, uh, you have some pretty. Uh, interesting ways that you’re going about building these and, uh, kind of a process to it.
Um, what, uh, for people who do feel like they’re good enough in SEO, do you want to dip their toe in a rank and rent model? Um, maybe let’s start at the beginning. Where do you start? Do you just start with a brand new domain? Um, how do you pick that domain? How do you pick what industry do you, is it important to pick and do keyword research and do industry research ahead of time?
James: So they’re all great questions. The, um, let a, again, let’s just go down the one kind of model of being plumbing for, for this example, right? So I’d start off by getting a domain, which is, um, plumbing.com or something close to plumbing.com. plumbing.co uk. What whatever it is that you can purchase, um, or jareds plumbing.com.
And, and this one, the first site that I build, I’m gonna go very broad. I’m gonna do everything related to plumbing, everything. Related to plumbing. Even if the certain clients at present might not do everything within that. I want the search volume. I want the real data, the real Google search console data, not the HREVs data, the SEMrush data.
I want to know what keywords get traffic. Now there’s so many out there, zero search volume keywords in HREVs that get two free foes in monthly searches. Right. That they’re missing out on. So I want to go broad. I want to go big. And then in that scenario, I might go and add 30 different plumbing companies in there.
These are 30 different plumbing companies that are not paying a single penny. For the SEO the, um, the inquiries or anything that are also what I say to him is I’m going to give you these leads for free. Also, I ask you to do is if you secure within your pricing, if you secure any jobs, try to add as a find this for you.
And you know what? I’ll let you decide. To me, what you think is a sensible find this fee. So they might go and do, um, fix a top for a hundred dollars. And they might say, here’s 10 back. And I might say, okay, that’s fine. And basically what happens is you get these 30 different plumbing companies fighting against each other.
So when the jobs and the cream rises to the top, so whoever starts to pay you the most money in 12 months time, at that point, you can start asking him and seeing whether they want a dedicated website being built for them. So in the plumbing industry is a prime example, going fixing someone’s top is 50 to 100 kind of pounds kind of job to do.
It’s very low. And it’s not very profitable, right? But then when you start realizing this, some of them might build bathrooms or shower rooms. So you start building them a site. I only start building certain pages for a shower room. No, for a shower room. They might make the money. It might cost 4, 000 pounds to have done, and they might make 1, 500 pound out of there and they might pay you 500 pounds as a kickback.
So you’re going, okay, this is getting better. I quite like doing shower rooms, but then further down the line from that, what you start to realize is. Some of them then start paying you some more money and you’re like, Oh, what’s that for? And they went, Oh, I just did a wet room and you go in, well, what’s a wet room?
And they’re going, a wet room is like a shower room, but it’s for commercial, so it’s for like gyms and office spaces. And basically it’s, it’s a shower room, but it’s got tiles all around on the roof and all the walls and all the rest of it. But and it’s, and they’re going, we make more money on a wet room and I’m going, I didn’t even know you did wet rooms and you go, okay, so you go down that remit of doing wet rooms.
And then you start to realize actually that disabled wet rooms, uh, you’ve got to have a wider door. It’s got to be DDA compliant. The room’s got to be bigger. Um, you’ve got to have a pull card. Uh, so you need to get an electrician to pull the pull card in. So when you start doing this, something like disabled wet rooms that might make them for 5, 000 pound a job, and they’re willing to pay you 2, 000 pound as a kickback.
So forget you kind of conventional keyword research in HREVs and SEMrush. You’ve got to listen to your customers for where they make the money and go down that rabbit hole of, you start off at plumbing, you go to shower rooms and then you end up at wet rooms. And that’s just one example of being, cause you asked me to do the plumbing industry.
You could go into roofing and go to flat roofing, biodiverse roofing, heritage roofing. There’s loads of different kind of subtopics and services within. An industry or niche that you can make money down and actually the further down the rabbit hole that you go, you start to realize the actually it’s easier to rank and they make more, more profit on it as well.
So that’s kind of how, how we’ve managed to go into so many different industries and understand what clients want and make some good money out of that.
Jared: Let’s focus on the rank part because I have a lot of questions about that. Um, you know, uh, being in, in, in client SEO running an agency myself, um, a lot of plumbers.
Would fall under the local SEO category. And they’re trying to rank for plumbing in a certain metro area and a certain locale, a lot of people listening are very experienced in building, say what you might call a content website, which is take the topic of plumbing and build a website out around. All of the questions, all of the information, all of the purchases, the reviews, the things you can buy, the things you can do, the things you need to learn when we’re trying to rank a site that will end up renting, what type of model are we following and maybe get into some of the specifics about the details you need to pay attention to to build a rankable rent rent site.
James: So first and foremost, you can still go down to the, um, Creating the informational content. So I’m a big believer in like, um, some people call it the SEO avalanche approach, or you’ve got certain traffic tiers. So starting off by trying to rank certain easier to rank for key, key terms. So there might be some, some how to type guides and stuff like that.
And if they can get traffic through to your site. I’m a massive advocate that traffic is one of the biggest signals still to this day. Um, behavioral signals and traffic through to your site is probably bar none, probably the biggest ranking factor that there is. Um, some people would say, um, content and backlinks is, but you obviously need to do the content and backlinks to get the traffic, but the behavioral signals and the traffic and engagement through to your site is key.
So How many pages can you create that’s going to start driving that traffic through? So sometimes we start off with informational based type keywords. We might try to monetize those, those pages with display ads. Um, initially, if, if ever further down the line, it starts ranking for big keywords on the site and the client doesn’t want us to keep the display ads on like he’s always got.
Um, AdFrive, Mediavine or whatever it is, um, we can remove them and the client can put their own little banner ads and stuff on those pages, own call to actions and stuff, but we’ll start off down that realm. Um, we’ll try to get the address of the client, um, on the site. So when, when you, when you, when you first build in the big site out and you go out to 30 different companies, I don’t normally put an address on and all the rest of that.
I’m just trying. To find my way to find the little smaller, more profitable niches. But when I get down the realms of building a more smaller, smaller keyword kind of volume, but more profitable niche, I eat the disabled wet rooms within plumbing. At that point, I’ve got a client that he’s desperate, that really wants those leads and happy to pay money for the site.
So at that point, I’m saying to them, I want to build this site out and I’ll, I’ll pay for it all. I want to build this out, but I want, I want your staff going on my site. Right. So I want to build this site as if it’s your site, right? Because you’re going to rent it and this needs to be your site. I’m going to, I’m going to do what you should do on your own website, but you’re probably too scared of doing it because you don’t have the budget to do it.
And you don’t have the photographers, videographers, the content writers, the link builders and everything else that you need. I’ll build the site out that you should do. And if you want to then go and copy my site and try and do it yourself, you can do. But for while I’m ranking it and you’re earning money out of it, are you going to carry on renting it?
Of course they are, because they’re going to, they’re making a return on investment for every time they’re paying me money. So actually we start to get clients wanting us to pay more money because they’re going to get more jobs in. So back to the realms of, we start off with informational based terms.
We’ll try to get their address. Um, on the site we’ll build out where they’re based. So it could be like say disabled wet rooms in Sarasota, which might be in Florida, in Florida or something like that. We’re mainly UK based, but I’ll just use Sarasota as being the example. Um, so we’ll build that out in Sarasota, in Florida.
And then what we’ll do is we’ll go and say, how far do you travel? And they might say, we’re willing to travel 90 minutes in the car to go to any job. So then we’ll go and get all the suburbs of. Sarasota, which could be 150 different locations. And I want to rank for disabled wet rooms in every single one of them, 150 different locations.
So, and I want to try to get, um, if I can images on every single one of them, if I can get a video done for every single one of them pages as well in the different areas, as long as it’s getting. Some sort of search volume. I might do a video for it. If it’s not really getting search volume, I’ll just do the page, but I’m going to create the 150 locations.
I’m going to do all the informational posts. I’m going to then make certain that I’m doing all my citations, like directory links with the NAP listing. Um, so I’ll get like a Twilio number, redirect it through to their mobile phone or their office. I’ve got their address on there. I’ve got the meet the team, um, page with their staff on, and these people are more than happy to do it because.
At the end of the day, they’re a plumber that just wants to get more plumbing business, and they’re only paying us a percentage of their profits. So they, they love us for it. Like, and I can openly say it and I can openly give you all of our clients to say, do you enjoy the model? And every single one of them will say, yeah, we’re in the SEO industry.
If you speak to majority of clients and say, do you think you’re getting good value for money? They’ll always feel they could get better value elsewhere or something where with our clients, they enjoy what we do because.
Jared: I want to focus on the ranking part because I think that there’s some gaps there going back to my previous question. Can you outline the process of what it looks like before you ever talk to a client? To get these sites to rank and what sort of framework you’re using to build these type of sites out.
James: So the, the, the framework used to be done in raw HTML. Um, we moved then just to building PHP kind of websites. Now, now they’re being done in WordPress. So there’s certain plugins, like we used to use certain plugins like Serp Shaker. Um, there’s other ones now, like, uh, Mike Martin owns a, a tool called magic, uh, magic, uh, magic plugin.
Um, so they, and they can create you the 150 different pages, or you could just duplicate page and change out the location. So create one page for in Sarasota, duplicate the page, change out the location, um, change. Enough of the content on the page to make it unique enough for that over for a different location.
Um, and build those out and then build the links. Um, the, like I said, we’ll try to get the address on there and do this, the citations. Um, we can use, we’ve got, I’ve got different businesses, so I’ve got certain writers that prefer using page optimizer pro. Kyle roofs, kind of on, on page optimization tool.
Some prefer using the, like the dashboard of surf SEO. Some use every lingerie is on page. ai and some prefer market moves. Market moves, I feel is probably the best. But it’s the most expensive. So in local, it’s probably not needed. We also, I also have like affiliate sites and stuff like that. And in the casino market, all my writers write in market moves.
Um, and, and that tool is great. It’s more of a topical modeling system as opposed to a correlation. Um, but surfer phrase. On page. ai, page optimizer pro. They’re all great tools. They’re all good enough for you to get the right entities on the page, internal link, all relevant pages to each other. And then once, once you’ve done the kind of the pillow foundational links of citations and forum links, I do like a social fortress, which is just getting like, if I’ve got.
Doolies, doolies, disabled, wet rooms. com. I’ll make sure I’ve got do, uh, doolies, disabled, wet rooms, kind of Twitter account, Facebook, Tumblr, um, Weebly, rebel mouse blog spot, and I’ll get out just getting all in branded terms, try and get all them index with a unique article, which link back to the site.
They’re only web two backlinks, but it’s just to get the branded anchors. Built to the site. So I’ve got my naked URLs for my citations. I’ve got my branded anchors from my branded fortress. And then after that, then it comes back down to them power. So where am I going to get my power from? Well, um, PBMs probably give you the most power cause it’s a homepage link.
Um, but then you’ve got guest posts, which kind of pass through the relevance. Um, you can power those guest posts up with tier two backlinks to get power to the new page that you’ve had written because even though it might be on a high DR site, the page level power might not be very good if it’s a guest post.
So get some tier twos kind of to that relevant post. And then you can do link insertions and niche edits, which are kind of links on existing pages that have already got some sort of power. Might not be as relevant as a guest post would be, but then you’ve got your blended mix. If you’ve got some homepage power, some really relevant guest posts, some other kind of inner post niche edit kind of power, you’ve got your citations for diversity, no follow, naked URLs, you’ve got your forum links or social forces for your branded links.
Some of them are no follow. Some of them are do follow. So you, you’ve got diversity completely in your backlink profile, and you’ve tried to cover the topic in its entirety as best you can for your industry. And you’re using certain on page tools to get the right entities on each page. I heard
Jared: you talk a lot about like the, um, the social fortress, the citations, these sorts of things.
How important do you think that is? And if somebody missed that step along the way, should they go back and do it? I’d
James: say yes, definitely do it. Like why? Why miss it when it costs for 500 citations, it probably costs 100, 150, right? So it’s the same price as doing one guest post. Go and get the 500 or the free.
I mean, some people always kind of get hung up on it when, well, do I need 50? Do we need a hundred? Do we need 200? Like go and get as many. Citations as you can, the, and don’t get me wrong, right? Are these citations going to help you run your site better? They’re not going to pass any power. They’re generally no follow backlinks.
They do actually help, I feel, with trust. They do actually help if you’ve got a GMB. The citations help the GMB ranking better. It’s giving more locality through to the website as well. Um, and It’s just the diversity part. So it allows you then not to then start getting caught up with if you’re doing some guest posts and niche edits and you start, let’s say some, you’ve got to realize that there’s times where I’m not doing the SEO, my staff are, and if they, they end up, my niche edit people start doing some exact match anchors and the guest post people use the same exact match anchors.
You can quickly become over optimized with exact match anchors. I try not to repeat. An anchor text, if I’m being honest, I try to do a lot of different money terms, but I try never to repeat an anchor if I can. But there’s times that it, that will naturally happen as staff use the same kind of processes and keywords.
But if I’ve got 500 citations, which are all naked URLs, My anchor text diversity and my backlink profile is fine. If I’m doing PBNs or I’m doing guest posts and I’m doing niche edits, they’re all do follow backlinks. If a site just has got loads of do follow backlinks and no, no follow backlinks, there’s times that Google could detect that.
So can you diversify your no follow and do follow kind of backlink profile? I think that’s a good thing to do. Um, the social fortresses for the brand is for the brand element, but also if you wait some tier twos to the branded fortress, well, you can then start to rank and control your own branded SERPs.
If you typed in do these disabled wet rooms, all your branded kind of your messaging of what you want. So it’s actually good for reputation management. You’re controlling your brand SERP for your rank and rent model of what you’re doing. Which is all linking back to your website and the traffic’s coming back to your site.
So I think there’s lots of reasons to do it. And it costs less than 300, 400 to do it in total, to do all the citations, the social fortress. The forum links, I just think it’s just the right thing to do. Like some people try to cut corners and not do it, but they’re the same people that then get hit with an algorithm update and say, why have I been it?
And I’m like, your content’s not good enough. Your backlinks aren’t good enough and you’re not going to diversification. Perfect
Jared: segue content. So you talked about the different on page optimization tools and whatnot. Like how many pages. Are you kind of like, maybe give us a stick of this plumbing analogy, um, and, uh, uh, in the Sarasota, Florida area, like how many pages are we building here?
How many, uh, locations are we building? How much informational content are we building? Um, uh, just to give people an idea for how much is involved with the content as it relates to this on page optimization process.
James: So, I’d go down the rabbit hole of checking on the keyword research of, um, how many informational pages can I do?
So if I could do 30, 40, 50, whatever, however many I can do that get search volume that I feel would be a good piece of content in, in plumbing kind of industry, a quite a good one to do. Or let’s say the wet rooms, um, has been an example, the, um, the wet room example, some, some good ones for you to do is like wet room designs.
And you’re going to get as many images from your client of as many different wet rooms is what they’ve done. You’ve uploaded the images. You’re trying to rank it for wet room ideas, wet room designs. You can pin that on Pinterest. You can share it on, on Twitter. You can get it shared in as many places as you can.
You can, even if you wanted to start to run some cheap Pinterest ads or Twitter ads, that’s getting traffic back to the site, which helps with indexation. Um, so there’s all that kind of things that you could do for very, very cheap talking like three, 4 a day worth of traffic that comes back to it. Um, and the ideas and the designs, and then, and then another one is the cost.
How much is a disabled wet room? How much is, and then you, if there’s certain sizes that you could put, put in there as well, like how much is a four by four. wet room, how much is, or you could talk about different shower units or different types of tiles that people might want to use. So there’s all these different kind of angles of where you can go down.
And then after that, then it’s just like going after, um, the, the kind of corky keyword of being disabled, wet room installer in Sarasota. Disabled wet room installer in, um, Tampa, disabled wet room installer in Miami, disabled wet room installer in Fort Lauderdale, disabled wet room installer in, um, Orlando and all the other places that all the little suburbs as well that the might install and do it in.
They’re really the ones that get. The, the inquiries that come through when someone’s looking for an installer in an area. And not only that, it’s what people don’t realize is sometimes you don’t need to type in, in Miami. All you need to be is on your mobile phone, typing in disabled, wet room installer, shower room.
Cause you’re still as well for disabled, wet room installer, you can still rank for. Web, room installer, shower room installer, and all other things related to, to those types of things, changing room, showers, and stuff like that for like gyms and stuff. So there’s lots of different variations of keywords that you can go after.
Um, I’d say it’s, it’s a difficult question to answer with home, many pages. I’d say do enough to win. Now, if that means doing for, informational posts and then doing 50 kind of locations and you’re getting enough inquiries and the client’s happy to pay 500, 1000, 2000, whatever you think you can get away with that they’re happy to pay and they’re happy to pay that amount and they get a return on investment.
It’s only if the client then starts to say. I want to, I want to go wider. I want to do more locations. I can travel four hours at that point. Then as you’re traveling four hours and you’re doing more locations, you need more backlinks, you probably need more informational posts. So at times like there’s a classic saying is, um, you don’t need to be faster.
Then the bear, all you need to be is you need to be faster than the people running away from the bear. Do you know what I mean? So like you just need to do enough to win in the SERP and I think too many people are perfectionists and too many people suffer from like paralysis analysis paralysis and Um, they suffer too much of trying to get this perfect site where realistically If you do seo properly to 55 percent of the way there You’re probably going to win in majority of easier to rank for terms.
If you don’t step up the mark and do 60%, 65 percent until like people don’t need to have this perfect SEO score to rank in a lot of these niches, they just need to do enough content, enough backlinks. And once you’re number one, do you really need to keep adding more informational posts on the site? No, no, you don’t really need to do it anymore.
Jared: How important is, um, we’ll call it site structure, navigational elements, internal linking, um, in this, right? Like, I, I think, um, we all know internal linking is important, but is there any significance or added weight to the navigational elements and the site structure and the internal linking with this strategy?
James: So I’ll probably get crucified for saying this, right? The, I, I generally feel if it’s a single topic niche, just internal link, almost as much as you can, where it’s relevant to internal link as much as you can, uh, make certain that the, the nav bar, and if you’ve got photo links or sidebar links, then they’re linking to all the main category pages, which linked to all the posts, I don’t feel you can over optimize Um, internal links with regards to architects, I’d still try and vary up as much as I can, but I’ve never really seen many sites being here.
With over optimization of internal, internal link anchor text. So I’d say just link as much as you can, where it’s relevant to where it really, really, really becomes important, which isn’t the case for these single topic. Niche is, is if we slightly just deviate away from rank and went to affiliate and you’re in the casino market, and you’ve got different sectors within the casino market, like live casino.
Um, bingo and slots and poker and blackjack at that point. Internal linking and silo structure becomes very, very important because you need to make certain you’re siloing all the poker pages to be able to internal link into all the poker pages and that might come under card games as being, so it might be a homepage to card games, card games to poker or poker internal linking to each other and you don’t really want to be sidewards linking too much to over Like kind of board game, like slots or bingo or other things.
So at that point you can start to quickly mess up your silo, but in these local lead gen kind of industries where you just a single topic at that point, just internal link where it makes sense as much as you can to all different pages that you think is relevant to each other. And I don’t think you really, you can harm the site.
I think majority of people just don’t internal link enough is the actual truthful answer to it. So internal link more, add more kind of, um, links on the homepage to all your main money keywords. Cause obviously your homepage is the strongest page on, on your site. So any of your main ones, can you, can you get off to the main services or the main locations of where you cover?
Um, and yeah, just think to own a link more on single topic kind of sites. You can’t really go wrong. It’s only really when you go after multiple topics, it starts to become a problem.
Jared: A lot of people listening at this point will think that this sounds a lot like building a classic old school affiliate website, like you’re building your money pages, right?
And it’s your best X, your best X for Y. And we have to write, um, informational topics to build, you know, topical authority, to help with internal linking, to help with navigation. Um, we can monetize those informational articles with ads if we want. Um, and we, you know, build backlinks, we do internal linking, we build social profiles, like what is different about the rank and rent approach or are there any differences to that classic affiliate
James: marketing?
It’s all SEO, like, so it is not, there’s not too much difference. There’s different nuances. Like if it is local more so than affiliate, the citations and the foreign links and stuff, I’d say are more important for the rank and rank kind of model than it would be on an affiliate site, affiliate sites, generally a tougher.
Um, but where it gets harder for a lot of these SEOs, a lot of people get into the SEO, get into the affiliate market because they can rank a website. They never need to pick up the phone and speak to anybody and they can earn money while asleep, right? The rank and rent model isn’t completely hands off.
You still need a sales team. Because even though you still, even though there’s renting the website out, the client still wants to speak to someone occasionally to be like, how can I generate more leads in this? Or is there any way that we can change this image or do this or do that? She’s still down the realm slightly of doing almost like client SEO work, but the clients are a lot nicer.
Because they’re only paying out of the winnings, if that makes sense. So they never demanding a client SEO. I feel like you’re almost employed by the client where this one, they’re asking you nicely, can you do X, Y, and Z where sometimes you’ve client SEO, the kind of. demanding I’m paying you, you’re my employee.
This is what you need to do because you’re doing it on their website. So when it’s on their website, you’ve got to follow their rules. And especially if they’re a big brand and they’ve got brand reputation management and all the rest of it, um, uh, brand kind of. things of like, Oh, I don’t really like the way you’ve done that.
I don’t really like the color of this and it just becomes a logistical nightmare. So, but back to it. Yes, it’s very similar. Everything’s similar. Like whether you’re doing display ads, display ads is still, you still need good quality content. You still need internal linking. You still need backlinks. You still need to know how to rank, which is came back to me at the start when I was saying If you know how to rank, you could make money by via lots of different platforms.
So you could do display ads. You could do affiliate. You could do rank and rent. You can do lead gen. You can, when you start getting big sites, you could do multiple things like display, lead gen. So if you, I’ll give you a niche here that you could do multiple sources of earning money. Uh, appliance repair, right?
So if you went and build out the biggest appliance repair site that there is, and you went and tried to start ranking for, um, appliance repair in every location that you can think of that a customer would want them leads for that goes and repairs, dishwashers and washing machines, you can sell those leads or rent those pages out to a client.
But then on the appliance repair, you can also say, why have it repaired when you can just go and buy a brand new. And then you can internal link it to the best dishwashers page and do affiliate. You can then start doing the how to guides of how you can repair it yourself and do that with display ads.
And if you really get big and you, and you’re ranking all these different terms with lead generation, with affiliate, with display ads. You can start renting out your Facebook pixel to big like brands that might want to do that. There’s so many different ways of monetizing websites. Like we, I don’t just do rank and when I’m known now for having this portfolio of sites that do rank and men, but I also make a lot of money in display ads and affiliate and other platforms as well.
And yes, it is all. A similar team that do similar processes of content, technical, internal linking, backlinks, content. You
Jared: took the words right out of my mouth. I mean, I was going to ask my next question was going to be, Hey, what about that person that let’s say, um, they did build that website. They have that website that is on plumbing and it’s.
It’s it’s content site, right? Like that’s the site they were trying to build. They wrote a bunch of informational content. They have some affiliate articles. Maybe they’re ranking well, maybe they’re not. Maybe their information, informational content is doing well. Is it possible to bolt this on? Could I take a contents that I have right now?
And I’m like, Oh man, I’m ranking. I’m about plumbing. Can I start adding these location pages on? Can, and will that work or does it have to be from
James: the beginning? Yeah, no, no, absolutely. You can bolt it on. Um, if I’m being honest, 100 percent honest with you, one of the, my biggest growth markets at present is I’m looking at the some affiliates and some SEOs in the industry that are great at what they do.
They’re probably better SEOs than me, right? But commercially and business. They’re, they’re, they’re, they’re not on my level, right? So the brilliant at what they do, and I’m looking at these sites and whether you’re going on Empire Flippers or you can go on ODYS or Flipper or whatever it is, or just looking Facebook groups or just outreach to certain sites that are ranking well for informational based terms.
And they’re only making money by a display ads, but they’re getting lots of traffic. I will 100 percent won’t buy their site and change it from being display to also making money in affiliates, also making money in lead generation, renting out the Facebook pixel, maybe like allowing certain, as long as it’s high quality kind of guest posts being done on the side, there’s, there’s probably 30, 40 different ways of monetizing a website that you can do.
And absolutely. If a sites. Aged and got traffic. You can bolt on other things onto that site. Definitely.
Jared: Let’s talk a little bit more as we kind of come to the end here about the renting side, right? There’s rank and rent and we’ve, we’ve danced back and forth on it. I mean, I’ll call out the elephant in the room here that I think maybe needs to be called out.
Like a lot of people are. In SEO, because they can, they don’t have to interact with people, whether it’s clients, whether it’s, um, whether it’s, you know, in this model, whether it’s uh, individual companies, plumbers, for example, um, what, what do people really actually need to get over if it, when it comes to that, and is there ways to outsource that or get help so you can continue to kind of just be the SEO in the whole game?
James: That’s a difficult question. Um, in fact, that’s the first time I’ve been asked this question, if I’m being honest with you, so it’s a great question to ask. The, you do need to have a sales team, like, like, so you need, cause you need to pick up the phone and you need to speak to the, or at worst be emailing back and forth.
So I suppose that’s not too bad, but you need to be speaking to these clients to understand where do they make the money. And you need to sometimes have them all awkward conversations with them to say, look, I want you paying more money for the site that we have. How can we start charging you more money?
I understand to charge you more money. You need to make more money. So you need to kind of open up more. More ways of you earning money, if that makes sense. So the, um, it, you do, you do need to interact and, and yes, certain people don’t like that model. Some people prefer the affiliate model because of that.
Um, and in general as well, you can’t really, when I call it rank and rent, it is rank and rent, but to start with it’s rank. And lead gen, like you need to provide them with the leads because if they don’t know what they’re renting out, they’re not going to rent it out. Like, so they need to be having the leads initially and the paying you like a finder’s fee for jobs that they’ve converted or paying per lead.
I normally do it on conversion to start with. And then it’s further down the line. You can then start to ask them the questions of what makes you more money? What services can I kind of bolt on to this existing site? Or do you want me to build you a dedicated website? And we prefer building out the dedicated sites because we can have to meet the team, the telephone number, the address.
All on this specifically for them, but I don’t think there’s a way, I don’t think there’s a way of getting out that there’s an elephant in the room that you need. You probably need to team up with someone. If you’re an SEO and you’re an introvert and you don’t like speaking to clients, you also probably need a business partner that’s going to go out and speak to these clients and try and get you the best from a commercial standpoint.
Jared: There’s nothing wrong with that, by the way. Like there’s nothing wrong with acknowledging like, Hey, there’s going to be some, some things that, that, uh, that might make you a bit uncomfortable or like you said, partner up with someone, you know, there’s plenty of people out there who enjoy this space and enjoy talking to people, but don’t know how to rank a website.
So that’s good. Um, Hey, so I guess maybe bringing it back to where we started and maybe we can close on this, like. What are the biggest mistakes you see people making when it comes to this model? Cause I mean, look, you’ve made it sound, um, not simple, but you make, you make it sound like, Hey, knuckle down in the process.
And as long as you know how to rank websites with SEO. That you can do this. And I, I believe you, but like, what are the mistakes? What are the big mistakes you see commonly trip people up along the way when it comes to this?
James: So I’d say there’s lots, there’s so many different nuances of little mistakes that compound.
So you mentioned internal linking too many people don’t internal link enough. So you’re not passing the page rank throughout the site enough throughout the site. Get internal linking more would be one part. Second part is I’ve just mentioned Phrase, Surfer, Page Optimizer Pro, OnPage. ai, or Market Moves.
If you’re not using one of those tools, how do you know what entities need to be on a page? How are you properly optimizing the page correctly? And if you’re not using them, you’re probably missing out because literally by. If you go and buy one of them and rent, if you go and get one of them for a seven day free trial, whichever one you want to use, and you go and add certain entities onto the page, it’s predictable and mathematical.
Google change words into vectors, right? And then it all comes down to semantic SEO. Can you get more vectors than your competition on that page? And it’s not just, if you’ve got, it’s, it’s almost like keyword stuffing back in the day. But now it’s almost like entity stacking. Have you got all the entities need to be that’s on the page and all the keywords that needs to be on the page.
So people don’t write good enough content. In my opinion, they write too much fluff. They try to think that a page that might only need to be 800 words needs to be 3000 words and the repeat themselves 10 times over. They’re not concise enough with the content, the backlinks that the buying, the going using, um.
They’re going by in guest posts, or they’re thinking that the guest posts put the PBMs and the part of bad link neighborhoods and they’re actually toxic backlinks. And I’m not going to bum off any link vendors out there, but a lot of link vendors out there sell toxic backlinks. And a lot of people that you ask the question to them owners and say, um, do you have any sort of trust and toxicity threshold metrics?
They say, I don’t even know what you mean. We just sell on. traffic and relevance. And some people think that a high DR site in HREVS is the be all and end all. Well, we, we show certain clients that we have, cause I actually own one or two service based businesses as well. And the only reason why I bought into them was because we were spending.
60, 000 pound in a month on content and backlinks. So I was like, I want better quality control. I don’t like what you’re doing. And I became this horrible client to the agency. Now that apart on where I wanted better quality control. And they were saying you a nightmare client. And I’m like, I know I’m a nightmare client, but I’m trying to improve your processes.
So at that point, I bought one of the major shareholders out. that then allowed me to say, look, I’m a shareholder in the business. Now we need to improve these processes. And then it, and I did it because it helps my business and I use them on a day to day basis, which means I don’t need to keep employing more content writers and link builders.
I just need to, the agency that we use that would bolt into what we do. Has got the right processes and we look at trust and we look at power and we look at toxicity and we make certain that we’re building the right type of links and, and people don’t, are not educated enough on it. People just think a high DR site in Ahrefs is enough where we can manipulate a deep, we can get a brand new site.
And, and if people want to show it, I can go and buy a domain no, and put it in the, in the link of this description. And you can see that it’s only just been bought in November, the end of November, 2023. And I can get it to a DR 70 within 28 days. So if you think a DR 70 link is really good, it’ll have no content on there, but it’ll be a DR.
70. It gets no traffic. And you think that’s good? No, it’s not. It, it’s not good at all. So just, just, no, don’t get me wrong. I know Tim Sri Lallwell, I like Ahrefs, I think it’s a great SEO tool to measure certain metrics, but you can’t just look at DR as being the be all and end all of whether a link is a good link or a bad link.
So there are different things that people have done wrong, whether it’s on page, internal linking, content quality, link quality. Um, that’s what our testing team are doing on a, on a week by week basis. And, and I, I’d wasted millions buying toxic link. I wasted millions buying the wrong type of links. I wasted millions not doing the right type of, I was just cheap and out on good quality content while I thought that was, um, and sometimes you just need to get up and go to certain networking events and speak to the right people who are good in their lane.
So I wouldn’t go speak to someone who’s very good at link building about content. Cause they’re probably not good about content, but I won’t go speaking to someone who’s very good about on page semantics, like a cow roof or a quarry of the world. That’s very good with on page content. I won’t go speaking to them about traffic or paid ads or link building or silo structures, even though the public are good at that as well.
But I try to speak to people who are the best in their lane. Uh, what they do, I travel the world going to these events and just trying every day, even to this day, every day is a school day. If you don’t innovate, you’re going to evaporate. And that’s what the team are built up to do every single day. Like every single day, they’ve got to try and learn and develop.
And there’ll be different nuances next year than what they are this year. What the benchmarks, is it more relevance? Is it more power? Like where does things lie? And you’ve got to, but the results are there to show you just got reverse engineer the SERP and see what Google’s, what Google prefer in a present.
Jared: Well, James, this has been absolutely fascinating and a really good deep dive. I think there’s, I’ll encourage everyone, like probably want to listen to this one a second time. Because yes, we’re talking about rank and rent, but kind of throughout, like there was basically like a five minute masterclass on how to start a site out.
There was another, uh, little masterclass there and how to evaluate links. And there’s another, so a lot, a lot of things here that people can kind of go back and listen to a second or third time. Um, Hey, where can people follow along with what you’re doing if they want to reach out? Like what’s the best place for people to, to, to follow, um, what you’re doing?
James: So I’ve got, I’ve got the site, jamesdooley. com. Um, and then on there, then that just, there’s not really any content on there. It’s just kind of who I am. And then from there, though, it links out to, um, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn. Pinterest, YouTube. I’m being quite a bit more active on YouTube at the moment.
Um, I’ve always kind of kept myself under the radar. I’ve always tried to hustle in silence and let success be the noise. But now more and more people seem to want to have me on certain podcasts and stuff like that. So I’m happy to do it. I’m not, I’m not introverted. I’m quite extroverted. I’m happy to talk.
I’m sure you probably realize that, um, the, um, but. Yeah, I’m going to be more public now on YouTube and sharing certain techniques. I’m here to elevate others. Um, I don’t mean it in an arrogant way. I don’t need to work another day in my life, but I love what I do. I’ll never retire. Um, I’m constantly trying to learn myself.
I still feel even I’m at the infancy of what, what’s working in today’s algorithms now with AI. So I feel like a school kid now, again, trying to learn how I can implement certain AI strategies for my growth. Um, so yeah, jamesnewly. com has got links to all my, my social profiles. Hit me up on any social media platform.
I’ll try to, I’m probably more active on Twitter and. YouTube and Instagram than I am on Facebook. I have more like family photos on there and stuff like that. Um, um, LinkedIn, I get thousands of kind of messages. So I fall behind on that. So I probably won’t message me on that platform.
Jared: You sound just like me, like LinkedIn.
Haven’t figured that one out yet. All I do is get a bunch of spam. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Pretty much my, uh, my family photos. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, that’s good. Hey, James, thanks so much for coming on the niche pursuits podcast. I really appreciate you being here.
James: It’s been an absolute pleasure. Cheers for having me.
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