Learn Lead Gen Like a Pro: What We’d Do If Starting Again

James Dooley: So today we're going to be talking about lead generation—specifically a full tutorial on what we would do if we were just starting out trying to generate our own leads. I'm joined with James. Take it off. James Dooley: To start with, I’m going to presume you already have a website. If not, you need to get a website first. But if you do have one, then the first thing I'd make certain you have is a Google Business Profile. That's a map listing that connects to your website. It puts your phone number and website on there, and then you start getting local rankings for the services you offer near your location. That's step number one. But what would you do, Kazzy, to help rank the Google Business Profile better? Kasra Dash: I would then focus on your actual website. A lot of beginner companies have a homepage, a services page, and a contact page—but all their services are lumped onto one page. They might mention plumbing, emergency plumbers, boiler replacement—all on one page. What you actually want is separate pages for each service. If you provide three services, you need three service pages: “Emergency Plumbers in Edinburgh,” “Boiler Replacement in Edinburgh,” etc. This helps with location-based optimization and indirectly improves your Google Business Profile ranking. James Dooley: Yes, that's a great on-page strategy. Now I’ll move to off-page SEO. If you're a local plumber or electrician, the first thing I’d do is get lots of business listings. Head over to something like Local SEO Sharks and buy around 100 citations. These are listings like Yell.com, Thomson Local, 192.com, and others. You get your business name, address, and phone number on 100 referring domains. Then force-index them with a tool like Giger Indexer or Indexation to make sure Google crawls them. After that, build a “social fortress”—Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Tumblr, Weebly, RebelMouse, etc. These are all brandname.tumblr.com, brandname.medium.com, and so on. These create trust signals. And if you win an award, you can broadcast it across all your platforms. Now that we’ve done SEO and social profiles, what would you do about organic social media? Kasra Dash: Organic social has many strategies. I even use it personally—talking about SEO, business, and similar topics. You can do text content, but it’s a slow burner. Don’t expect results in 30 days. Plan for one post a day for 90 days. If you have a visual service, I recommend before-and-afters. For kitchen remodeling or house renovations, post before-and-after photos or even time-lapse videos. Some of these videos get two to three million views—not necessarily leads, but even 0.2% reaching out is still valuable. This is great if you’re in a visually appealing service business. James Dooley: Within this tutorial for lead generation, I’ll move from organic social to paid social—paid ads on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, depending on how visual your product is. Make sure you set up a retargeting pixel on your website, so anyone who visits can be retargeted. Paid ads can work well, but if you don't know what you're doing, you can waste money—same as SEO. Moving away from paid social—what are your thoughts on PPC, pay-per-click on Google? Kasra Dash: PPC can work, but it can also burn a lot of money. Pros and cons. PPC is faster than SEO for generating your first leads. But you need to track which keywords your clicks are coming from. A new campaign won’t have a negative keyword list. So if you're an accountancy firm, someone searching “accounting jobs” might trigger your ad, which you don’t want. So build a negative keyword list. Also track click fraud. In competitive markets, competitors click your ads, wasting money. Track IPs and blacklist suspicious ones. But yes—PPC is faster than SEO. James Dooley: If you're a beginner looking for lead generation tutorials, PPC can work but can be expensive. Another option is teaming up with a lead generation company. For example, Checkatrade ranks for big keywords. You can appear alongside competitors. You pay to be listed, but if they generate you an inquiry every day and you have good conversion rates, it’s a positive ROI. Same with Bark.com, Builder, TrustATrader. But again, like PPC and SEO, you can burn money. So if you're doing lead generation, track your KPIs always. But what about dedicated lead generation companies—experts that know SEO, PPC, retargeting—what's your thought on letting the “roofer do the roof,” so to speak? Kasra Dash: It makes perfect sense. We once spoke to a chartered accountancy firm who said, “I went to university, learned accounting, worked for 20 years—but I don’t know how to generate leads.” Universities don’t teach marketing. Whether you’re a dentist, lawyer, accountant—they teach you the profession, not lead generation. So it definitely makes sense to partner with people who do this day in and day out. Kasra Dash: Another thing—get leads first. That's James’s book. James Dooley: Yes, I’ve written a book called Leads First. And when you're talking about that example with the accountant... (Transcript ends here)