Local Lead Generation in 2026 The Real Strategy (James Dooley x Mike Martin)

James Dooley: Local lead generation. Today I am joined with Mike Martin, the founder of Magic Page, the founder of GBP Optimizer, Lead Simplify and several other SaaS tools. He has been in the industry for a long time. I have a lot of respect for him. But coming into 2026, Mike Martin, what is different now for local lead generation? Where should people be focusing their attention to generate more local leads?

Mike Martin: I think in 2026 we are looking at what we call agentic AI, which is basically speaking into a machine and getting the result that you want. So when you are driving along, you can get the result. When you are speaking to your phone, you can get the result. A lot fewer people are now going into boxes, clicking in keywords and searching. They are literally clicking a button, speaking to it and having a chat with it. The fundamentals have completely changed and they are going to change rapidly over the next 12 to 18 months. Back in the day, if I needed a locksmith, I would have gone to my computer in the house, switched it on, logged in, searched on Google and picked the top business. Nowadays, you pick up your phone, you just chat to it, say get me a locksmith in the local area, press a button and it is done. I feel agentic AI is taking over. People need to have genuine real human interactions with their business in all different directions that can be proved. That will enable them to rank not just in the search engines, but on AI, in the maps, on social media and in lots of different other environments and areas.

James Dooley: Yes, for sure. I think AI is the buzz keyword for 2026, for sure. I think it is going to be even bigger in 2027. People are getting down the funnel a lot faster. As they move down the funnel from top-of-funnel question-based keywords to bottom-of-funnel keywords, Google Business Profiles and paid ads are dominating. A lot of websites are getting a lot fewer clicks. People talk about zero clicks now for a lot of keywords, whereas I talk about being the perfect click. Instead of it being zero clicks, now you are getting a lot fewer clicks, but they are already pre-sold. By the time they click through to your website, they are pre-sold. I want to touch on Google Business Profiles because we have seen massive growth in the volume of calls and leads coming from Google Business Profiles. You have obviously gone all in on this with GBP Optimizer, which is an amazing tool that allows you to manage multiple GBPs or Google Business Profiles. Can you expand a little bit more on why a Google Business Profile is very important for local lead generation?

Mike Martin: It is not just a Google Business Profile. Rather than just answering that one question, I think I should outline a map of local lead generation for a local business, like the easiest route to success for a local business. There are really four pillars, and then you have the off-page SEO and things like that. Step number one for any local business, and it is free to start, has got to be the Google Business Profile. It is the true organic top of Google. It takes the top three positions. If you can get into the top three using consistent daily actions, then you are going to win. But it being connected to an actual website is also very, very important because of things like your NAP information and various other back and forth signals that are created through schema and other things like that. I would say step number one is build a decent website, a decent local business website that presents your business to the world as a legitimate organisation that people want to do work with. Straight after that, go after the Google Business Profile side of things. Get your Google Business Profile, connect them together and put a process in place, an SOP in place for your business that does continuous daily actions for your business. A lot of businesses will win just on those two actions alone. But if they then want to start spreading further afield and doing better, then you want to start creating local pages for all the towns, villages and suburbs around your business. Maybe a three to five mile radius to start with, then going further afield, making sure your schema points back to your Google Business Profile and so on, and making sure all your branding matches. A great way to generate new leads is to avoid what I see a lot of businesses doing, which is stupid. I will just call it what it is. They do not understand they are doing it, so it is not stupid because they understand it. It is stupid because it is stupid when you think about it. Paid ads, right? I am not knocking paid ads. I love paid ads. But if I am a plumber in London and I am targeting plumber London, and there are 200 other plumbers in London, and the ad system is on an auction system, your cost per click is always going to rise. Your profit is always going to decrease. It is a race to zero for every single business. Because of desperation, businesses do that. Then they have to figure out how to upsell. Then they have to figure out how to put prices up. Then they have to figure out how to rip customers off because they have got no other choice, because they are spending that much money on Google Ads. Google Ads are absolutely brilliant. They are the fastest way to fill a pipeline, to fill an email marketing system, and to build anything like that that you want. But for a local business, you only want to use them on short-term ads, promotions and special offers. Do not get me wrong, long-term branding is different. You can throw millions at it if all you care about is getting seen everywhere. That is a different game altogether. But when you are talking about a local business, I have seen businesses spend £3,000, £4,000, £5,000 or £6,000 a month and almost go out of business because they are focused on long-term keywords. You have to have Google Business Profiles and search engine optimisation to make that work. If you have not, you are not using a profitable business strategy. What you do is go after short-term promotions and marketing. Let us say I am in Weymouth now. If I am in Weymouth, I would do a short-term promotion to local businesses, a 50% off deal to local businesses. I would do an event that I am promoting in Weymouth for local businesses and get lots of people in, generate lots of buzz and get lots of people around my business, which will rank my website and rank my GBP. I would never bother, if I was in a major city like London, with locksmith London, plumber London or electrician London, because there are 200 businesses and everyone is doing cost per click. Other people are doing cost per click in a way where they can use a credit card to push the cost per click through the roof, then they just rip the credit cards off. What a lot of people do not think about, and this winds me up, is that Google gives you, when you sign up as a local business, £400. So if they give me £400 to compete against real businesses with real money, that is like going into a casino and betting against somebody who is using fake money with your real cash. All they are doing is pushing the cost up. It should be illegal. They should not be allowed to do it, but they do. It really winds me up. So the four pillars are paid ads, Google Business Profiles, local pages and a local business website. They are your foundations of any good local marketing strategy. Then all the other stuff that we do, like link building, PR, public relations, getting them to events and things like that, comes secondary to that.

James Dooley: I completely agree with what you are saying there. Just to add a few more things onto local lead generation strategies that are working very well at present, check to see any Reddit forums that are ranking. In nearly every single area, if you type in roofing Edinburgh or plumbers London, you will find that on the first page there will probably be a forums and discussions tab, and normally Reddit is in there. Go onto that Reddit for the specific products and services that you offer in the areas that you offer them and try to add value in those Reddit subreddits. That is another good and cheap way of generating enquiries. Another one is LLM optimisation, so AI optimisation. Try to get the content that you have on your website, or the work you are doing with Google Business Profile optimisation, where you are doing the posts, to trigger into ChatGPT, Gemini and tools like that. Try to get the brand into the AI overview so it says that you are the best plumber or roofer in Weymouth and things like that. The last one, which is a cheap form of running paid ads, is getting the retargeting pixel set up on the website and doing Meta ads retargeting only. They have already been through to the website, which means they are interested, but they might not have actually enquired. You can then follow them on Facebook and Instagram. It is a cheap form of running paid ads just to stay top of mind and maybe get them back. So those are some other strategies for local lead generation in 2026. Is there anything else you might want to add?

Mike Martin: You just reminded me of something. We did something years and years ago. At one point, I found a way to get a free website. This was a long time ago, but it worked for years. It still works now if I set it back up. I did not have much money back then, so I found a way to get a free website with a pay-as-you-go SIM card. I went and got loads of SIM cards, built loads of free websites, and got them ranking in all the major cities. Then I started to build location pages off them all and was generating loads of leads and loads of traffic. Then all of a sudden, Google must have caught on to what I was doing because they took down all my websites overnight. I lost 19 or so websites covering Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Oldham and Rochdale. I was number one everywhere, then I was number one nowhere. Very quickly, I was like, I need to go and do paid ads. So what we did, rather than setting up a local ad campaign, was set up a national ad campaign. The UK is not massive, but it was a national ad campaign. I put my cost per click at about £1 per click rather than £10, £15 or £20 per click. What I found was that the phones blew up really, really quickly, but not in Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and the major cities. It was all the tiny little outside areas where we did not have any competition. The phones exploded, and we were answering these calls. Then I was saying to them, we charge a £50 booking fee and after that we will get somebody to come out. We were getting the booking fees, then we were phoning local businesses and giving them the job. It was more on the ad side of things. We were driving the cost per click down massively because we were doing national campaigns and getting clicks in the areas where there were no ads. The areas where there are no ads are a lot of the rural areas where you have not got major cities and all the competition. It worked really, really well. It kept us afloat to a point where we could rebuild all the websites, rerank all the websites and do all the other things that we did. If you have telesales people who can place and position the jobs, or if you are a national company, low-ticket ads on a national basis will not cost you a lot of money in the big areas, but they can make you a fortune in all the smaller rural areas where you can send your drivers, your vans or whatever it is that you are doing out to those clients. We found that really profitable.

James Dooley: Yes. I hope you liked the video on local lead generation. I just want to mention one last thing with regards to Mike Martin’s tool, GBP Optimizer. Another reason why I absolutely love it is not only because Google Business Profiles have started to generate more enquiries. I think it is also one of the main trust factors for building reputation. Getting reviews on both Trustpilot and the Google Business Profile is key. It is almost like a zero-sum moment. If you are a plumber and you are £1,000, and another plumber is £1,000, and the customer is quickly going to check who they are going to use, a lot of the time they type in the brand name. The Google Business Profile shows up at the top, and they want to see who has the better reputation. What I love about GBP Optimizer is that it can drip-feed the reviews that are coming in and help with that review velocity. Make sure you check out the link in the description. Mike Martin, it has been an absolute pleasure discussing local lead generation strategies for 2026.

Mike Martin: Cheers, mate.