Why Most Businesses in Dudley Struggle With Digital Marketing in 2026 And How to Fix It

James Dooley: If you are a Dudley-based business looking to grow in 2026 but unsure which digital marketing strategies you should be using, should you be hiring a Dudley-based SEO agency, a PPC agency in the Dudley area, or a freelance lead generation service that can generate more enquiries for your business? These are all questions we get asked a lot. But before spending any money on marketing, Kazra, what advice would you give to entrepreneurs and business owners with a Dudley-based business?

Kazra Dash: If you are a Dudley-based business owner, what I would recommend before spending any money is setting up some KPIs. You want to know exactly how much money you are spending on your digital marketing efforts. Next, you want to know how many leads have been generated per channel. Maybe you are spending money on Facebook ads and SEO. You want to work out how many leads have been generated via SEO and how many leads have been generated via Facebook ads. Next, you want to look at the contact rate from those generated leads. Has it been five out of the last ten leads you have been able to contact? Has it been two out of the last ten leads? Last but not least, from the contacted leads, you want to work out how many of them have actually turned into paying customers or clients for your business. Once you have all of those numbers in place, that is when digital marketing becomes a lot more predictable. So James, what strategies should Dudley-based businesses be looking at to generate more leads and enquiries for their company?

James Dooley: It has got to be branding or brand SEO and making sure that you are looking good online and have a strong reputation. I think everything needs to start there. The foundations need to start with a positive brand SERP of who you are and what you do. A SERP stands for search engine results page. Getting that branding right across the board can then lead on to other things that you can be doing. It will improve your conversion rate on paid ads or social media. Any leads that you are getting will convert better if, at the eleventh hour, they are deciding who to go with. Branding becomes very important. I would say that is the first thing people need to get right for all digital marketing strategies. My next strategy is AI visibility. I feel like more and more companies are looking into this. What do ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok and Perplexity say about your brand or your business? Is it positive or negative? You also need to figure out what it says about your competitors and try to improve that. Some people call it AI SEO. Some call it GEO. Some call it LLM optimisation. This is going to be a big thing in 2026 and in the years ahead.

Kazra Dash: I think that is a huge strategy that people need to be looking at with artificial intelligence. More and more people are using AI. The next one for me is filling in the form at Fat Rank or Promo SEO, which do a commission-based lead generation service for UK companies looking to grow. I think it is important to look at your own digital marketing efforts to generate your own leads, but also, if you can use some freelancers and outsource some as well, you have that diversification of leads. So head on over to fatrank.com, fill in the form and see whether they can help you with a no-risk supply of enquiries. Promo SEO also do a very similar performance-based lead generation service, so you might want to fill in the form there as well and double check whether you can get a third-party lead generation company to top up and start generating leads for your business to grow in 2026.

James Dooley: Next on the list is Google Business Profiles. So Google Map listings. This is like local SEO where you basically try to get more reviews and build out your Google Business Profile in your local area. There are pros and cons to this. I think the biggest pro is that once it is actually ranking, you are going to be consistently generating leads. However, to get from nowhere, where you do not have a Google Maps listing at all, to ranking in position one, the issue is there might be a sixty or a hundred review deficit. To get those reviews, you need leads. It is one of those chicken and egg situations. I think it is good for personal branding or for the branding of your company. Always try to get the Google Maps listing, but always know the pros and cons as well.

Kazra Dash: For certain. If you are in a local area, you want to get those local map listings. For me, you need to be omni-channel and omnipresent. The next part is SEO in general. Organic SEO. Can you build up your website to try to get it ranking better? If you are in a local area, you might want to do your service pages with the area you cover. So like plumbing in Manchester. Create a page for that. Hopefully then share that on the Google Business Profile like you mentioned. Trying to get organic rankings matters because of the amount of search volume out there for the services you do. It could also be blog posts that you create as well. There are different strategies you can use, but ideally you want good quality content, strong topical authority and some third-party backlinks to power up the site and get those organic SEO rankings. That is another big part of your digital marketing strategy in 2026.

James Dooley: Then the next one, which ties back to what you were saying before, is organic social media. Organic social media is more of a numbers game. Try to create good content that your audience would actually want to view. I see it time and time again where brands have published maybe four or five posts on Instagram and then have not been active for three years. That is not going to drive sales. But if you can do how-tos, guides, maybe before and afters, then people will see you on social media and click through to find out more about you and fill in the contact form. The caveat to organic social media is that yes, it is free to do. It is not like PPC, for example, but it is very much a numbers game. You want to be consistently uploading, maybe not every day, but at least three or four times a week.

Kazra Dash: Paid social ads are also massive. I am a big advocate of the dollar-a-day strategy people talk about. If you are going to take the time to post every day like you mentioned for organic social media, then spending a few pounds on those posts and boosting them makes sense. Use case studies and any awards you have won for reputation and start boosting that. You can also run retargeting ads. If anyone has clicked through to your website, you can run retargeting, which is paid social as well. You have platforms like Meta, so Facebook and Instagram. You have Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and even Reddit for paid ads. I think paid social media is still an untapped market for digital marketing strategies.

James Dooley: The next one is probably a love-hate relationship, and that is PPC. Google Ads or Bing Ads, wherever. That is basically the sponsored results. If you search for a service, it is above local SEO. Both Kazra and I have spoken to so many business owners who have either spent ten, fifteen or twenty thousand on it and not had a single result, or they have had a few leads and the quality has not been there. Then you have other businesses who have spent hundreds of thousands and say it is the best thing that has ever happened to their business. The reason people either love it or hate it is probably down to how it has been set up. There are so many nuances to PPC. For example, having a proactive negative keyword list, making sure you have a set of banned IPs so competitors are not clicking on your ads, which is click fraud, making sure you have a high-converting landing page and making sure you KPI your sales team. When a PPC lead comes in, that should be one of the first priorities when it comes to contacting the lead. There are a lot of nuances and if you are not on the ball with PPC, it probably will not work for your business. However, if you have a really good well-refined sales team, a really good landing page, a well-kept up-to-date negative keyword list and you are using click fraud software, then it will probably perform well for you. But again, know the pros and cons to PPC.

Kazra Dash: There are certainly pros and cons. There are benefits to using PPC to get instant leads, but like you said, the amount of people we speak to who have burnt a lot of budget and not had the enquiries or results is pretty scary. While we are on the subject of paid traffic, we have already spoken about paid social ads and PPC with Google or Bing. I am going to throw paid ads on AI platforms into the mix. It is not fully rolled out as we are doing this video, but I know that ChatGPT is looking to roll out ChatGPT ads. Claude, Perplexity and other LLMs might start rolling it out in 2026. If you are one of the early adopters and innovators to get on there, I think you could be getting cheap leads or cheap contact form submissions. It is something to look out for in 2026.

James Dooley: Next on the list, and this is a little bit out of your control, is getting your brand mentioned in forums like Reddit and Quora. That very much comes down to where your customers that you have dealt with previously are hanging out. Are they actually raving about you? If they are, that is a very good source of getting other people recommending you. It is a bit out of your control, but asking for reviews and asking people to recommend you to friends and others can generate a decent amount of leads and enquiries as well.

Kazra Dash: The add-on benefit to places like Reddit is that it is getting cited so much now in AI overviews. When you spoke earlier about AI visibility, if you can get a positive volume of people talking about the products and services you offer, and some reviews on there, it is indirectly or directly going to help you with AI visibility. The last one for me is tradesman websites. So like Checkatrade, Bark, Rated People and MyBuilder, or teaming up with a third-party lead generation company. Something I would say with all of these practices, and Kaza touched on it earlier, is that you need to understand your KPIs and your return on ad spend. It is very important for business owners doing any sort of digital marketing to track how much time and effort is being put into things like running organic social media or paid ads. Everything should have KPIs in place. The same applies with tradesman websites like Checkatrade, Bark, Rated People and MyBuilder. These can be amazing platforms for generating leads that get you a positive return on investment. If they do, you should continue using them.

James Dooley: There are certain lead generation companies out there as well that could generate quite a lot of leads. They could be using organic SEO, PPC or social media ads to generate those leads. If they are getting you a positive return on investment, then I am all for it as part of your digital marketing strategy. I just want to repeat one more time, with regards to Fat Rank and Promo SEO, they do lead generation and they guarantee a return on investment. It is a commission-based lead generation service or performance-based lead generation service. So make sure you head on over there and fill in the form. That could be one part of generating leads of many. You should be trying to generate your own as well. You should never have a single point of failure and you should be trying to build diversification. Make sure you head on over to Promo SEO or Fat Rank lead generation service as part of your digital marketing efforts in 2026.

Kazra Dash: Thank you very much.