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

James Dooley: If you're a company based in Guildford and looking at different digital marketing strategies in 2026 to grow your customer base or generate more enquiries, should you be teaming up with a local SEO agency based in Guildford? Should you be trying to team up with a PPC agency, which is a pay per click agency based in Guildford, or looking for a Guildford lead generation service specifically? These are all questions that we get asked quite a lot when people are looking for a return on investment. But Kasra, before people get started on which digital marketing strategies work best in the Guildford area, what advice would you give to business owners and entrepreneurs?

Kasra Dash: The biggest piece of advice that I would give to Guildford based business owners would be to set up some KPIs before spending any money on digital marketing. You want to know exactly how much money you're spending per campaign or per channel. Maybe you're spending money on Facebook and YouTube, or Facebook and social media. The next thing I would be taking a look at is how many leads have actually been generated. From the leads that have been generated per channel, I want to know what the contact rates have been. Has it been the past five out of ten enquiries, or two out of ten enquiries? Then from the contacted leads, I want to know how many of those have actually turned into paying customers for my company. Once you have those figures in place, digital marketing is just a lot more fun. It is a lot more predictable. So James, take it away with the first digital marketing strategy that you would recommend for a Guildford based business.

James Dooley: Step number one for me has got to be branding or brand SEO and making certain that you're looking good online and that you've got 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're getting will convert better because if at the eleventh hour they are deciding who they are going to go with, branding becomes very, very important. So I would say that is the first thing that people need to get right for all digital marketing strategies. My next strategy is going to be AI visibility. I feel like more and more companies are actually looking into this. So what do ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok and Perplexity say about your brand or about your business? Is it a positive thing or is it a negative thing? Also trying to figure out what those platforms say about your competitors as well, and obviously trying to improve that is really important. Some people call it AI SEO, some people call it GEO, some people call it LLM optimisation, but this is going to be a big thing in 2026 and also in the years to come as well.

Kasra Dash: I think that is a huge strategy that people need to be looking at with regard to artificial intelligence. More and more people are obviously 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 focus on your own digital marketing efforts to generate your own leads, but also if you can use some freelancers and outsource some work as well, you have got 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 that you might want to fill in the form for as well and just double check whether you can go and get a third party lead generation company to top up and start generating some leads for your business to grow in 2026. 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. You build out your Google Business Profile in your local area. Now 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, if you do not have a Google Maps listing at all, getting it into position number one can be difficult. The issue you have got is that there might be, let us say, a 60 or 100 review deficit. To get those reviews, you need leads. So it is one of those things. It is like the chicken and the egg. I think it is good for personal branding or for branding of your company, so always try and get the Google Maps listing, but you should always know the pros and cons to it as well.

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

Kasra Dash: The next one, which ties back to what you were saying before, James, is obviously organic social media. Organic social media, I think, is more of a numbers game. So try to create good content that your audience would actually want to view. I see this time and time again where I look at brands and they have just published maybe four or five posts on their Instagram profile and then they have not been active for three years. That is not going to drive you sales. But if you can do how tos, guides, or before and afters, if you can do content like that, people will see you on socials and they will actually click 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. So you want to be consistently uploading, maybe not every day, but at least three or four times a week.

James Dooley: Yes, for sure. On the subject of social media, paid social ads as well are massive. I am a big advocate of the small daily budget strategy that people talk about. So if you are going to be taking the time to post every day like you mentioned there for organic social media, just spending a few pounds on those posts and boosting them makes sense. Use case studies, any awards that you have won as well for reputation, and start boosting that. You can also be running retargeting ads. So if anyone has clicked through to your website, you can be running retargeting, which is paid social as well. On different places like Meta, whether that is Facebook and Instagram, plus Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and even Reddit, you can run paid ads. I think paid social media is still an untapped market for digital marketing strategies.

Kasra Dash: The next one is probably a love hate relationship, and that is PPC. Google AdWords or doing it on Bing, wherever. That is basically the sponsored results. So if you search for a service, it appears above local SEO. James and I have both spoken to so many business owners that have either spent £10,000, £15,000 or £20,000 on it and they have not had a single result, or they might have had a few leads and it just has not been quality. Then you have other people who have spent hundreds of thousands on it and they say it is the best thing that has ever happened to their business. The reason people either absolutely love it or absolutely hate it is probably down to how it has been set up. There are so many different nuances to PPC. For example, having a really proactive negative keyword list, making certain that you have a set of banned IPs, because competitors could be clicking on your ads and that is deemed as click fraud. You also need to make certain that you have got a high converting landing page and that you KPI your sales team so when a PPC lead comes in, that becomes one of the first priorities they deal with when it comes to contacting the lead. There are all these different nuances and if you are not on the ball with PPC, it is probably not going to work for your business. However, if you have got 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, just know the pros and cons of PPC.

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

Kasra Dash: Next on the list, and this is a little bit out of your control, you obviously have forums where you can get your brand mentioned, like Reddit and Quora. That very much comes down to what your customers are saying after dealing with you. Are they actually raving and shouting about you? If they are, then that is a very good source for getting other people recommending you. So if you can get that, again, it is a little bit out of your control, but asking for reviews and asking for recommendations to friends and other people can obviously generate you a decent amount of leads and enquiries as well.

James Dooley: Yes, for sure. And the add on benefit to places like Reddit is that it gets cited so much now in the AI overviews. So when you spoke there earlier about AI visibility, if you can try to get a positive volume of people talking about the products and services that you offer and some reviews on there, it is indirectly going to help you, or directly actually is going to help you, with AI visibility. Then 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 this earlier, is making certain that you understand your KPIs and your return on ad spend. I think it is very important for business owners that are doing any sort of digital marketing to be tracking how much time and effort is being put into, let us say, running organic social media or paid ads. Everything should have KPIs put in place. This is exactly the same with tradesman websites like Checkatrade, Bark, Rated People and MyBuilder. These could all be amazing platforms for generating leads that could get you a positive return on investment. If they do, you should continue to use those platforms. 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. But if they are getting you a positive return on investment, again, I am all for it as part of your digital marketing strategies. But I just want to repeat one more time with regard 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 a performance based lead generation service. So make sure you head over there, fill in the form. That could just be one part of generating leads among many. You should be trying to generate your own. You should never have a single point of failure and you should be trying to get that diversification. But make sure you head over to Promo SEO or Fat Rank lead generation service as part of your digital marketing efforts in 2026.

Kasra Dash: Thank you very much, Kazwell.