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

James Dooley: If you are a business based in Inverness and looking to grow in 2026, but you are uncertain which digital marketing strategies you should be using, should you be trying to team up with an SEO agency based in Inverness or a PPC pay-per-click agency that is based in Inverness? There are a lot of questions in the community about whether you should be trying to get yourself cited and recommended in AI overviews or within ChatGPT. What strategies are working? What strategies are not working? This is what we are going to uncover today with Kazra. But before we get started on the different types of digital marketing strategies that businesses in Inverness should be using, Kazra, what advice would you give to business owners?

Kazra Dash: For business owners in Inverness, the number one piece of advice that I would give is to set up some KPIs. James Dooley and I are going to be talking about a lot of different marketing channels in this video. That is not to say you should go and try every single one of them because some of them might not work. However, before spending a single penny, you need to set up some KPIs. You need to know these figures. You want to know exactly how much money you are spending per campaign. You also want to know which campaigns are actually generating the most leads. Is it Facebook ads? Is it PPC? Is it SEO? Then you want to work out, from those leads, how many are actually contactable. Let us say Facebook ads has generated 25 leads for £3,000. Out of those 25 leads, how many have you actually been able to contact and try to sell to? Finally, how many of those have actually been converted into paying customers or clients for your Inverness-based company? If you can get those figures, that is when digital marketing becomes far more predictable. You can scale certain campaigns up and switch certain campaigns off as well. So James, for Inverness-based businesses, what is the first marketing strategy they should be focusing on?

James Dooley: Step number one for me has 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 with the foundation of a positive brand SERP of who you are and what you do. SERP stands for search engine results page, and getting that branding right across the board can 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, the conversion rate will be better. If, at the eleventh hour, they are going to decide who they are going to go with, branding becomes very, very important. I would say that is the first thing people need to get right for all digital marketing strategies.

Kazra Dash: My next strategy is AI visibility. I feel like more and more companies are actually looking into this. 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 they say about your competitors and improving that is really important. Some people call it AI SEO, some people call it GEO, and some people call it LLM optimisation, but this is going to be a big thing in 2026 and in the years to come as well.

James Dooley: 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 FatRank or Promo SEO, which offer 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 of it as well, you have that diversification of leads. So head over to FatRank, fill in the form and see whether they can help you with a no-risk supply of enquiries. Promo SEO also offer a very similar performance-based lead generation service that you might want to fill in the form for there as well. Just double check whether you can get a third-party lead generation company to top up and start generating some leads for your business to grow in 2026.

Kazra Dash: Next on the list is Google Business Profiles, so Google Maps 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 advantage is that once it is actually ranking, you are going to be consistently generating leads. However, to get from nowhere, let us say you do not have a Google Maps listing at all, to getting it ranked in position number one, the issue is that there might be a 60 or 100 review deficit. To get those reviews, you need leads. So it is one of those situations. It is like the chicken and the egg. For me, I just think it is good for personal branding or for the branding of your company. So always try and get the Google Maps listing, but you should always know the pros and cons as well.

James Dooley: Yes, definitely. If you are in a local area, you want to try and get those local maps listings. For me, you need to be omni-channel and omnipresent. I think the next part is SEO in general, so organic SEO. Can you build 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 that you cover. For example, plumbing in Manchester. Create a page for that, then hopefully share that on the Google Business Profile that you mentioned. Trying to get organic rankings matters because of the amount of search volume from people searching for the different services you offer. It could also be some blog posts that you could be doing as well. There are different strategies you can use, but ideally you want good quality content, to build up topical authority and to get some third-party backlinks to strengthen the site and improve those organic SEO rankings. I think that is another big part of what you need to be doing as part of your digital marketing strategies in 2026.

Kazra Dash: The next one, which ties back to what you were saying before, James, is obviously organic social media. I think organic social media is more of a numbers game. 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 have not been active for three years. That is not going to drive you sales. But if you can do how-to content, guides and maybe before and after examples, then people will see you on social media 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. 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 are massive as well. I am a big advocate of the dollar-a-day 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, then just spend a few pounds on those posts and boost them. Get case studies and any awards that you have won as well for reputation and start boosting that. You can also run retargeting ads. So if anyone has clicked through to your website, you can run retargeting, which is paid social as well. On platforms like Meta, whether that is Facebook and Instagram, you have got Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest. You can even run places like Reddit as well for paid ads. I think paid social media is still an untapped market for digital marketing strategies.

Kazra 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 is above local SEO. James Dooley and I have both spoken to so many business owners who have either spent £10,000, £15,000 or £20,000 on it and not had a single result, or they might have had a few leads and they were just not good quality. Then you have got 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 sure that you have a set of banned IPs. For example, your competitors could be clicking on your ads, and that is what is called click fraud. Making sure that you have got a high-converting landing page. Making sure that you KPI your sales team. So when a PPC lead comes in, that becomes one of the first priorities when it comes to contacting the lead. There are all of 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 and up-to-date negative keyword list, and you are using click fraud software, then at that point 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 to using it to get instant leads, but like you said, the number of people we speak to who have burnt a lot of budget and not had the enquiries and results come through as part of their digital marketing is pretty scary. While we are on the subject of paid ads, we have obviously spoken about paid social ads and now you have spoken there about PPC with Google or Bing. I am going to throw into the mix paid ads on AI platforms. It is not fully rolled out as we are doing this video, but I know that ChatGPT is looking to try and roll out ChatGPT ads. Claude, Perplexity and other 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, doing paid AI listings and ads. I think that could be something to watch in 2026.

Kazra 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 really comes down to your customers and the people you have dealt with previously. Are they actually raving about you and talking about you? If they are, then that is a very good way of getting other people to recommend you. If you can get that, again, it is a little bit out of your control, but asking for reviews and asking people to recommend you to friends and others can obviously generate a decent amount of leads and enquiries as well.

James Dooley: Yes, for sure. One of the extra benefits of places like Reddit is that it is being cited so much now in AI overviews. So, when you mentioned AI visibility earlier, if you can try to get a positive volume of people talking about the products and services you offer, and some reviews on there, it is indirectly going to help you, or directly actually, with AI visibility. The last one for me is tradesman websites, such as Checkatrade, Bark, or teaming up with a third-party lead generation company. Something I would say with all of these practices, which Kazra Dash touched on earlier, is making sure that you understand your KPIs and your return on ad spend. I think it is very important for business owners doing any sort of digital marketing.