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

TRANSCRIPT

James Dooley: If you have a business based in Surrey and you are looking to grow, but you are uncertain which digital marketing strategies you should be focusing on, should you be trying to get into AI overviews or ChatGPT, or should you be trying to team up with a Surrey-based SEO agency or a pay-per-click PPC agency based in Surrey? These are all things that we are going to unpack today. But before we get started on the different types of digital marketing strategies working best in 2026, what advice would you give to business owners based in the Surrey area before they spend a single penny on digital marketing?

Kazra Dash: For business owners based in Surrey, the number one piece of advice that I would give is to go and set up some KPIs. These KPIs will cover you when you start to scale up or scale down certain campaigns in the future. If you do not know what a KPI is, it is basically a metric that you can score certain things on. The metrics that I typically look at are how much money I am spending on generating new enquiries. Next, I want to know how many enquiries have come from certain campaigns. So if I am spending money on Facebook ads, Checkatrade and PPC, for example, I want to know how many leads each of those campaigns has generated. Then, from the generated leads, the next KPI I would look at is how many of those leads I have been able to contact and how many have actually picked up the phone. Then from that, the next KPI I would be looking at is how many of those leads that I have contacted have turned into paying customers. Once you have those facts and figures in place, digital marketing becomes a lot more predictable. You can scale certain campaigns up and turn certain campaigns off as well. So James, what would be the first digital marketing strategy that you would recommend to a Surrey-based business?

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 the foundations need to start with 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 would 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 that people need to get right for all digital marketing strategies.

Kazra Dash: 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 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 it says about your competitors and obviously trying to improve that is really important. Some people call it AI SEO, some people call it GEO, and some people call it LLM optimisation. 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, because 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 offer a commission-based lead generation service for UK companies looking to grow. I think it is important to be looking 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 Fat Rank, 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. You build out your Google Business Profile in your local area. Now 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 of it as well.

James Dooley: Yes, definitely. If you are in a local area, you want to try and get those local map 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 your website ranking better? If you are in a local area, you might want to do your service with the area that 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 out there from people searching for the different services that you offer, or it could be some blog posts that you could be doing as well. There are different strategies that you can be doing, 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.

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 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 sales. But if you can do how-tos, if you can do guides, maybe you can do before and afters, if you can do content like that, 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. 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 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, just spending a few pounds on those posts and boosting them. Get case studies and 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, 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 spoken to so many business owners where they 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 just have not been 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 why 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, because your competitors could be clicking on your ads and that is deemed to be 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 is one of the first priorities that they actually take 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 amount of people that 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, 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 roll out ChatGPT ads. Claude, Perplexity and other LLMs might start rolling this 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 with 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 do obviously have forums where you can get your brand mentioned, like Reddit and Quora. That very much comes down to where your customers that you have been dealing with previously are. Are they actually raving about you and talking about you? If they are, then that is a very good resource 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 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 added benefits of places like Reddit is that it is getting cited so much now in AI overviews. So when you spoke there early on 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, with AI visibility. The last one for me is tradesman websites, so things like 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 who 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 running 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 to generate leads that could get you a positive return on investment, and if they do, you should continue using those platforms. There are certain lead generation companies out there as well that could generate quite a lot of leads for you. 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, then I am all for it as part of your digital marketing strategies. 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 performance-based lead generation service. So make sure you head on over there and fill in the form. That could just be one part of generating leads out of 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 on over to Promo SEO or the Fat Rank lead generation service as part of your digital marketing efforts in 2026. Thank you very much, Kazra Dash.