Alex Radetic has spent a decade marketing waterproofers, sewer companies, plumbers and siding contractors, and he has stopped selling traffic. On this episode he makes the case that a five percent lift in close rate is worth more to a seasonal home services business than twenty percent more leads, and he brings the receipts, including a fifteen-million-dollar client whose organic traffic grew seventy to eighty percent year over year while conversions moved about ten.

Alex is the leader of Nuvo Agency, born and raised in Missouri and building home services and B2B websites on a subscription model, no large upfront fee, with the site build, technical and organic SEO, paid media, integrations and automations rolled into one monthly fee. He started in 2015 doing keyword work and traffic chasing, and now spends as much time on what happens after the form fill as before it.

In this episode

• Home services is a new-lead business, not a retention business, a repeat client for the same job you already sold them is usually a bad sign, not a win.
• Why paid social beats organic social for trades companies, crews are doing labor, not photography, and a one-to-three-million-dollar company has no budget for a marketing person to chase before-and-afters.
• The speed-to-lead flowchart, call queue on day one, second call plus voicemail on day two, then an email every seven days for fifteen days. Worth five to ten points of close rate.
• Sixty-seven leads from ChatGPT in an entire year, on an account running three hundred to six hundred leads a month. Alex's read on what AEO and GEO are actually worth right now.
• ChatGPT's Yelp licensing deal, and the groans he got when he told a client they now have to fix their Yelp reviews.
• Read the SERP before you promise the keyword, “attic insulation” is Owens Corning, Home Depot and Lowe's; “foundation crack repair” is shopping and informational with no businesses on it. No volume column tells you that.
• Where your impressions actually go, ten searches a month in the AdWords API versus eleven hundred impressions in Search Console, plus AI Overview citations counting as organic impressions.
• Publish the pricing, a padded range, every factor that moves it, localized. Alex calls it the easiest E-E-A-T win in home services, regardless of company size.
• Honesty as a sales strategy, six to nine months for a brand-new domain, no guaranteed rankings, and turning down a job because the repair method itself was dishonest.

Chapters

• (00:00) Meet Alex Radetic, a decade of home services marketing out of Missouri
• (01:01) Why home services never gets a repeat customer
• (02:46) Why paid social beats organic social for a trades company
• (04:05) Speed to lead: the flowchart that beats more traffic
• (06:16) The black hole after the conversion
• (07:36) AEO, GEO, and sixty-seven leads from ChatGPT
• (11:55) Yelp, reviews, and reputation management 2.0
• (13:59) Say the thing you actually do
• (15:25) Keyword research you can't do from a volume column
• (17:35) Where your impressions actually go
• (21:21) Foundation repair is an education business
• (23:02) Interview your own crew for content
• (24:08) Put the pricing on the website
• (25:45) Turning down the work you can't stand behind
• (27:42) Why he won't guarantee a ranking
• (30:20) The low-hanging fruit: E-E-A-T you can actually ship
• (33:20) Where to find Alex Radetic

Notable quotes

“A five percent increase in close rate can actually net you more revenue than a twenty percent increase in leads year over year with the same close rate.”
, Alex Radetic

“I looked at last year, and the entirety of last year they only got sixty-seven leads directly attributable to ChatGPT. And I'm like, okay, well that's worthless.”
, Alex Radetic

“It doesn't matter how small a company you are. If you're willing to publish price range information for specific types of jobs, Google loves that stuff.”
, Alex Radetic

Things mentioned

• Jeremy cites Jake Melendy's lead response study, 1,824 businesses, and 68% never respond inside 24 hours (04:05).
• Matt Brooks on educating your off-site customer service team, so the answer engines have something true to repeat (13:59).
• Jon Henshaw's line that the best thing you can do to influence LLMs is fix your broken product.
• Jeremy interviewing the installation manager and the CEO at Permacast in Florida, to mine real jobs for content (23:02).
• Advanced Web Ranking's study putting People Also Ask click-through somewhere around ninth or tenth position.

Resources & links

• Nuvo Agency, Alex's subscription-model home services and B2B websites
• Alex Radetic on LinkedIn, where he does his organic posting
• Alex on swaying the LLMs: get branded, get into news stories, get talked about on Reddit. That is a complete guide to link building & authority problem, not a prompt problem.
• Turning a job walkthrough with your installation manager into an article is exactly the human-certified, expert-sourced content play.

About the show

Unscripted Small Business is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. Full episode archive at unscriptedsmallbusiness.com.