I have to open with a confession, because I made it on the recording and it is the honest frame for this whole conversation.
From roughly 2010 to 2020 I had blindness after the conversion. My job was rankings and traffic. I delivered rankings and traffic, I got paid, and what happened after the form fill was a black hole to me.
Alex Radetic spent that same decade in home services marketing in Missouri, and he arrived at the opposite habit. He goes past the lead, into the call queue, into the close rate, into whether the client even wants the kind of job the content is generating. Sitting across from him made me realize how much of my old scope was self-protective.
We cannot afford the black hole anymore
I said it to Alex plainly. We should be reaching deeper into the organization to make sure the marketing we put out leads to the conversations that actually close. Are we optimizing basements when the profit is in attics? Does an addition drag in a predictable amount of follow-on work that the client loves, or is the client quietly hoping we stop sending those?
That last part is the one that bites. Optimizing for leads a client does not want builds an invisible resentment, and it can turn a good relationship toxic before anybody names the problem out loud.
Alex has a similar arc. He started in 2015 doing keyword stuff and getting traffic to pages. He is now running what he calls a pseudo consultation, where the conversation with the business owner is about operations as much as it is about search.
Speed to lead is the part nobody sells
I brought up Jake Melendy of Ignitvio, who studied roughly eighteen hundred businesses and found that fewer than five percent replied to an inquiry within twenty-four hours. Alex did not need convincing. It is what he has been talking about more than anything else lately.
“They may come back and say the lead quality is not great. And I’m like, Did you contact them right away? Are you automatically emailing them? Are you sending text messages?”
For one client he built the whole thing as a flowchart, every contact stage mapped:
- Day one, the lead drops automatically into a call queue
- Day two, a second call if the first went unanswered, after a voicemail
- Then an email every seven days for the next fifteen days, three emails total
- The message is simple. We tried to reach you. Do you need a second opinion?
The logic is specific to the trade. Most of these companies offer free estimates. A homeowner with a wet basement wants it fixed fast and has probably collected a quote within the first couple of days. If you are not answering the phone or the email, they go find someone who is. But at those ticket prices, a second-estimate nudge a week later is still worth sending.
Five percent beats twenty percent
Then Alex put a number on it that reframes how I want to pitch retainers.
“Because most home services are seasonal, 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.”
Sit with that as a consultant. Twenty percent more leads is a hard, expensive year of content and links. Five percent on the close rate is a call queue, a voicemail script and three emails. One of those is inside my scope as I traditionally sold it. The other one, the cheaper one, is not, and Alex says the automated follow-up alone moves close rates five to ten percent.
I do not think most business owners have insight into that math. I am not sure most agencies do either.
Traffic that grows while the leads sit still
The same discipline shows up in how Alex reports. He has a client doing well over fifteen million a year, three hundred to six hundred leads a month depending on the season. Organic traffic is up seventy to eighty percent year over year, from thirty-five hundred organic visits in a month to seven thousand.
Conversions are up about ten percent.
He tells the client both numbers.
“So we need to understand that I could be over here trying to fool you with this great organic growth traffic number.”
And when that client asked about AI search, Alex went and checked instead of selling.
“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.”
I want to be careful here, because Alex is not saying AI search does not matter. He is saying he measured it on one account and reported the result. That is the behavior. Not the conclusion.
Saying no is part of the service
This is where I felt most at home in the conversation. Alex has turned work down. A foundation crack repair prospect described the method he used, and Alex told him he could not take it, because the man would be charging people for a non-permanent fix while claiming it was permanent. Not optimizable. It would only generate bad reviews.
I have my own version. It has never been only the casinos and the pills. It is the prospect who opens with, can you put up a bunch of extra pages and get us ranking right away. One guy asked me straight out for the most links I could buy him from India. Out the gate. That is a hard no, not because I am precious about it, but because taking it is bad business on my behalf, and it comes back to me.
Alex’s screen is simpler and better. He works with companies whose work he would stand behind if he were the one doing it.
He will not guarantee you a ranking
Ask Alex for ninety, one hundred eighty and two hundred seventy day ranking KPIs and the answer is no. Three months from now Google could tank it with an algorithm update. For a brand-new domain with no history in a competitive plumbing niche, his honest answer is six to nine months before organic leads start coming through, with the business listing and reviews producing earlier, and paid available if you accept that the first two weeks of an ad account is money spent to learn whether it works at all.
“I need you to trust my expertise. So I need you to understand that I’m not gonna lie to you, even in the sales process.”
He says that has made him a lot of good business partnerships, and has protected his reputation from the thing he would otherwise have promised.
What I took away
Three things I am changing in how I scope consulting work.
- Ask about response time before I ask about rankings. It may be the highest-leverage thing on the whole engagement, and it is not an SEO deliverable.
- Report the lead number next to the traffic number every single time, even when the lead number is the worse of the two.
- Ask which jobs the client actually wants before I decide what to optimize. The resentment builds quietly.
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Alex Radetic runs Nuvo Agency at nuvoagency.com, specializing in home services and B2B websites on a subscription model. He publishes on LinkedIn under his own name.
The owner-facing recap of this episode is on Unscripted Small Business, and the practitioner version is on SEO Arcade.
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