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This week on the Unscripted Small Business Podcast, host Jeremy Rivera sits down with Alex Radetic of Nuvo Agency, a home services and B2B marketing shop out of Missouri.
This one is for the owner, not the agency. Alex spent the hour on things a home services company can actually go do this month, most of which cost nothing but a decision. His client list runs waterproofing, sewer, plumbing, siding repair, foundation repair and insulation, and sizes from around a million in revenue up past fifteen million. If you own a trades business, or you market for one, this episode is a to-do list. Here are the pieces worth acting on, and then go listen to the whole thing.
Your business runs on new leads, every single time
Alex opened with the thing that makes home services different from almost every other kind of marketing.
“Part of the uniqueness of marketing in home services is that generally speaking, you’re not marketing for repeat clients. In most cases it’s constant new lead flow. If you have a returning client and it’s for the same thing you sold them the first time, it’s not usually a good sign.”
Jeremy joked that a pool company hearing from the same customer about a second pool has a problem, not a repeat customer. Alex allowed for the guy who bought a new house. Otherwise, the point stands. There is no retention flywheel to lean on, so the job is permanent new lead generation plus customer education.
That also shapes the social side. Alex mostly runs paid on Meta rather than organic social, because his clients are waterproofing and sewer and siding companies. As he put it, they are not pretty. Good before-and-after photos exist sometimes, and getting them out of a crew whose actual job is labor can be like pulling teeth. Companies around the one to three million mark do not have budget for a marketing person to go take photos all day. So the paid spend goes to brand building more than lead generation, based on what lead quality has looked like.
Answer faster than the guy down the road
Jeremy brought up a study from Jake Melendy at Ignitvio: about eighteen hundred businesses, fewer than five percent replied within twenty-four hours. Alex has been building the fix.
For one client he mapped a complete speed-to-lead flowchart:
- Day one: the lead lands automatically in a call queue
- Day two: a second call if nobody answered, after leaving a voicemail
- Then one email every seven days for the next fifteen days
- The email says, we tried to reach you, do you need a second opinion?
Most of these companies offer free estimates, so the second-opinion nudge costs nothing to offer. And someone with a wet basement is not patient. They want it fixed, they have probably already collected a quote, and if you are not picking up they will go find someone who does.
Here is why an owner should care more about this than about ranking:
“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.”
Alex says the automated follow-up alone tends to move close rates five to ten percent. That is a bigger swing than most marketing budgets buy, and it lives entirely inside your own phone system.
Run the two numbers against each other before you approve next year’s budget. Twenty percent more leads is an expensive year of content, links and ad spend. Five percent on the close rate is a call queue, a voicemail script and three emails on a timer. One of those is a line item. The other is an afternoon.
Put the price range on your website
The recommendation Alex fights hardest for, and the one owners resist hardest.
When he says publish pricing, contractors hear pricing page and imagine a customer holding them to a number. That is not the ask. The ask is a range with the reasoning attached.
“I’ve written articles where you give a big range. You go: this project type could cost you five thousand to thirty thousand plus, depending on a bunch of factors. Tell them what the factors are, what actually affects it.”
The way he protects the contractor: take the real internal range, publish a wider one, label it clearly as an estimate, and explain everything that moves it. His example was a customer who gave him six to thirteen thousand for an average attic insulation job around St. Louis. He published six to seventeen thousand.
“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.”
And it localizes cleanly. How much does attic insulation cost in St. Louis is one article. Every city you serve is another one.
The competitor objection has an answer too. Your competitor, who may well do a substantially poorer job, is going to undercut you regardless. Publishing the range is a trust builder and it will net you more leads than it loses you.
Fix your Yelp reviews. Yes, really.
Alex had to walk into a client meeting and deliver news nobody wanted.
“ChatGPT just signed a licensing agreement with Yelp, to use the Yelp platform and Yelp reviews to pull up businesses. And so I had to get on the meetings with my client and be like, Hey, I’m gonna tell you something you really don’t wanna hear. You need to fix your Yelp reviews.”
The response was literal groans. Everybody in the trades has accepted that Yelp is where people go to complain.
His fix is unglamorous and it works: go find happy customers and ask, including customers who already reviewed you somewhere else and were pleased. And be honest about why you are asking.
“Be like, hey, I’m running a business here, it’s a small business, we’re family owned, we’re not some big corporation. I need you to write a review on Yelp.”
Alex thinks pride is what stops most owners from asking, or from explaining the reason behind the ask. Your customers ask you for help all day. You are allowed to ask them.
This lined up with something Jon Henshaw told Jeremy in an earlier episode: the best thing you can do to influence what the language models say about you is to fix your broken product. The reviews and the Reddit threads are downstream of the actual experience, and in Jeremy’s own testing these systems hold a grudge longer than they hold a compliment.
Say the thing you actually do
Somewhere in here Jeremy got on his soapbox, because this one costs owners real money. Matt Brooks put it as educating your off-site customer service team, and that is exactly the job now. Claude and the rest are reasonably good at answering questions about your business, but not if your website never says what the business is.
Jeremy has fought this fight with salons that wanted to be an experience rather than a salon. Nobody searches for experience. Type it into Google and see whether that is your business.
It goes further than the H1 now. Your hours, your focus, your specialty, your expertise, all of it has to be stated in plain words on the page. Alex sees the same thing: about pages that are one photo and a puffy sales sentence, on sites built years ago that get technical updates but never got real content.
Another local services marketer on doing the unglamorous fixes before spending more money on reach.
Where your next twenty articles are hiding
Foundation repair, Alex says, is fundamentally an education business. A homeowner sees a crack in the basement and ignores it. Doors and windows start sticking and they assume the house is just old. The barrier to the job is not price, it is that the customer does not yet know they have a problem. And the topic is genuinely boring, which makes it hard to get anyone to sit still for it.
So make it easy on yourself and go interview your own crew. Jeremy did exactly that for Permacast in Florida, sitting down with both the CEO and the installation manager. The installation manager was the goldmine, because the question was simple: what is in the way when you get to the job site?
His answers were articles. Customers not realizing how much clearance a concrete wall needs. Customers not understanding that once it is poured, it is a multi-ton block of cement at exactly the width you specced, with no fudge factor and no adjustment. Measure, measure, measure again.
Alex’s reaction was immediate. Boom, there is another article. Boom, there is another article.
Ask what the search actually looks like
Last one, and it will save you from a bad agency conversation. Owners come to Alex naming the keyword they want. Foundation crack repair. Attic insulation.
He makes them pull up the search. Attic insulation is Owens Corning, Home Depot and Lowe’s and product listings, plus a map pack of three companies that do only that. Foundation crack repair is shopping and informational results with no businesses on it at all.
“And I’m like, it’s just not a great keyword to rank for. There’s too much competition from major corporate players.”
No amount of domain authority changes it. And no volume column in Semrush or Ahrefs will tell you, because the number does not describe what is on the page. Somebody has to open the search and look.
Which is also why Alex will not guarantee you a ranking, at ninety days or any other number. Anyone who does, in his words, is lying to you, because there is no way to guarantee it. For a brand-new domain in a competitive niche his honest answer is six to nine months to organic leads, with your business listing and its reviews producing sooner.
Connect with Alex Radetic
Alex runs Nuvo Agency, specializing in home services and B2B websites. They work on a subscription model with no large upfront fee: one monthly payment covering a custom build, technical and organic SEO, digital and social advertising, integrations, automations and consulting.
- Nuvo Agency: nuvoagency.com
- LinkedIn: Alex Radetic, where he posts most of his thinking
Listen to the full episode
Alex covers a lot more than fits here, including what AI Overviews are doing to your Search Console impressions and why he checked how many leads ChatGPT actually sent one of his biggest clients last year. The number is smaller than you think.
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