I have spent a lot of years inside tools that hand you a volume column and a difficulty score, and I have watched plenty of strategy get built on nothing else. So when Alex Radetic told me he still does keyword research by opening the search and looking at it, I wanted the whole method on tape. Alex runs Nuvo Agency out of Missouri and has spent a decade in home services marketing: waterproofing, sewer, plumbing, siding repair, foundation repair, insulation. That niche punishes lazy research faster than most, because the obvious keyword and the money keyword are usually not the same keyword.
Here is his method, plus a read on AI search that every agency owner should hear before quoting a GEO retainer. The owner-facing version of the episode is over on Unscripted Small Business. This post is the practitioner version.
The full case for running a show like this sits in our podcasting as content and SEO strategy resource guide.
The volume column is not the research
Alex gets the same request constantly. A client names a keyword, and the keyword is wrong.
“I do also more often run across people being like, I want to rank for X keyword. I want to rank for foundation crack repair. And then I’m like, go pull up foundation crack repair. Here’s what the SERP looks like: it is a shopping and informational query with no businesses on it.”
Alex Radetic
The insulation example is even cleaner. Search attic insulation and you get Owens Corning, Home Depot and Lowe’s, product listings, and a map pack with three companies that do nothing but that.
His conclusion is blunt. It is not a great keyword to rank for, there is too much competition from major corporate players, and no amount of authority fixes it.
“You could be a thirty million dollar a month company and it’s not gonna make you rank for this keyword, because that keyword doesn’t have anything to do with people actually searching for that service.”
Alex Radetic
So the work stays manual. Pull the search, catalog what is on it, sort the results into informational and commercial, and only then decide what the content has to be to fit into that mix. Alex is explicit that this is not something you get from looking at volumes on Semrush or Ahrefs.
If you want that turned into a repeatable checklist, our SEO tactic library carries the intent-mapping plays we run before any content brief goes out.
Where your impressions actually went
I brought Alex a discrepancy I had been chewing on all week. A phrase my own SEO site ranks for showed ten monthly searches through the Google Ads API, and over eleven hundred impressions in Search Console. Both numbers come from Google.
Part of the answer is horizontal splitting. If you surface inside a People Also Ask box attached to a different query, the impression lands under the PAA phrase, not the original one.
Alex says AI Overviews are doing the same thing, harder.
“It is counting your little logo icon as a reference. It is counting that as an impression.”
Alex Radetic
His read is that Google rolled out generative AI Overview reporting in Search Console without pulling that data out of the regular search view, so impressions inflate in the standard report. He also suspects, and says plainly that he has no data to prove it, that a click into an AI Overview where you are cited may be counting as a click too.
Worth holding onto if you are building a client report on impression growth right now. The number is real. It is just not measuring what your client thinks it is measuring.
I mentioned the Advanced Web Ranking study on People Also Ask click-through, which put a PAA entry somewhere around ninth or tenth place. The traffic exists. It is a fraction.
AEO, GEO, and sixty-seven leads
This is the part of the conversation I keep replaying. Alex has large clients asking him to show up in AI Overviews and AI search. He can do it. He is also honest about what it paid.
“I’ve got a company that makes well over the fifteen million dollar revenue range per year that I do work for. We’re talking like three hundred, six hundred leads per month depending on the season, the time of year.”
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
Meanwhile the organic side is working. On that same client he is seeing seventy to eighty percent traffic growth year over year, thirty-five hundred organic visits in a month climbing to seven thousand, from writing blog articles that properly cover the topic and the informational questions around it. Which, as he points out, is the exact same thing SEOs were already doing and should be doing anyway. It just got renamed AEO and GEO.
The traffic went up. The leads did not follow at the same rate. Conversion growth on that account is roughly ten percent year over year, and Alex tells the client that out loud.
“I could be over here trying to fool you with this great organic growth traffic number. And it’s technically what you’re paying me to do, get you organic traffic. But at the end of the day, I want to talk to you about these leads, talk to you about the quality of leads.”
Alex Radetic
His summary of the AEO and GEO discourse: Google says do the same things you already do for SEO, Bing says optimize directly for the LLMs, and none of us actually control the output, because the models run largely on public opinion. If you cannot get branded, get into news coverage, and get people talking about you on Reddit, you are not going to do well there.
He also flagged something nobody is discussing. After the June update that turned out not to be a spam update, AI Overviews got flattened and largely replaced with YouTube. They are crawling back now, but by his count roughly three quarters of AI Overview results are still YouTube.
The cheapest E-E-A-T win nobody ships
I asked for the low-hanging fruit. Alex skipped past technical basics, called them the minimum standard for launching a website, and went straight at E-E-A-T, which he flagged as a topic that usually gets very vague answers in our space.
His version is specific:
- Real customer and company photos
- Before-and-after images on the service pages themselves
- Job stories: four photos from one job, what the homeowner had, why you installed what you installed
- Cost articles with real published price ranges
The cost article is the one he pushes hardest, and the one clients resist hardest, because they hear pricing page and picture someone holding them to the number.
“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
The mechanics protect the contractor. Take the client’s real range, publish a wider one, state plainly that it is an estimate, then explain every factor that moves the number. His own example: a customer gives him six to thirteen thousand for an average attic insulation job in the St. Louis area, so the article publishes six to seventeen thousand.
And it localizes. How much does attic insulation cost in St. Louis is a page, and so is the same question in every other city on the service map.
His answer to the competitor-undercutting objection is the part I liked best. The competitor who does worse work is going to undercut you anyway. Publishing the range is a trust builder, and it will net more leads than it loses.
The thread that ties it together
Alex will not guarantee a ranking, and he says so during the sales process. Ask him how long a brand-new domain in a competitive plumbing niche takes and the answer is six to nine months before organic leads start showing up, with the business listing and its reviews carrying weight earlier than the site does.
“People that are willing to guarantee you specific rankings for specific keywords, they’re just lying to you, because there’s no way to guarantee that.”
Alex Radetic
That is the same instinct running through the SERP research, the impression skepticism and the sixty-seven leads. Look at what is really there, report what it really did, and do not sell a number you cannot stand behind. Our library of SEO standard operating procedures is built on the same premise.
Where to find Alex Radetic
Alex Radetic runs Nuvo Agency, which specializes in home services and B2B websites 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 and business automations. Site: nuvoagency.com. He posts most of his SEO thinking organically on LinkedIn under his personal profile, Alex Radetic.
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