The Google Premier Partner Who Says Your Problem Isn’t Leads – It’s the 90% of Calls You’re Not Picking Up
Introduction
Most home service business owners have the same complaint: not enough leads. They want more traffic. More calls. More volume coming in the top of the funnel.
Ed Stapleton has worked with hundreds of them, and his diagnosis is almost always the same: the problem isn’t at the top of the funnel.
Ed is the co-founder of Clicks Geek, a Google Premier Partner agency that specializes in lead generation for local service companies – electricians, roofers, plumbers, doctors, lawyers. He’s also one of the sharpest strategists in the home service space, someone who has built and sold businesses, acquired companies for equity, and spent years studying under the likes of Jay Abraham and Dan Kennedy.
In Episode 3 of Surge Ahead, he joins Forrest for a wide-ranging conversation covering the 5,000-page SEO strategy behind Keil Electric’s new website, why Google’s own reps are working against you, the brutal math on unanswered leads, and the three geometric levers that can add 30% to your bottom line without generating a single new lead.
Why Electrical Is His Favorite Niche
Ed has been called the “king of niches” – and when asked which niche he’d pick right now, he doesn’t hesitate: electrical.
“The niche could be a mile wide and an inch deep,” he says. “There’s just so many different services within the service. The more lines you have out in the water, the more likely you are to catch fish.”
That fishing metaphor isn’t casual. Ed thinks about marketing the way a serious fisherman thinks about outrigging – deploying as many lines as possible across the water to maximize exposure. For electrical, that means a near-endless list of specific service pages, locations, and content angles to target.
That philosophy is what drove the 5,000-page programmatic website Dunzo built for Keil Electric – a massive content matrix targeting every service, every location, and every question the market is asking, across two distinct markets. The goal: become the largest content resource for those markets. Not just ranking for “electrician San Diego.” Ranking for “how much does it cost to install a panel upgrade in Chula Vista.”
The Longtail Strategy: Death by a Thousand Cuts
Longtail SEO is the backbone of Ed’s approach, and he explains it clearly for anyone who’s never heard the term.
The main keyword is “electrician in San Diego.” The longtail is “how much does an electrician cost in San Diego.” The longer the tail, the higher the intent – because the person searching isn’t browsing. They’re ready.
“Not one of these long tails is going to produce hundreds or thousands of searches a month,” he says. “But in totality, putting them all together, they make up a very large segment of the market. And it’s just really high-quality traffic.”
The YouTube parallel makes it click: put up a video targeting a specific, obscure question and it might get 10 views. But eight of those views are leads. The volume is irrelevant. The intent is everything.
Ed’s firm also pays close attention to EAT signals – expertise, authority, and trust – the factors Google uses to determine whether a website deserves to rank. For home service companies, this means making sure your license information is verifiable, your address is visible, your social profiles are linked. Things that can’t be faked. Google built EAT specifically to weed out the lead farms and affiliate scammers that plagued local search – and as AI overviews become more prominent (and legally contested, as a recent German court case suggests), having verifiable authority within a market is going to matter even more.
The Real Problem: Nobody’s Picking Up
The most important section of the conversation isn’t the SEO strategy or the ad platforms. It’s the follow-up problem.
Ed’s observation: if you think an advertising lead is calling to hand you their credit card, you are sadly mistaken.
Ad leads are not referred leads. They’re strangers who found you through a search or a click and are now comparison shopping. If you don’t pick up – or don’t follow up aggressively – they move to the next result.
“Something like 90% of calls don’t get picked up,” he says. “Which is mind-blowing. Maybe not 90%. Maybe it’s 50. But a shocking amount of leads don’t get picked up on the first call. And you just paid for that lead.”
The standard he recommends: call back within 30–90 seconds of a missed call. Five minutes at the absolute maximum. And don’t stop at one attempt – expect to make 5 to 20 follow-up touches (calls, texts, emails) spread over several days before giving up on a lead. For a panel upgrade, push closer to 20. For a $150 diagnostic, maybe fewer.
“There’s always money left on the table there. That’s a big boy.”
Ed’s stance is stark: he won’t take on a client if the business owner is still answering the phone themselves, unless there’s a concrete plan to hire someone for that role. Because spending ad money while the owner is on a job ignoring calls is, in his words, “putting water into a bucket with a bunch of holes in it.”
How to Hire a CSR Before You Can Afford One
The counterargument is the obvious chicken-and-egg problem: you need leads to afford a CSR, but you need a CSR to convert your leads. Ed has a clean answer.
Don’t hire someone for 40 hours a week. Strike a deal: lower base hourly rate, paid only when on the phone, with an appointment-booking bonus on top. Then hand them the backlog – every estimate that went out, every form submission that came in overnight, every unanswered call from the last 30 days. If you have 20 old leads and each one needs 10 follow-up attempts, that’s 200 calls the business owner was never going to make. That’s where the CSR starts.
“The idea is: can they produce enough appointments on your calendar for you to get sales, close the jobs, do the job, and get paid before you ever have to stroke that payroll check? My answer is yeah – in 90% of cases.”
For most home service businesses – where a lead comes in Monday, the job is booked Tuesday, done Wednesday, and paid Wednesday – the CSR pays for themselves before the first payroll cycle ends.
The Three Most Slept-On Marketing Channels
Ed’s top three underrated channels for home service operators who want to see results quickly – without a giant ad budget:
- Joint ventures and strategic alliances. You’re in someone’s home. That’s the hardest door to get through. While you’re there, look around – missing shingles, old HVAC unit, cracked concrete. A quick mention and a referral to a trusted partner generates commission, goodwill, and reciprocal referrals back to you. Ed cites Jay Abraham’s framework: you’re one joint venture away from a seven-figure business. Find the non-competitive businesses that serve your customers and build relationships with them.
- Longtail content on your website. Marcus Sheridan’s They Ask You Answer is the playbook. Every question your market has ever asked about your services should be answered on your website. Not because any one page will drive massive traffic, but because collectively they capture a huge segment of high-intent searchers.
- Bandit signs, wrapped vehicles, and Google Maps reviews. All cheap, all underused. Bandit signs stay on a job site lawn at minimal cost. A wrapped vehicle is a moving billboard for $250/month amortized over the vehicle’s life. And Google Maps reviews, Ed argues, should come before almost any other marketing spend: “If you have less than 20 reviews, there’s not really any marketing you’re going to do that’s going to outperform getting to 75 reviews.” The local service ads platform is directly tied to review count. Get there first.
The Geometric Levers: 10% × 3 = 30%
One of the most practical frameworks Ed shares comes from Jay Abraham’s “three ways to grow a business”: increase leads, increase close rate, increase average order value. These aren’t additive – they’re multiplicative. A 10% improvement in each produces approximately a 30% increase to the bottom line, because the gains compound across each other.
Going from 10 leads to 11 isn’t dramatic. Closing one more out of ten isn’t dramatic. Adding $100 to average ticket isn’t dramatic. But doing all three simultaneously moves the needle faster than doubling your ad spend.
“Those are geometric levers. As you increase one 20% and another 15%, the numbers just skyrocket.”
The tracking piece is the enabler. Use a CRM like Go High Level, assign unique phone numbers to each marketing channel, and you suddenly have attribution data that turns every decision into a math problem. “How do we increase 10%?” becomes answerable because you know what’s working.
The $50 Framed Cartoon That Opens Any Door
The last strategy Ed shares is the one that sticks longest. It comes from Stu Heinecke’s book How to Get a Meeting with Anyone – the idea of using personalized cartoons as physical direct mail to get attention nobody else gets.
The mechanics: buy or license a cartoon from a stock site for about $50. Take it to a print house and have it personalized with the recipient’s name. Frame it. Mail it in a flat box from Uline. Total cost: about $50 per piece, including shipping.
Ed has used this to get meetings with detailing supply distributors, divorce attorneys, roofing companies – anyone he’s wanted a strategic relationship with. It doesn’t get thrown away. It gets opened. And it opens conversations.
“All I was doing with these was using them as a foot in the door. You just need to run your customer acquisition math. If I send 100 of these at $50 a piece, and I can convert even a few of them into relationships that send me regular referrals – is the ROI there?”
The simpler version for most operators: a single-page letter. Clean headline, two or three sentences, your signature. Dan Kennedy’s 3% rule applies – at any given time, roughly 3% of your market is actively buying, and another 10% is looking. A hundred letters targets the market. Getting in front of those 30–100 people and starting conversations is the whole game.
Where to Find Ed
Ed Stapleton Jr. on Instagram and LinkedIn. Agency: clicksgeek.com.
