Unscripted SEO. Host: Jeremy Rivera. Guest: Jake Melendy, founder and CEO of Ignitvio. He came up through enterprise software, with time at Oracle and Confluent, before building a lead generation company for home service and professional service businesses.
Jake Melendy called five roofers to get his mother a quote on a new roof. Not one of them got back to her inside three days. A couple of months later he called five law firms for his own business, on a Sunday afternoon, and left a voicemail with every one of them. Same result. Nobody called back.
Most people tell that story once at a dinner party and move on. He turned it into a study.
He ran the same test deliberately, across the most competitive metros, in roofing, HVAC, accounting and dentistry. Over fifty percent never responded at all. Of the businesses that did respond, only two percent followed up more than once.
“And of the ones that did get back to me, only two percent followed up more than once, which is insane to me.”
Jake Melendy, Ignitvio
That is the whole episode in one number. The biggest unclaimed opportunity in home services is not ranking better. It is responding at all.
Key takeaways
- Across his own mystery shopping, over 50% of service businesses never responded to an inbound enquiry, and only 2% of responders followed up more than once.
- Most sales happen after the fifth touch, so a single reply is a system that quits four touches early.
- One to three percent of dormant or lost opportunities are in an active buying window right now, or will be inside 90 days.
- A three hour response time feels fast to a service business owner. Competitors are answering in ninety seconds and booking the job.
- An answering service that can only take a message is a more expensive voicemail. Ask whether it can actually schedule.
- Cold email needs roughly 50,000 to 100,000 decision maker contacts to work. A one metro firm does not have that, which is why Jake adds human callers instead.
- Trigger events beat bid lists. Public planning board minutes can be scraped with AI to reach a prospect before the bid is even announced.
- Organic is three separate games now: search, maps, and the LLMs. Listicles and best-of pages are what feed the LLMs.
- A keyword rich business name still works on maps, and Google now suspends profiles for it. Do it properly with a DBA.
- Fifty local service pages can be genuinely unique if a script gathers real town data and a human copywriter does the writing.
What is in this episode
- The three pillars behind the model
- The mystery shop that became a study
- Speed to lead, and the lunch hour nobody staffs
- How is that any different from a voicemail
- One to three percent of your dead leads are alive right now
- Why cold email does not work for a regional firm
- Trigger events, and the planning board scrape
- Three organic surfaces, three different games
- The maps naming cheat code, and how it gets you suspended
- Jeremy’s cheat code: verify with Google Workspace first
- Fifty service pages that are actually different
- AI gathers, humans judge
- Entities mentioned
- Questions this episode answers
The three pillars behind the model
Ignitvio sells three things, and Jake runs them in order: attract, direct outreach, and convert and retain. Most agencies sell the first one and stop there. His argument is that the third is where the recoverable money already sits, because those leads have been paid for once already.
Attract is the familiar work. Search, maps, content. Direct outreach is the deliberately unfashionable part, cold calling and cold email into commercial accounts. Convert and retain is speed to lead, missed call text back, and going back to dormant or lost quotes.
He calls reactivation the hidden gem, and it is the one most businesses are not touching at all.
The mystery shop that became a study
The study started as two bad experiences two months apart. The first was his mother.
“she was calling for a new roof quote and she called five different roofers and none of them got back to her within three days”
Jake Melendy, Ignitvio
The second was his own business, and he set it up to be easy to answer. He left a voicemail with all five firms and told them he was looking to become a new client.
“And I called them on a Sunday afternoon, and I called five local law firms in my area, and none of them got back to me.”
Jake Melendy, Ignitvio
Then he did what an operator does with an anecdote. He turned it into a test he could repeat, across competitive metros and across verticals: roofing, HVAC, accounting, dentists. Over fifty percent of the businesses never got back to him. Of the ones that did, only two percent followed up more than once.
The follow-up number is the one that hurts, because of what everyone in sales already knows.
“The majority of sales happen after the fifth touch.”
Jake Melendy, Ignitvio
So the average service business is quitting four touches before the sale usually happens, and half of them are not starting at all.
Speed to lead, and the lunch hour nobody staffs
Jake is careful about what he is selling. He does not pitch AI as a replacement for staff, and he says so unprompted.
“people want to talk to people”
Jake Melendy, Ignitvio
His point is that even an excellent receptionist loses leads to arithmetic. Calls do not arrive one at a time.
“People often call during the lunch hour. So you pick up, your receptionist does a great job, picks up during the lunch hour, and the next person calls while she’s on the call with them, right? And then that one goes to voicemail.”
Jake Melendy, Ignitvio
That is the waterfall problem. The second caller is not a staffing failure, it is an overflow failure, and there are three ways to cover it: hire for it, outsource it, or automate it. The same gap opens again at 6:30pm, which is not an unreasonable time for someone to call a law firm.
Where the automation earns its keep is in the texture of the reply. He trains his own team on the difference before they run a study.
“know the difference between an automated text message back and a text message that actually is engaging where you’re supposed to respond”
Jake Melendy, Ignitvio
An acknowledgement that says we got your message and we will get back to you is a receipt. A message that names the estimator and offers two times is a conversation. Most people assume the second one is a human. It usually is not.
How is that any different from a voicemail
The best moment in the episode is a question Jake asked a roofing client. The client was paying for an answering service and felt covered. Jake had already called a stack of these services himself to find out what they can actually do.
“And none of them can schedule.”
Jake Melendy, Ignitvio
The reason is structural. They are not connected to anything.
“they only have the ability to take the message information and then send it over”
Jake Melendy, Ignitvio
The message goes out as a text or an email to somebody else, and the delay is still there. So Jake asked the obvious question.
“And I literally asked him, I go, Well, how is that any different than a voicemail?”
Jake Melendy, Ignitvio
The client went quiet for about forty five seconds. Jake had to check he was still on the line. The answer, once it came, had some swearing in it.
The framing that follows is worth stealing for a sales conversation. Tell a service business owner they are replying in three hours and they will tell you that sounds pretty good.
“your competitors responding within ninety seconds”
Jake Melendy, Ignitvio
Three hours is not slow against your own past. It is slow against the person who booked the job while you were still deciding who should call back.
One to three percent of your dead leads are alive right now
Reactivation is the pillar Jake would push hardest if he only got one. In home services, a no is very often a not yet.
“a lot of times you’ll get a quote and then it’ll be a timing issue”
Jake Melendy, Ignitvio
A few loose shingles is a maybe next year. A full leak is an emergency. The problem is that the clock runs against the company that gave the original quote.
“they’re probably not gonna remember you because eight million things have happened between now and then”
Jake Melendy, Ignitvio
“And then they’re just gonna go back on the Google and look for whoever’s at the top.”
Jake Melendy, Ignitvio
Which means you paid for the lead, did the site visit, wrote the quote, and then handed the job to whoever ranks first two months later. Staying in the game is cheaper than winning the ranking again.
The number he puts on it is the one to write down.
“One to three percent are typically back in the active buying window, or they will be within 90 days.”
Jake Melendy, Ignitvio
That is one to three percent of the leads you already lost, including the ones who told you they went with somebody else. Deals fall apart. Funding and insurance go sideways. Those people end up back at square one, and square one is a Google search.
Jeremy has watched this play out on a client. Connecting up the channels for a local construction company, he found Facebook Messenger enquiries that had simply never been answered. He replied to them. One of those replies turned into a hundred thousand dollar home renovation.
Why cold email does not work for a regional firm
Jake splits direct outreach by who the end client is. Residential is a door knocking game, and he is straightforward that it is not what Ignitvio sells. If you are a roofer, an HVAC company or a pool builder chasing homeowners, a canvassing team on the right commission structure is the best return you will get.
Commercial is a different business, and that is where he specialises. His problem with the standard cold email play is arithmetic, not taste. Cold email works at volume, and volume means 50,000 to 100,000 decision maker contacts, not companies. A mid sized company might hold twenty contacts, but only a few are decision makers.
“But a lot of the service providers that we work with are regional or they’re even one metro based.”
Jake Melendy, Ignitvio
A one metro firm does not have a hundred thousand businesses to email. At a half percent to one percent positive reply rate, the list runs out long before the meetings show up. So he does something almost nobody in marketing wants to fulfil.
“we add a human co-caller into the mix”
Jake Melendy, Ignitvio
His reasoning is a bet on scarcity.
“as you’re seeing more and more AI come into the business world, that there’s going to be a premium set on that human-to-human interaction”
Jake Melendy, Ignitvio
“And so while everybody’s zigging, we’re zagging right over here.”
Jake Melendy, Ignitvio
He is honest about why more agencies do not copy it. You need somebody who can train cold callers, and that is a sales skill, not a marketing one. Most marketing shops are not equipped to hire for it.
Trigger events, and the planning board scrape
The part of this section worth stealing even if you never make a cold call is how he picks who to contact. Not a list. A moment.
A new facilities manager taking a role is an opening. So is a new site.
“New location is usually a good opportunity as well.”
Jake Melendy, Ignitvio
For a commercial roofer or a commercial HVAC company, the bid announcement is already too late, because everybody in the county sees it at the same moment and bids into the same crowd.
“they have to be earlier in the process, not when the bid gets announced, but actually in the planning board”
Jake Melendy, Ignitvio
And the planning board is not a private room.
“But you can scrape all that data because it’s public.”
Jake Melendy, Ignitvio
Most cities and towns of any size publish meeting minutes. Jake’s team has AI read them and pull out the projects coming down the pipeline for their clients. By the time the bid is announced, the relationship with the decision maker already exists. That is the inside track, built out of a public document nobody else bothered to read.
Three organic surfaces, three different games
Jake splits organic into three: classic search, maps, and the chat assistants, meaning ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and AI Overviews. His framing is that each one has its own levers, and AI Overviews behave differently again from search itself.
His observation about the assistants is a practical one, and it is about supply rather than quality.
“listicles work really well or best of work really well with ChatGPT because it’s structured data that they can like rationalize”
Jake Melendy, Ignitvio
“if you ask a recommendation for a roofer in your area, they’re gonna pull a best of list”
Jake Melendy, Ignitvio
The assistant cites the source, but it presents the pick as fact rather than as somebody’s ranked list. Jake finds that shocking and then treats it as a rule of the game. If best-of lists are the supply, getting your client onto the right lists is the work.
Maps runs on something else entirely. It pulls heavily from the Google Business Profile, which leads directly into the sharpest tactic in the episode.
The maps naming cheat code, and how it gets you suspended
Jake had an epiphany looking at a roofing company sitting third on Google Maps in a competitive market with fewer than ten reviews. No review velocity, no backlink profile, nothing that should have put them there. Their company name was the city name, followed by roofing and gutters.
“You just get the name and it’s a cheat code.”
Jake Melendy, Ignitvio
The catch is that everybody worked this out, started stuffing keywords into their profile name, and Google started blocking it and suspending accounts. So the tactic did not die, it just got a compliance bar.
“You have to know how to actually do it the right way, get a DBA”
Jake Melendy, Ignitvio
Doing it the right way means an actual registered DBA, then the paperwork to match: signage, vehicle wraps, documents in the new name. One of his clients was asked for six documents showing the new branding before Google would approve it. Once approved, the rise is close to immediate.
Jake also likes adding strategically placed locations across a metro, since a service radius of twelve or thirteen miles does not cover a city like Chicago. A second location in a suburb such as Naperville compounds the coverage. He is explicit that there is a right way and a banned way to do this.
Jeremy’s asterisk on that: pay about thirty dollars for a real desk at a real address. Call a local commercial realtor and ask where you can rent a seat. There are more options than people expect, and none of them require faking a location.
Jeremy’s cheat code: verify with Google Workspace first
Jeremy’s contribution here is a sequencing trick for getting a local business verified without the video verification circus.
Start the domain on Google Workspace. It is about thirty dollars, and you do not have to keep it forever. The point is that Google now has your address, your credit card and a paying relationship before you ever ask for anything.
Then run the order deliberately: Google Workspace, then Google Search Console verification, then Google Analytics, then Google Tag Manager, and only then the Business Profile. By that point the data layer is in place and the entity is already legible to Google. Jeremy has had profiles auto verify with no verification step at all.
The second half of that play is citations. Buy the basic data aggregator citations from BrightLocal’s citation builder without taking the monthly subscription, which is sold separately and is not required. Jeremy named Localeze, DexKnows and Superpages on tape, and noted the roster of major aggregators keeps getting shuffled. Each aggregator pushes out to somewhere between ten and fifty citation locations on its own, so once those are done there is very little manual citation work left worth paying for.
More of this thinking sits in the show’s local SEO strategies guide, and Isaac Justesen makes the adjacent case for the Business Profile mattering more than the website.
Fifty service pages that are actually different
Jake’s audio dropped out for a stretch of the recording, and when he came back he picked up the thread on the search side of organic. His complaint is unglamorous and completely correct.
“if you have a local service business, you need to be having local service pages on it”
Jake Melendy, Ignitvio
He keeps finding clients and prospects with bare bones service pages, or none at all. And the fix is not a template with the town name swapped out.
“You need to put unique information for each of those towns or each of those zip codes.”
Jake Melendy, Ignitvio
Jeremy has been shouting about this since 2007, when realtors were publishing the same page thirty five times with a different city name at the top. Google was better than that then. It is a lot better than that now. His suggested minimum is five extra minutes of actual thinking per town: what is the road everyone complains about, is the place built around a university, what would a local recognise.
What makes Jake’s version scale is that he built the gathering step. His software engineering team wrote a Python script that pulls unique information for each town from the local government site and from Wikipedia, with a verification process on top.
“Then we have a human copywriter read it over”
Jake Melendy, Ignitvio
The saving is in the research, not the writing. He puts it at twenty to thirty hours per project, and it changes what he can sell.
“And that’s how we’re able to put out like 50 service pages that all start to rank because they’re all unique, because we’ve got all the information very quickly.”
Jake Melendy, Ignitvio
Against an agency shipping ten or fifteen pages, he can charge a more competitive rate and deliver five times the coverage. The copywriter never loses the judgement call, they just stop doing the lookups.
AI gathers, humans judge
The same split runs through how his team builds. AI drafts, a human edits, and the editing is not cosmetic. One client site runs to a hundred pages of unique information, all reviewed by a person.
His tell for AI writing is visual rather than textual. It does not handle a page vertically. You get an undifferentiated block of text, and a reader clocks it before they read a word of it. His editor’s job is to fix how the page looks to a human eye, not just to a Google algorithm.
On the engineering side, the job has quietly changed shape.
“you’re not over architecting or creating something that’s brittle”
Jake Melendy, Ignitvio
He now pays engineers largely to keep the coding agents on the guardrails. And he is blunt about the other side of it.
“you’re not using Claude or Claude Code or Codex or something similar”
Jake Melendy, Ignitvio
If you run an agency or work at one and that describes you, his view is that you will be toast inside a year or two, because people with the same headcount and the same budget will simply out-produce you. He credits Alex Hormozi with the framing he keeps coming back to: it has always been humans with tools against humans with tools. The tools just changed.
Jeremy’s version of the same point, from the same week: a prompt into Claude Code with REST access to WordPress edited a hundred and forty seven posts on this site, adding breadcrumbs and connecting them to their topic hubs, during the interview itself. That job was a week of manual labour or an expensive dev ticket.
Entities mentioned
| Entity | What it is | Why it came up |
|---|---|---|
| Jake Melendy | Founder and CEO of Ignitvio | Guest. Ran the lead response mystery shopping study. |
| Ignitvio | Lead generation for home and professional services, ignitvio.com | The three pillars: attract, direct outreach, convert and retain. |
| Jeremy Rivera | Host, Unscripted SEO | Contributed the Workspace verification sequence and the citation buying play. |
| Google Business Profile | Google’s local business listing | What maps results are largely built from, including the naming tactic. |
| BrightLocal | Local SEO tool with a citation builder | Citations can be bought individually without the monthly subscription. |
| Localeze, DexKnows, Superpages | Data aggregators and directories | The base layer that syndicates a listing out to dozens of other sites. |
| Google Workspace | Google’s paid business suite | Step one of Jeremy’s verification sequence, ahead of Search Console. |
| ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini | AI assistants | The third organic surface. They lean on best-of listicles for local picks. |
| Claude Code, Codex | Coding agents | His engineers now spend their time keeping them inside guardrails. |
| Alex Hormozi | Entrepreneur and author | Credited for the humans with tools against humans with tools framing. |
| Jon Henshaw | SEO, previous guest on the show | Jeremy cites his term surface optimization for search everywhere. |
| Planning board minutes | Public municipal records | Scraped with AI to find commercial projects before the bid is announced. |
Questions this episode answers
How many service businesses actually respond to an inbound lead?
In Jake’s own mystery shopping across competitive metros in roofing, HVAC, accounting and dentistry, over fifty percent never responded at all. Of the ones that did respond, only two percent followed up more than once.
How fast does a service business need to reply?
Faster than it thinks. Owners tend to hear a three hour response time and call it good. Jake’s point is that the competitor answering in ninety seconds is booking the same person.
Is it worth going back to old, lost quotes?
Yes. One to three percent of dormant or lost opportunities are typically back in an active buying window, or will be within ninety days. That includes people who told you they went with someone else.
Is an answering service enough?
Ask it one question first: can it actually schedule? Jake called a stack of them and none could. If all it does is take a message and forward it, the delay is still there, and it is functionally a more expensive voicemail.
Why does cold email fail for a local or regional firm?
Volume. The channel needs roughly 50,000 to 100,000 decision maker contacts to produce meetings at a half to one percent positive reply rate. A single metro service business does not have a list that size, so it burns the list instead.
What is a trigger event and where do you find them?
A moment that creates a reason to buy: a new facilities manager, a new location, a project entering planning. Public planning board minutes are the cleanest source, and AI can read them at scale so you make contact before the bid goes out.
Can you rank fifty local service pages without duplicating them?
Only if each page carries genuinely unique information about its town. Jake’s team scripts the gathering step in Python from local government sites and Wikipedia, verifies it, then hands it to a human copywriter to write. The automation replaces the research, not the writer.
Does a keyword rich business name still work on Google Maps?
It still works, and Google now suspends profiles for stuffing one. The compliant route is a registered DBA plus matching signage, vehicle wraps and documentation. One of Jake’s clients was asked for six documents before approval.
Go deeper
- Small business growth lessons from the show, for the operator side of this conversation.
- Alex Zweydoff on property management SEO, the same lead handling problem in a different vertical.
- Jon Henshaw on AI hype and Google’s sources of truth, where surface optimization comes from.
Where to find Jake Melendy
Ignitvio is at ignitvio.com, and Jake takes email at jake@ignitvio.com. He is most interested in home service and professional service businesses with a commercial or business to business angle, which is where he says his fastest growth is right now.
About this recap
Every quotation on this page is verbatim from the episode transcript and is Jake Melendy speaking. A connection problem took Jake’s audio offline for part of the recording, which is why his material on service pages, the Python gathering script and AI guardrails arrives near the end of the conversation rather than alongside the organic discussion. Nothing has been reconstructed to fill that gap.
Cite this episode
Rivera, Jeremy. Jake Melendy on Speed to Lead for Home Services. Unscripted SEO. Guest: Jake Melendy, founder and CEO of Ignitvio. Available at unscriptedseo.com/jake-melendy-on-speed-to-lead-for-home-services/
