WHAT SEO COSTS FOR A HOME SERVICE BUSINESS, AND WHO TO HIRE

All articles · By Brandon Aubey

In short: A plain look at SEO price tiers, what each one buys, and the five kinds of people you can hire. Written for home service owners.

You get a call every week from someone selling SEO. One guy wants 99 dollars a month. Another wants 4,000. They all say the same stuff. Here is what you actually get at each price, and who is worth hiring.

SEO means showing up on Google when someone searches for your trade. That is it. The price buys you a certain amount of work toward that goal. Not more.

What each price tier really buys

I’ll be blunt here. These are the four price points I see most.

100 dollars a month. You are getting a bot. Nobody is working on your site. It does just enough to make you feel like you’re doing something. That is the whole product.

500 dollars a month. Maybe a real person. But that person has about 100 other clients. You get a blog post written by AI and a post on your business profile. It’s fine. It won’t get you to number one.

1,500 dollars a month. Now some real work happens. You should get service pages, which are pages about each thing you do. You should get location pages, which are pages for each city you serve. You should get citations, which are listings of your business on other sites. This can work in a small market. It is not enough if you want to take over a city like El Paso. Think about what your competitors are spending.

3,500 to 5,000 dollars a month. You are paying someone to own the outcome. Content, links, the website, all of it. You also get someone who tells you no when you’re wrong. That part matters more than people think. In a competitive trade or a big city, this is the real cost.

The map listing trap

Here is the one that bugs me. Someone pays 500 dollars a month to an agency. I’ve seen it go as high as 1,200. All the agency does is “manage the map listing” for them.

Your map listing is your Google Business Profile. It is free. Yes, it needs to be built out right. Yes, you should post on it. You should post about the exact areas you want to serve. But that is a few hours of work, not a monthly retainer.

Sometimes they dress it up with a cute name for the service. I’m not talking trash on agencies. I’m telling you that service is trash.

Who you can hire

Owners tend to pick one of five options. Here are the honest pros and cons.

• Cheap freelancer from a gig site. Terrible. They’ll build you 100 spam links and vanish. You may pay later to clean it up.
• Overseas agency. Cheap for a reason. You get a ticket system. The person on the other end doesn’t understand your business or marketing.
• Your nephew who is good with computers. He might be great. I honestly don’t know. But he probably doesn’t know SEO. You are likely wasting his time and yours.
• In-house hire. This is actually the best option if you can afford it. Plan on about 70,000 dollars a year. The hard part is managing them. If you don’t know SEO, you can’t tell if they are doing it well.
• Local agency. Big shocker, I’m biased. But this is the best fit for most businesses. The catch is the word good. A bad local agency is no better than the overseas one.

Ranking the moves for a bigger shop

Say your plumbing shop does 100,000 a month. You have some budget. Here is how I’d rank each SEO move, from best to worst.

S tier: open a new location. You get leads just from having a business profile in another city. Nothing else comes close.

S tier: a review process for your crews. Build a simple habit. Every tech asks for a review on every job. It’s free. People leave reviews for the person who showed up, not the company name.

A tier: real pages for every city you serve. One page per city, with real content about that place. I hope you’ve already done this.

B tier: local sponsorships and the chamber of commerce. These are great links back to your site. I just wouldn’t call them the top priority.

C tier now, S tier later: hire in-house. At 100,000 a month, you are a little small for this. Start thinking about it. Once you can afford real talent, it jumps to the top.

D tier: fixing every technical issue on your site. Expensive. It won’t make a change you can notice. Fix what is broken and move on.

F tier: doing it all yourself. You’re the most expensive employee in the building. Your hour is worth more than this.

Where we fit

We work at the top tier. We own the outcome, and we’ll tell you no when it’s the wrong call. Read about our SEO services, or book a strategy call. We’ll look at your market together.

We can do this for you

You can do everything above yourself. Most owners do not have the hours. Dead River Management builds and runs it for home service businesses. We work in El Paso and across the country. You keep running jobs. We handle the search work. You judge us on booked jobs, not reports. See SEO services, read about the Demand Flow guarantee, or book a strategy call.

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