Nobody in this industry likes publishing prices, which is exactly why it is worth doing. Here are real ranges, what moves them, and the four places service businesses reliably lose money on their website.
The Actual Ranges
For a local service business in the United States, roughly.
- A template site you build yourself. A few hundred dollars a year. Slow, generic, and genuinely fine for testing whether a business works at all
- A freelancer on a page builder. Two to five thousand dollars once. Quality varies enormously and you usually inherit a maintenance obligation nobody mentioned
- An agency custom build. Five to fifteen thousand dollars, sometimes far more. Should include strategy, real content and a proper migration. Often does not
- Local SEO in the trades. Commonly $1,500 to $4,000 a month. Entry programs run lower, multi market and multi vertical work runs higher
Those are the numbers. Now the useful part, which is what actually moves them.
What Drives the Number
How Many Pages Genuinely Need Writing
This is the biggest single driver and it is almost never discussed on a sales call. A five page brochure and a forty page build with a real page per service and per city are different jobs by an order of magnitude. If a quote does not say how many pages, it is not a quote.
Whether the Content Already Exists
Most of the cost of a good site is the writing, not the code. A business that can hand over real service descriptions, real prices and real photos saves more than it expects. A business that says just make something up is buying a much more expensive project and a worse result.
Whether There Is a Site to Migrate
Replacing a site that already ranks is more work than starting fresh, because every earning URL has to be found and mapped. Skipping that step is how rebuilds destroy traffic. It is also the step most commonly cut when a quote needs to come down.
Whether Anything Has to Actually Do Something
Booking, quoting, customer accounts, payment. These are software, not web design, and they are priced accordingly. A quote engine that prices a job down to the real fee sheet, like the one on RV Travel Agency, is a different product from a contact form.
Where the Money Leaks
Paying for Traffic a Site Cannot Convert
The most expensive mistake by a wide margin. A business spends two thousand a month for three years driving people to a site that hides the price, buries the phone number and never says who turns up. The traffic was never the problem. We wrote about the symptom in ranks but never rings.
Paying Twice for the Same Listings
Citation services often charge yearly for listings you could create once for free, and several of them stop existing the moment you stop paying. The honest version of that math is in whether Yext actually works.
The Maintenance Nobody Priced
A site with an admin panel and thirty plugins is a standing obligation. Either you pay somebody to patch it or it quietly rots until something breaks publicly. We stopped selling that and explained why in why we moved off WordPress.
Missed Calls
Not a website cost on any invoice, and probably the biggest one. Most service businesses lose more work to an unanswered phone at 7pm than to any ranking problem, and almost none of them measure it. Count last week's missed calls before you buy more traffic.
Take your average job value and multiply it by the number of calls you did not answer last month. For most shops that figure is larger than their entire marketing budget, and it is the cheapest problem on this page to fix.
What We Charge and Why
We build the website and we host it, at no cost. SEO starts at $800 a month, month to month, with no lock in. Before you pay anything we build your real site and send you the link.
That is not generosity and it is worth explaining the mechanics, because an offer nobody can explain is an offer nobody should take.
- Building a site costs most shops three weeks of labor. It costs us a fraction of that, because the build pipeline, the page generator and the quality gates are ours and have been refined over twenty years
- A large upfront fee mostly exists to cover the risk that the client leaves. We would rather remove the fee and carry that risk ourselves
- Month to month means we get judged every thirty days. That is uncomfortable and it is the correct incentive
- Hosting a static site costs us very little, because there is no database and no application server to run
We build the website and we host it, at no cost. SEO starts at $800 a month, month to month, and that is the whole invoice. Before you pay anything we will build your real site and send you the link. Here is how that works.
How to Judge a Proposal
Whoever you hire, including us, these are the questions that separate a real proposal from a nice looking one.
- How many pages, and which ones? A quote without a page count is not a quote
- Who writes the content, and is it included? This is most of the cost and most of the value
- What happens to my existing URLs? If the answer is not a mapped redirect list, expect to lose rankings
- What do I own at the end? Domain, content and site should all be yours. Some arrangements deliberately are not
- What does month thirteen look like? Ask what the ongoing cost is and what it buys once the build is finished
- Can I see live work in my trade? Not a portfolio image. A URL you can open
- What are you not going to do? An honest answer here tells you more than anything else on the list
Common Questions
How much should a small service business pay for a website?
Built properly, somewhere between nothing and about fifteen thousand dollars depending on who builds it and how much is custom. The build price matters far less than what it costs to keep and whether it earns.
Why do agencies charge so much up front?
Partly because the work is real. Partly because they do not expect to keep you past month six, so the build fee has to carry the relationship. A large upfront number and a short retention expectation usually travel together.
Is a cheap template site ever the right call?
Sometimes. If you are testing whether a business works at all, spend nothing and find out. The mistake is staying on it for five years after the business clearly works.
What should SEO cost for a local service business?
Programs in the trades commonly run $1,500 to $4,000 a month, entry offers lower, multi market work higher. Ours starts at $800 a month with the site built and hosted at no cost.
What is the most expensive mistake?
Paying for traffic to a site that cannot convert it, and paying for it for years. Ranking and converting are separate problems and almost all the money goes to the first one.