Ask three agencies to quote a roofer for SEO and you’ll get £150, £600 and £2,400 a month. All three will describe it as “local SEO”. None of them are necessarily lying — they’re selling very different amounts of work, to very different sizes of business.
Here’s what the numbers actually buy, so you can work out which one you need.
Around £100 a month
At this level you’re paying for a maintained Google Business Profile and a website that stays current. Realistically that means weekly posting, review handling, photos, and a site with a page for each area you cover, kept up to date.
That’s not a lesser version of SEO for a trade — for most one-to-five-van outfits it’s the version that matters. The overwhelming majority of trade enquiries come through the map pack, and the map pack is driven by profile quality, reviews and consistency rather than by the kind of technical work that justifies four-figure retainers.
What you should not get at this price is a twelve-month contract.
£150 to £250 a month
The step up. Everything above, plus new content published each month and local SEO worked across every area you cover rather than just your home town.
This is the right level once you’re competing with two or three established firms in the same town, or you cover a wide enough patch that one set of area pages isn’t enough. It’s still nowhere near agency-retainer territory, and for a trade with decent job values one extra enquiry a month covers it several times over.
£300 to £700 a month
This is where you start paying for content and competitive work: regularly published pages targeting specific services and towns, link building, and someone actively watching what competitors rank for and responding.
It’s worth it when you’re competing in a genuinely crowded market — several established firms with hundreds of reviews each — or when you cover a wide patch and need to rank across a dozen towns rather than two or three.
It’s not worth it when you’re a sole trader in one town whose profile still isn’t verified. Fix the free things first.
£1,000+ a month
Multi-branch operations, national coverage, or trades with high job values where a single extra enquiry a month pays the fee several times over. Commercial roofing, groundworks, specialist restoration.
If you’re a domestic trade working within a thirty-minute radius, this is almost certainly more than you need, and a lot of what’s billed at this level is reporting about the work rather than the work.
What actually drives the results
The uncomfortable truth is that the highest-impact items for a trade business are cheap or free:
- Verifying your Google Business Profile. Free. Skipped constantly.
- Setting the right primary category. Free. Two minutes. Frequently wrong.
- Asking every customer for a review. Free. Requires a habit, not a budget.
- Posting to your profile weekly. Free. Almost nobody sustains it.
- A fast website with a page per area. A one-off cost, then maintenance.
What you’re really paying a monthly fee for is someone doing the unglamorous things every week when you’re on the tools and haven’t got a spare hour. That’s a legitimate thing to pay for. Just be clear that’s what it is.
Terms that should make you walk
Twelve-month contracts. Common, and rarely in your interest. If the work is good you’ll stay. Thirty days’ notice is enough for anyone confident in what they do.
Owning your accounts. Your Google Business Profile, your domain, your website and your ad accounts should be in your name, with you as owner and the agency as manager. If leaving means losing your listing, you’re not a client, you’re a hostage.
Reports with no enquiry numbers. Impressions and “keyword movement” are easy to make look good. Ask for calls and enquiries. If the answer is vague, that’s the answer.
Guaranteed number one rankings. Nobody can guarantee that. Anyone offering it is either inexperienced or counting on you not checking.
How to tell if it’s working
Not by rankings alone. Check your Google Business Profile insights directly — calls, direction requests and website clicks from the listing. That’s where trade enquiries actually land, and it’s the number that reflects money.
For context on what movement looks like: JNC Bespoke Roofing in Amersham went from roughly six profile interactions across three months to over forty in the three months after we started — forty website clicks and four calls placed directly from the listing. That’s the shape of a working profile for a single-town trade. The full numbers are here.
Be patient for the right length of time. Profile and category fixes can show within weeks. Competitive search terms take two to four months. If nothing has moved at all by month four, something’s wrong — ask directly what’s been done.
What we charge
For the sake of not being coy about it: our Website + Google plan is £149 a month — local SEO, Google Business Profile management with a post every week, plus hosting, maintenance and updates for your website, with a plain-English report each month. Adding Facebook and Instagram — a post a week on each, written from the photos you send us — takes it to £249. Websites are £995 one-off if you need one building. Thirty days’ notice either way, no tie-in.
Growth suits most domestic trades in one or two towns. Pro is for competitive markets or a wide patch. If you’d be better off on the cheaper one, we’ll say so rather than sell you the bigger plan.
If you want the full picture on website costs specifically, we’ve broken those down separately in how much a website costs a small business in 2026.