Ask five marketing companies what they’d charge a small service business and you’ll get five numbers that have almost nothing to do with each other. A few hundred a month from a freelancer. Several thousand from a full-service agency. Both call it digital marketing. Neither quote tells you what you’re actually buying.
I won’t add a fake market-range chart to that pile. Every business and every scope is different, and a made-up number helps nobody. What I can do is show you what the money should buy, where the price hides, and how I price it myself. My numbers are public on the pricing page.
What the money should actually buy
Digital marketing for a local service business is a handful of connected jobs:
- The website. Built once, then kept fast, current, and secure. A site nobody touches after launch decays, and Google notices.
- Local SEO. The pages, structure, and upkeep that get you found around your town. This is ongoing work, not a box checked at launch.
- Content. Pages and posts that answer what your customers actually search. Published on a schedule, not when someone remembers.
- Google Business Profile. Posts, photos, and reviews, kept active. Google’s AI answers now pull straight from your profile, so a stale one quietly costs you calls.
- Paid channels, if and when they fit. Ads and social can be worth real money, but only pointed at a site and profile that convert.
When a quote is cheap, one or more of those jobs isn’t in it. When a quote is huge, you’re often paying for account managers and reporting meetings, not more of the work.
The retainer trap
The most common failure I see isn’t overpaying. It’s paying monthly for activity nobody can tie to a result. The report shows impressions up, clicks up, keywords moving. The phone rings the same as last month. Nobody at the agency can tell you which invoice their work produced, because their tools stop at the click.
That’s the question that exposes a weak retainer: how do you know when it worked? If the answer is a traffic chart, keep shopping.
How I price it
I run one plan: digital marketing from $2,500 a month, website included. That covers the site (built, hosted, maintained), local SEO, monthly content, and a managed Google Business Profile. Google Ads, social media, and email campaigns are add-ons, quoted flat, added only when you want them. So you’re never paying for a channel you don’t use.
And because I work with the field service software most trades already run, the monthly report counts calls and booked jobs, traced back to the channel that sent them. Work on the schedule, not clicks on a chart. The full picture is on the digital marketing page.
How to judge any quote, including mine
Three questions do most of the work:
- What exactly happens each month? Get the deliverables list. “Ongoing optimization” is not a deliverable.
- Who does the work? A person you can call, or a rotating account team with your file in a queue?
- How is success measured? If booked work isn’t in the answer, the plan is built to look busy, not to pay for itself.
If you’re weighing a website project on its own first, I broke down what websites and automation should cost separately.
Want a straight number for your business? Book a call and tell me what you’re running now. I’ll tell you what’s worth keeping, what’s missing, and exactly what the plan would cost. If you only need a site, I’ll say that instead.