A plumber posted a quote he got and asked a simple question. Was this normal?
The number was $3,500 a month. When he asked what it bought, the agency told him "local pack visibility" and "authority building."
His reply is the whole problem in one line: "I'm a plumber, i don't have 12 months and $40k to find out if this works or not."
The thread went about how you'd expect. "Charging that much for a local Plumber is borderline scamming." And a sharper one about a different quote: "paying a company $2500/m to manage a $1000/ad spend is tantamount to a scam."
Here's the thing though. Those replies are satisfying and they're not actually useful, because they don't tell him how to tell. He still can't evaluate the next quote he gets. So let's do the part nobody does.
Run the number backwards
Every "how much does SEO cost" article gives you a range and stops. Ranges are useless. Do this instead.
$3,500 a month is $42,000 a year. That's the real number, because SEO doesn't work in month two and everybody selling it will tell you so.
Now take your average ticket. Say it's $400 for a residential plumbing call, and use your own number here, not mine. And say roughly half of what comes in the door is gross profit after materials and labor.
$42,000 divided by $200 of profit per job is 210 jobs. That's what this retainer has to bring you, on top of everything you already get, just to get back to even.
Two hundred and ten extra jobs a year. Four a week, every week, forever, before you've made a dollar.
Now you can evaluate the quote. You don't need to know what "authority building" means. You need to know whether anybody thinks four extra jobs a week is realistic for a one-truck shop in your town.
Do the same thing with a smaller number
Run it at $750 a month. That's $9,000 a year, which is 45 jobs at the same math. Not quite one a week.
That's a completely different conversation. One extra job a week is something you can picture. You can also tell within a few months whether it's happening, which is the actual point.
The lower number isn't better because it's cheaper. It's better because it's checkable.
When $3,500 is a fair price
Now the part the angry replies got wrong.
That number isn't automatically a ripoff. It's a ripoff for a one-truck plumber. It might be cheap for somebody else.
- Twelve trucks instead of one. A shop doing five million a year needs a hundred pages, ten cities, a real content operation and somebody watching it weekly. $42,000 against five million is under one percent of revenue. That's nothing.
- A high ticket where one job pays for months. Roofing, full HVAC changeouts, foundation work. If your average job is $12,000, four extra a year covers the whole retainer. The math flips completely.
- You're in a metro fighting real competitors. Ranking in a town of 8,000 is not the same job as ranking in Cincinnati. One of those is genuinely a lot of work.
So the question was never "is $3,500 too much." It's "too much for what, and for who." An agency quoting the same number to a solo plumber and a twelve-truck shop isn't pricing the work. It's pricing whoever picks up the phone.
The ad spend ratio, since it came up
That second quote deserves its own paragraph. $2,500 a month in management on $1,000 a month in ad spend.
You're paying two and a half times more to the manager than to the actual advertising. Whatever the fair rate is, it isn't that. Almost all of your money is going into overhead instead of in front of a customer.
There's no magic ratio, but you should be able to look at any ads arrangement and see most of the money going to the platform, not the middleman. If it's the other way around, ask why, and get an answer that isn't a word like "strategy."
What I charge, since I'd be a hypocrite otherwise
A post about price that hides its own price is exactly the thing that made that plumber post in the first place. So here it is.
- $149 a month. Hosting, backups, security, the lead form wired up so submissions actually reach you, and alerts when one comes in. No SEO promise attached. This is the "keep it running and stop losing leads" tier.
- $749 a month. The one most guys are actually shopping for. Service and city pages, Google Business Profile work, the lead dashboard, review automation, rank tracking. Three cities included, $100 a month for each one past that.
- $2,499 a month. Managed ads on top, up to ten cities, monthly strategy call. This is the closest thing I have to that $3,500 quote and it's the one I sell least, because most contractors don't need it.
Setup is $600 on the first tier and $1,000 on the other two. Three month minimum, then month to month. No annual contract to sign.
Run the same backwards math on those. At $749, forty five jobs a year. If you can't picture forty five, don't buy it from me either.
The two questions to ask on the next sales call
Whoever's quoting you, ask these.
"What does this have to produce for me to break even, and how many months in should I expect to see it?" A real answer has numbers in it. A bad answer has the words "visibility" or "brand" in it.
Then: "What happens in month four if none of it has moved?" You're listening for whether they've thought about being wrong. Everybody who's actually done this work has been wrong before and will tell you what they do about it. The ones who've never been wrong are the ones to worry about.
That plumber wasn't asking whether $3,500 was expensive. He was asking whether anybody would put a number on the other side of the trade. Nobody would. That's why he posted.
Full breakdown of what's in each tier is here, including what happens if you leave. If you'd rather just tell me your ticket size and your town and have me say whether any of it is worth it, get me on the phone. Sometimes the answer is no, and that's a fast call.