What it costs, and when not to buy it at all
Real market ranges rather than a call to action disguised as a guide. What drives the price, what a lead is actually worth to you, the five situations where we would tell you no, and the six questions to ask anyone selling you this.
What agencies actually charge
| WHAT YOU ARE BUYING | TYPICAL MONTHLY | WHAT IT USUALLY MEANS |
|---|---|---|
| Nothing, done badly | $50 to $150 | Automated reports, directory submissions, no human doing anything. Common and worthless. |
| A real small program | $65 to $350 | A defined number of keywords, pages and links each month, delivered by a person. Honest at this price if the scope is honest. |
| A mid market agency | $800 to $2,500 | Account manager, more content, more links, and a substantial share going to their sales and office costs. |
| A large metro agency | $2,500 to $5,000+ | Appropriate for a multi location operation in a contested metro. Considerable overspend for a single van shop. |
| Pay per lead | $50 to $300 per lead | No asset built. You stop paying, it stops entirely, and you are usually one of several contractors sold the same lead. |
THE PROGRAMS ON THIS SITE RUN FROM $65 TO $575 A MONTH, WITH SETUP FROM $75. THAT IS PUBLISHED RATHER THAN QUOTED, WHICH IS THE POINT.
Not the difficulty of the work. It is keyword count, content volume, link volume and how much organizational overhead sits behind the person doing it. The first three are things you can compare. The fourth is what you are usually actually paying for.
What a lead is worth to you
This is the number that should decide your budget, and almost nobody calculates it before buying.
| THE JOB | TICKET | LEAD VALUE AT 40% CLOSE |
|---|---|---|
| Service call, troubleshooting | $250 | $100 |
| Outlet, switch, fixture | $200 | $80 |
| Recessed lighting | $1,200 | $480 |
| EV charger install | $1,500 | $600 |
| Subpanel addition | $1,800 | $720 |
| Panel or service upgrade | $3,200 | $1,280 |
| Knob and tube, partial rewire | $9,000 | $3,600 |
| Whole house generator | $12,000 | $4,800 |
| Whole home rewire | $18,000 | $7,200 |
| Commercial tenant improvement | $25,000 | $10,000 |
ADJUSTABLE DEFAULTS, NOT FIXED CLAIMS. YOUR CLOSE RATE AND YOUR TICKETS ARE THE ONES THAT MATTER.
The largest program on this site costs $6,900 a year. One panel upgrade lead a month at a 40% close rate is worth about $15,400 a year. That is the entire business case, and it does not require the program to work particularly well.
Five situations where we would tell you no
We sell this. Read the following with that in mind, and then notice that it costs us money to publish it.
Run the calculator. If top three visibility is worth less than about twenty thousand a year to you, start with the free checklist on this site and revisit it when your average ticket or your market grows.
More leads you cannot service produce missed calls and one star reviews. Hire first, or raise your prices first. Marketing a capacity problem makes it worse.
If calls go to voicemail during working hours, every dollar spent on visibility is spent generating calls for your competitors. Fix the answering before the ranking, and it is usually much cheaper.
A name change or a relocation resets a large part of the local signal. Do it first, then start. Six months of work discarded at the point of rebrand is a genuinely common waste.
Search work takes three to six months to pay and then compounds. If you are selling or winding down, that curve does not have time to work in your favor.
There is a sixth case worth naming, which is that some contractors simply do not need it. If you have twenty years of referral work, a full schedule and no ambition to grow, a search program is a solution to a problem you do not have. Nobody in this industry will tell you that, and it is true of a meaningful number of the shops we talk to.
Six questions that separate real from theater
Ask these of us and of anyone else you are considering. The answers are more revealing than any proposal.
- Do I get the live URL of every link you build, every month, or just a count
- Will your report show terms that went backwards as well as terms that improved
- What exactly is delivered in a month: how many pages, how many links, how many keywords tracked
- Am I under contract, and what happens to the content you write if I leave
- Will you work with another electrician in my service area for the same kind of work
- What would have to be true for you to tell me not to buy this
The first. Link building is the easiest part of this industry to fake and the hardest for a client to check, which is precisely why a live clickable URL for every link is the clearest honesty signal available to you.
Questions about cost
How much should an electrician pay for SEO? 01
Across the market, anywhere from about $65 a month for a small managed program to $5,000 a month from a large agency in a major metro. The honest answer is that the right number depends on your average ticket and the size of your market, not on what an agency wants to charge. A shop doing $250 service calls in a town of 20,000 and a shop doing $25,000 tenant improvements in Houston should not be paying the same.
Why is there such a wide range? 02
Mostly overhead and sales cost, not delivery. An agency with local offices, a sales team and account managers has to charge for all of it. The underlying work of technical fixes, content and link building does not cost five thousand dollars a month to perform for a single van residential contractor, and anyone charging that is selling you the organization rather than the outcome.
What is an electrician lead actually worth? 03
It depends entirely on which job it is. At a 40% close rate, a lead for a $250 service call is worth about $100. A lead for a $3,200 panel upgrade is worth about $1,280. A lead for a $25,000 tenant improvement is worth about $10,000. This is why optimizing for volume rather than ticket value is the central mistake in this trade.
When is SEO not worth it? 04
When your annual opportunity is under roughly $20,000, when you already have more work than you can take, when you are about to move or rebrand, when you cannot answer the phone reliably, or when you are within a year of retiring. In every one of those cases the money is better spent elsewhere and we will say so before selling anything.
Is a cheap program a waste of money? 05
Not if the scope matches the price. A $65 program that honestly covers five keywords, one page a month and two links is a real service at a real price. A $65 program that claims to do what a $2,000 program does is the problem. Ask what specifically is delivered each month and whether links come with URLs you can check.
The other three
Find out if the arithmetic works for you
The calculator takes about a minute and it will tell you plainly if your numbers do not support a program. That honest branch is deliberate, and it is the most useful thing on this site.