Marketing pricing in the construction trade is opaque on purpose. Agencies quote after a discovery call because the number depends on the client, and because publishing it invites comparison. That is defensible, but it wastes a lot of everyone’s time.

So here is the honest structure. Not a single number, because a single number would be a lie, but the models, what drives them, and how to check the maths yourself.

The four ways it gets priced

Monthly retainer

The most common model. You pay a fixed monthly fee and the agency runs an agreed scope: some combination of SEO, content, paid search, reviews and reporting. For residential contractors, retainers generally land somewhere between $2,000 and $8,000 a month depending on how many services and how many cities you need to hold.

What drives the number is not the agency’s effort, it is the size of the surface. One trade in one metro is a small job. Six trades across four cities is a very different one, because every service and city combination needs its own page, its own tracking and its own attention.

Project or sprint pricing

A fixed scope over a fixed window. Typically used at the start of an engagement, because there is a lot of one-time foundation work before a retainer makes sense: fixing the Google Business Profile, restructuring the site, building the initial service and city pages, wiring call tracking.

Ours is a $4,500 ninety-day sprint, or $1,500 a month across three months for founding clients. The reason we start there rather than quoting a retainer is simple. Until someone has looked properly at where you stand, any retainer number is a guess.

Percentage of ad spend

Common for paid-only engagements, usually 10% to 20% of managed spend, often with a minimum. It is transparent, and it has one structural flaw worth understanding: it rewards the agency for spending more of your money, not for spending it better. If you use this model, tie it to a cost-per-booked-project target as well.

Pay per lead

You buy leads at a fixed price. Attractive because the risk looks transferred, and popular with lead-generation platforms rather than agencies. The catch is that the same lead is usually sold to two or three of your competitors, so you are buying a race rather than a customer. It also builds you no asset. Stop paying and it stops entirely, whereas rankings and reviews you have earned stay yours.

What sits inside a real retainer

When you compare two quotes, compare these rather than the headline number:

Component	What it covers
Local search	Google Business Profile, categories, service areas, citations, review system
Organic SEO	Service and city pages, internal structure, technical health, content
AI visibility	Entity structure, schema, mention network, answer-engine monitoring
Paid search	Google Ads, Local Service Ads, call tracking, dispute management
Conversion	The pages where enquiries are won or lost, and the follow-up after the form
Reporting	Rankings, AI citations, calls, booked consultations, tied to source

A quote that covers two of these at $3,000 and a quote that covers all six at $3,500 are not close to the same offer.

The arithmetic that actually decides it

Forget the monthly fee for a second and work out what one additional job is worth to you.

Take your average project value and your gross margin. If you sell $80,000 kitchens at a 35% gross margin, one additional booked project is worth about $28,000 in gross profit. Against a $4,000 monthly retainer, that single job covers seven months of fees.

So the real question is not “is $4,000 a month expensive.” It is “does this produce at least one extra job a quarter.” For a contractor selling considered projects at high ticket, that is a low bar. For a business selling $900 service calls, the same retainer needs to produce dozens of extra jobs a month and the maths gets much harder. This is exactly why we only work with contractors selling $20,000 to $500,000 projects, and why marketing advice written for emergency trades does not transfer.

The general industry benchmark for professional services is that marketing spend sits somewhere between 5% and 10% of revenue. For a contractor doing $2M a year, that is roughly $8,000 to $16,000 a month across everything: agency fees, ad spend, photography, the lot. Most contractors we speak to are well under that, which is usually why the pipeline is inconsistent.

What you should also budget for

Agency fees are not the whole cost. Three things get forgotten and then resented:

• Ad spend. Separate from management fees, and paid to Google, not the agency. For a competitive metro, meaningful paid search starts around $2,000 to $5,000 a month.
• Photography. The single highest-leverage asset a contractor can own and the one most often skipped. Professional photos of finished work feed your website, your Google profile, your ads and your social. Budget for it once a quarter.
• Your own time. The best content a contractor can produce is a walkthrough of a real project with real numbers, and only you can supply that. Agencies who claim to need nothing from you produce content that reads like it.

Signs you are being overcharged

• The reporting is impressions and rankings with no line to booked work.
• The contract is twelve months with no exit.
• Nobody can tell you which channel produced your last five enquiries.
• The same deliverable list would fit a dentist, a lawyer or a plumber with the noun swapped.
• You are paying for content that nobody in your company has ever read.

What we charge

For the sake of not being the sort of article that explains pricing without giving any: a $4,500 ninety-day sprint to start, $1,500 a month over three months at the founding client rate, then $3,000 to $6,500 a month depending on scope. Month to month after the sprint, no notice period beyond the current month. A full website rebuild is $8,500 and only when the site is genuinely the constraint.

If you want to know which of those is right for your business, the audit is free and runs on your own data. It takes thirty minutes and you keep the findings either way.