How trades marketing agencies price their work

The seven models you will meet

Trades agencies price in one of seven ways, and many combine two or three. Knowing which you are looking at tells you where the risk sits: with you, with the agency, or shared.

Published prices in this market range from a low fixed fee around £149 a month for a packaged system, through local SEO tiers in the £349 to £999 range, to retainers of £8,000 and above for an embedded senior team. The spread is enormous because the models are doing different jobs.

Fixed fees: the clean option, with one check

A fixed monthly fee is the easiest to budget and the easiest to compare. Several trades agencies now lead with it, and some pair it with no contract and a promise not to take a percentage of ad spend.

The check is scope. A fixed fee covering a website, Google Business Profile, review automation and a CRM is a different product from a fixed fee covering ad management alone. Write down exactly what is inside the fee before you compare it to anything.

Percentage of ad spend: the quiet conflict

When an agency charges 15 per cent of your Google Ads budget, its revenue rises with your spend. That does not make the agency dishonest, but it does mean that advice to 'scale the budget' arrives with a built-in incentive.

Some agencies deliberately reject this model and say so. Where you do encounter it, ask for a flat management fee instead, or at least a cap. And insist that ad spend is paid directly to Google or Meta from your own card, so you can see every penny.

Pay per lead: read the definition of a lead

Pay per lead sounds like the fairest deal in marketing. You pay only when a potential customer appears. The arguments start over what counts.

Is a lead a phone call of any length, or one over 60 seconds? Does a form fill from outside your area count? What about a duplicate from the same homeowner? A fair agreement defines all of this in writing and gives you a way to dispute bad leads within a set period. If the agency will not define it, do not buy it.

Website rental: cheap now, expensive to leave

Rental sites are tempting because the monthly figure is small and there is no upfront cost. The catch is ownership. The agency owns the site, the content and sometimes the domain. When you leave, you start again from nothing, and the search history you built belongs to them.

A growing number of trades agencies have turned this into a selling point by refusing to do it: sites are bought outright or paid off over about a year and then belong to the client. If you are offered rental, ask what happens to the domain and content on the day you stop paying, and get the answer in the contract.

A worked example at £1,200 a month

Suppose a plastering firm has £1,200 a month in total. Here is how that could land under three different structures. These are illustrations, not any agency's figures.

Under a percentage model at 15 per cent, the firm might put £1,000 into Google Ads and pay £150 in management, leaving £50 unspent. The agency's incentive is to push the ad budget higher next quarter.

Under a fixed-fee system at, say, £149 for the website, profile and review foundations, the firm has roughly £1,050 left for ads or a separate ad manager. Spend is transparent, but the firm has to decide what to do with the remainder.

Under a tiered local SEO retainer at £599, the firm has £600 left, no paid traffic, and a slower build towards organic enquiries. Cheaper to run month on month, slower to show results.

None of these is wrong. They produce different shapes of result at different speeds, and the right choice depends on how urgently the firm needs work.

The costs that do not appear on the quote

• Ad spend, which in most models is separate from the fee and often larger than it
• Setup or onboarding fees, sometimes a month's retainer upfront
• Hosting and domain renewals after a website project
• Stock photography or video licensing
• Software subscriptions for CRMs, review tools or call tracking, passed through at cost or marked up
• Notice periods: a three-month notice period on a £900 retainer is a £2,700 exit cost
• Your own time: approving content, supplying photos, answering the leads

Putting rival quotes on the same footing

Take each proposal and build a 12-month total that includes the fee, setup, estimated ad spend, software and the exit cost if you left at month six. Then list what you own at the end of the year under each one.

That exercise frequently reverses the ranking. The cheapest monthly figure can be the most expensive year once rental, notice and separate tools are counted. The guide to reading an agency proposal line by line walks through this in detail, and the buyer's guide to trades marketing agencies sets out what a reasonable scope looks like at each price point.

Before you ask for quotes at all, the checklist of what to send an agency will make sure the proposals you receive are comparable in the first place.

Frequently asked questions