This morning the owner of a plumbing HVAC company asked me how much to build their website.
$650 one-time is the short answer.
But let’s break this down and see how most home service businesses screw this up badly.
It’s no secret that a plumbing HVAC website is just a template that you can inject your name, phone number, and other details into. A reasonably competent VA following our checklist can do this for a few hundred dollars.
However, if you want a skilled American to fine-tune the site to rank on Google, ensure proper call tracking, and help get the right content in place, these folks cost $60,000 to $100,000 a year.
The real cost lies in troubleshooting performance and tuning content, which means that a “website” should typically cost around $2,500 over 6-8 weeks to coordinate after the VA has done her part.
Many of you guys see marketing companies charging $8K or even as much as $50K for a website. Does this mean our plumber friend is getting ripped off?
Not necessarily, since the agency is probably bundling in Google My Business optimization, Local Service Ads, and other services.
However, charging separately for SEO on a monthly basis is a scam, as I’ve explained in detail in other posts. The same goes for monthly “hosting and maintenance” fees, since all of us know that we can use WP Engine for $30 a month, a bit more if you opt for VIP support, especially if you have a lot of sites and need super-fast loading, security, and support.
When people ask me for help fixing their existing site, I first check to see if they have WordPress and all the necessary plugins for analytics, content, etc. If they do, then we look at what stage their business is in. If they are in a major Google local category (plumbing, landscaping, electrical, etc.) and doing at least $80K a month, tuning their site is usually easy – often doable for $1,500. But we prefer long-term relationships (think wives, not hoes) where we can put a team on it and have an American team leader actively watching and managing.
The ongoing VA cost for a retainer should be $500 to $750 a month, depending on whether the scope includes social ads and video editing, in addition to just Google-related tasks (website, GMB, LSA, SEO). Add in a senior client strategist, overhead for tools/training, and a 20% profit margin, and retainers are typically $2-3K a month per client location.
HVAC businesses may be at the higher end of this spectrum (versus karate studios at $500 a month). Clients in New York City would also be higher, since there’s more competition and, therefore, more work.
There are agencies that charge $10,000 a month (which isn’t necessarily bad, depending on what you’re getting). But then they outsource to white-label fulfillment, paying $300 a month for implementation and assigning 50 clients per account manager. That’s a pure money grab, as they’re primarily sales-driven organizations where the leader isn’t a hands-on practitioner, believing they need to know only a bit more than their client about digital marketing – which isn’t much.
So now you see why pricing in website building is all over the place. All digital services are connected through the website, so bundling makes sense.
There is so much outsourcing and “easy money bros” taking advantage of uninformed clients that the markups are insane. The solution is to understand exactly what you’re getting and work only with folks who have published SOPs. And you must own your marketing assets. No more “website is free” deals, where you pay $295 a month but lose your site if you ever leave. The same goes for PPC, where the agency owns your account, and if you try to leave, they make up some excuse about “intellectual property.”
Consider your own costs in running a service business. There are the actual materials and product (the equivalent of VA labor in our case), your various people, marketing costs, overhead, and then a healthy 20% margin.
A few weeks ago in Paris, I paid $24 for two croissants and two coffees. You know the actual cost was maybe a dollar. But what else are you paying for?
If you want to own your marketing and hold it accountable, I created a 5-step guide with Marko S. Sipilä that you should review.
