How much should an electrician spend on SEO? What moves the price

The right SEO budget for an electrician is the one that pays for itself inside a year on the jobs it brings in. In practice that means spending roughly what one decent job a month is worth, and judging the result on enquiries, not on a rankings screenshot. What you should pay depends on four things: how big an area you want, how crowded it is, what state the website is in, and what the money actually buys each month.

The size of the area

One town with one Google Business Profile is a different job from three towns and two bases. Each additional area that you genuinely serve needs its own evidence: a page that speaks to it, reviews from it, and mentions in it. An agency quoting one flat price for "the whole of Cheshire" is either building doorway pages that Google will filter, or not building anything at all.

The competition

Search your trade and town and look at who is on page one. If it is three directories and two electricians with ten reviews each, the road is short. If it is established firms with two hundred reviews and a page for every job, it is longer and costs more, because the work has to be better than theirs, not just present. We look at this before we quote and we tell you which it is.

The state of the website

A fast, indexable site with real pages is a foundation. A one-page template with stock photos is a rebuild waiting to happen, and SEO spent on it is money spent on scaffolding round a house with no floor. Sometimes the honest quote is "fix the site first, then the monthly work", and it is cheaper in the end than paying monthly to promote something that cannot rank.

What the money buys

This is the question to ask anyone who quotes you, and to insist on a specific answer. A real monthly retainer for a trade business contains most of this:

• Google Business Profile maintenance: categories, services, hours, photos, posts, review replies, and a review process that runs every job.
• Content: a new page or guide most months, written by someone who understands the trade, aimed at a search people make.
• Technical care: speed, indexing, broken links, schema, the things that quietly break.
• Mentions and citations: real directories, installer registers, local sites, built steadily and never bought.
• Measurement: Search Console and analytics read by a person, with a report in plain English that says what changed and why.

If a quote cannot say which of these it includes and how much of each, the price is meaningless. If it promises a number of keywords on page one, walk away; nobody controls that.

How to judge whether it is working

Not by rankings alone, and not in month one. The honest sequence is: profile changes show in weeks, reviews build over months, pages take three to six months to settle. By month four you should see impressions rising in Search Console for the searches you care about. By month six to nine you should see enquiries you can trace to it. If at twelve months the enquiries do not cover the cost, something is wrong, and a good agency will have said so at month six.

Our own pricing is on the pricing page, with what each tier includes, because we think the ranges should be public. Whatever you are quoted elsewhere, ask for the list.