How Much Does Roofing SEO Cost? Real Price Ranges

Our roofing SEO plans cost $125 to $575 a month, month to month, or $140 to $620 if you buy a plan as a one-time option. Quotes from other agencies will vary a lot, by market, by what's included and by how they bill, so we won't pretend to know what the agency across town will charge you. What we can do is show how SEO gets priced, what pushes the price up, what you should get for the money and how to check whether a plan pays for itself.

How SEO gets priced

You'll run into five ways of selling it:

• Monthly retainer. A set fee for ongoing work, often described as hours or "strategy." Flexible, but hard to compare between agencies unless you pin down the deliverables in writing.
• Fixed packages. A set number of keywords, links and tasks each month at a set price. Easier to compare and easier to check. This is how we sell.
• Hourly or project work. An audit, a site move, a technical fix. Good for one-time jobs with a clear end.
• Pay per lead or "performance" SEO. You pay for calls or rankings. Read the fine print, especially who owns the website, the phone number and the listings when you stop paying. Some of these deals rent you leads from a site the agency owns, and the calls stop the day you do.
• Bundled with a website. SEO included in a monthly web design fee. Ask what the SEO part actually is, because sometimes it's a plugin and a sitemap.

What pushes the price up

• Competition in your market. A roofer in a big metro fighting dozens of companies for "roof replacement [city]" needs more links and more content than a roofer in a town of 15,000 with four competitors.
• How many towns and services you want to rank for. Each one needs a page and enough authority behind it.
• The state of your site. A slow, thin or broken site needs fixing before links do much.
• Locations and domains. Two offices or two brands means more profiles, more pages and more links.
• Content. Who writes the service pages and blog posts, how many and how long.

When a quote seems high or low, ask which of these it's based on. If the agency can't say, the number probably came from a template.

What you should get for the money

Whatever you pay, get these in writing:

1. The keywords being targeted and the page on your site each one points to.
2. A list of every link built: the live URL, the page on your site it points to and the anchor text.
3. The on-page changes made to your site, if that's included.
4. Business Profile and citation work, if that's included.
5. Rankings for your target keywords, tracked month over month.
6. A contract you can leave, ideally month to month.
7. Your website, domain, Business Profile and phone number in your name. Always.

A report full of "impressions" and a rising chart, with no list of what was actually done, leaves you unable to tell what you paid for.

Comparing two quotes side by side

Here's a made-up pair of quotes to show how to line them up. Agency A: $900 a month for "full SEO management," six-month minimum. Agency B: $400 a month for 15 target keywords and a set number of links each month, every link listed in the report, cancel anytime.

Start with the commitment. Agency A costs $5,400 before you're allowed to leave. Agency B costs $400 before you can judge the first month's work and walk if you don't like it.

Then ask Agency A to turn "full management" into a list: how many keywords, how many links, which pages they'll write or fix, what the report shows. If the list is good, the higher price may be fair, since more hands-on work costs more. If they won't write it down, you're comparing a list against a promise, and only one of those can be checked.

Our plans, as one reference point

Plan	Monthly	One-time option	Keywords	Guest posts (DA 20+)	Web 2.0 (DA 50+)	Also included
Silver	$125	$140	10	10	10
Golden	$235	$260	20	20	20	In-depth keyword research, on-page audit, content gap analysis, premium indexing
Platinum	$325	$380	40	30	30	2 domains, competitor analysis
Titanium	$575	$620	100	50	50	4 domains, toxic link check

A guest post is an article on another website with a link back to yours; ours go on sites with a Domain Authority (a third-party estimate of a site's strength) of 20 or higher. A Web 2.0 property is a page on a hosted publishing platform with a DA of 50 or higher that links back to you. Every plan is month to month, you can cancel anytime, and the monthly report lists every live URL, the target page and the anchor text. Clients can leave any month, and 94% stay.

If you need words or a site, content writing plans start at $26 a month for four 500-word posts, and websites start at $400 one time. The full breakdown is on our roofing SEO pricing page.

As a rough guide, not a rule:

• Silver suits one town, a handful of services and light competition.
• Golden suits a metro area or several towns where you also want keyword research and an audit of your site.
• Platinum suits a competitive metro, or a company running a second domain.
• Titanium suits several locations or brands and a long keyword list.

Will it pay for itself

Do this math with your own numbers. Say your average replacement leaves $3,500 in gross profit after materials and labor. The Golden plan for a year costs $2,820. One extra replacement over the year covers it, and two extra jobs return about two and a half times what you spent.

The honest part: SEO takes months before the phone rings more, and how much more depends on your competition, your site and your reviews. Nobody can promise you a number of jobs or a ranking, and anyone who does is guessing or selling. Give a campaign at least four to six months before judging it, and track where every signed job came from so you're judging with numbers rather than a feeling.

Red flags in any quote

• A ranking guarantee, or "page one in 30 days"
• A 12-month contract with no way out if the work isn't delivered
• A "private network" of links they won't show you
• The agency registering your domain or Business Profile under its own account
• No deliverables, only "SEO management"

If you want a number that fits your town and your competition, start with a free SEO inspection. We'll tell you which plan we'd suggest, or tell you if your site needs fixing before any plan is worth paying for.