What roofing SEO actually costs per month.
Generalist agencies bill $3,000 to $5,000 a month on long terms. Here is what that buys, and what it does not.
The published range
Generalist marketing agencies charge roofing contractors $3,000 to $5,000 a month, usually on a twelve-month minimum. Roofing-specific agencies sit in a similar band. The recurring complaint recorded across the trade is not the price itself. It is that the same playbook gets run for roofers, dentists, and yoga studios, and that the monthly report never ties to booked jobs.
What $3,000 a month is meant to cover
Typically a mix of the following, with the proportion rarely specified in writing.
Where the money leaks
Three places, consistently. Content produced without query research, which fills a calendar rather than answering a question anyone types. Link acquisition that buys volume from sites with no relevance to roofing or your metro. And reporting built on rankings and sessions, which move for reasons unrelated to your revenue and cannot be argued with because nobody agreed what success meant before the engagement started.
Why retainer pricing fits roofing badly
Roofing demand is seasonal and event-driven. A flat monthly fee bills the same in February as it does the week after a hail event, while the work that decides outcomes is front-loaded: research, architecture, and publishing the pages that need to be indexed months before the season they serve. Pay for that work monthly and you pay for the calendar rather than the work.
What a fair recurring cost looks like
After a build, the only recurring cost that genuinely recurs is keeping the site alive: hosting, licences, security patching, and platform updates. That is a care plan, priced in the $99 to $300 a month band the research reports for maintenance, and it should be cancellable with the site remaining your property. Anything above that should be a defined project with a scope and an end.
How to compare a retainer against a build
Multiply, then compare against an asset. A $3,000 monthly retainer over three years is $108,000 with nothing owned at the end. A $50,000 rebuild plus a $200 monthly care plan over the same three years is $57,200, and the site is yours. That comparison is why this site sells a fixed-scope audit and a fixed-price build instead of a retainer.
When a retainer is the right answer
When you need continuous paid media management, when you have no internal capacity and genuinely want someone else operating the channel every week, or when your market is competitive enough that content production has to be constant. Those are real cases. They are just not the default, and they are not what most roofing contractors are sold.
Questions to ask about a retainer
Five, and ask them before the price conversation.
How to audit a retainer you are already paying
Pull twelve months of deliverables and count them. How many pages were published, and are they pages a buyer would search for? Then check Search Console for what those pages actually receive. Most contractors doing this exercise find a handful of pages carrying everything and a long tail of content that has never had a visit, which tells you what the fee bought.
The alternative shape
Front-load the work, then pay only for keeping it alive. Research and architecture first, as a fixed-scope purchase. The build as a fixed price with an end date. Then hosting, patching, and monitoring as a care plan in the $99 to $300 band, cancellable, with the site remaining yours. The total across three years is materially lower than a retainer and you own the asset at the end.
Related guides.
The direct answer, every published band, and how to work out which one your company belongs in.
$60 to $220 industry-wide, $200 to $300 for shared platform leads, and the factors that move the number in your market.
What a roofing website actually costs, from DIY to a $50,000 rebuild, with the ranges published rather than quoted on a call.
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