Done-for-you marketing for tradespeople: what you get

Done-for-you trade marketing costs £49-£199 a month and covers the website, Google profile, reviews and local pages. What is included and what is not.

A1 Digital · written & reviewed by the team 2 October 2026 5 min read Updated 2 October 2026

Quick answer

Done-for-you marketing for a trade business costs £49-£199 a month and covers the website, Google Business Profile, review requests, local area pages and keeping it all current. What it cannot do is answer your phone, which is where most trades actually lose work.

£49-£199/mo

typical done-for-you range for a trade business

Missed calls

the biggest single leak in trade marketing, and not fixable by a website

Photos

the one input only you can supply, and the highest-value one

Done-for-you marketing for a trade business costs £49-£199 a month and covers the website, Google Business Profile, reviews, local pages and keeping everything current. It cannot answer your phone, and for most trades that is where the work is actually lost.

Worth starting there, because a marketing service that pretends otherwise is selling you something.

What is actually included

The website, built and maintained

Five to eight pages covering your trades, areas and prices. Hosted, secured, backed up, and changed whenever you need without a quote each time.

Google Business Profile

Set up or fixed, categories and services right, service areas set to the towns you cover, photos added, posts weekly. For most trades this brings more calls than the website does.

Reviews

Requests going out after jobs, replies to what arrives. In trades this matters more than almost anything else, because a stranger is coming into someone's home.

Local pages

Real pages for the towns and services you want work from. 'Emergency electrician Horsforth' rather than 'we cover West Yorkshire'.

The technical checking

Site speed, mobile layout, and testing that your contact form actually delivers, which fails silently more often than anyone expects.

Ads, on the higher tiers

Google Ads managed, with the spend paid to Google directly and set by you. Worth it in competitive areas, unnecessary in quieter ones.

That is the whole product. Anyone adding much beyond it for a single-van trade business is padding.

What it cannot do, honestly

Answer your phone. The single biggest leak in trade marketing. A missed call in an emergency is a lost job in ninety seconds, because they are already ringing the next name. If you are up a ladder all day, a call answering service at £30-£80 a month will make you more money than any marketing spend.

Make you turn up on time. Reviews reflect the job, not the website.

Take your photos. Only you are on site. Ten seconds with a phone at the start and end of each job is the raw material everything else uses, and no provider can do it for you.

Guarantee leads. Nobody can. Search and ads do not work that way, and a guarantee is the clearest signal to walk away.

Key takeaway

The three highest-value inputs in trade marketing all come from you: answering the phone, taking photos, and asking happy customers for reviews in person. A service can automate the follow-up and handle everything else, but those three stay yours and they matter most.

How it compares to lead platforms

Most trades are on Checkatrade, MyBuilder, Bark or similar, so the comparison is worth doing properly.

	Lead platform	Done-for-you marketing
Cost model	Per lead, or membership	Fixed monthly
Competition	You plus several others, on price	The customer found you specifically
Who owns the customer	The platform	You
Cost as you grow	Rises with volume	Flat
Speed to first lead	Fast	Three to six months

That last row is the honest disadvantage. Platforms produce leads next week. Search visibility takes months.

Which is why the sensible pattern for most trades is both: use the platforms while your own visibility builds, then need them less each year. The goal is not to abandon them tomorrow, it is to stop being dependent on them.

Watch what platform leads actually cost you over a year

Add up your platform spend for the last twelve months, membership plus per-lead charges. Trades are frequently surprised by the total. Compare it against £99 a month with no per-lead fee, and the calculation often looks different than it does month to month.

The realistic timeline

Month one is unglamorous: profile fixed properly, site sorted, business details made consistent, forms tested. Little visible happens.

Months two and three: first area pages go up, review requests start, profile becomes active. The profile side moves here and you may notice more Maps calls.

Months four to six: search rankings begin to shift. This is the honest timeline for local search and anyone promising faster is either guessing or counting profile fixes as SEO wins.

If you need work next week, that is what ads and platforms are for. Managed marketing is the thing that makes you less dependent on both.

Whether the numbers work for you

Do this sum with your own figures.

Take your average job value. A boiler service at £90, a rewire at £3,500, a bathroom at £6,000. Divide the annual plan cost by it.

At £99 a month that is £1,188 a year. For a plumber doing bathrooms, one extra job covers it five times over. For someone doing £60 callouts exclusively, it needs twenty extra jobs, which is a different proposition.

Higher job values make this easy arithmetic. Lower ones mean you should probably start at the entry tier or do it yourself.

Doing it yourself instead

Entirely viable, and worth saying. The Google profile is free, review requests cost nothing, and a basic site is a few hundred pounds. A tradesperson who posts weekly and asks every customer for a review will beat most paid marketing.

The honest question is whether you will still be doing it in six months. Most will not, because you are on site at 7am and quoting at 9pm. That is the thing a service actually sells: continuity, not brilliance.

General guidance is in online presence for tradespeople, and the cost breakdowns by trade in plumber and electrician website cost.

Our plans are £49, £99 and £199 a month with no contract, and you own the domain, site and content. Most single-van trades fit £49 or £99. The pricing page sets out each, or tell us your trade, your patch and how you get work now and we will say which tier fits, including if the answer is that you are better off spending the money on someone to answer the phone.

Frequently asked questions

What does done-for-you marketing include for a trade business?

The website built and kept current, Google Business Profile set up and posted to weekly, review requests going out after jobs, local area and service pages published through the year, and someone checking the enquiry forms actually work. Ad management usually sits on the higher tiers.

How much does trade marketing cost per month?

£49-£199 a month for a managed service covering the whole stack. Ad spend, if you run ads, is separate and paid to Google directly. Lead platforms like Checkatrade charge per lead on top, which is a different model and usually more expensive over a year.

Will a marketing service get me more jobs?

Nobody can promise that, and anyone who does is telling you something about themselves. What can be committed to is the work: the profile maintained, pages published, reviews requested, the site kept fast. Whether that converts depends on your area, your prices and crucially whether you answer the phone.

Is it better than Checkatrade or MyBuilder?

Different model. Those platforms charge per lead or per membership and put you next to competitors on price. Your own profile and website cost a fixed monthly fee with no per-lead charge and the customer arrives interested in you specifically. Most trades use both and aim to need the platforms less each year.

tradespeople done-for-you marketing trades pricing local seo

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Written by the A1 Digital team

We handle the entire online presence for small businesses, website, branded email, Google, AI search, content and reviews, for one simple monthly plan. No tech headaches, no lock-in.

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