Thirteen is the number most tradesmen get wrong when they cost a year of marketing. A fee that runs every four weeks is paid thirteen times in a year, so £350 is £4,550 and not £4,200.
That gap of £350 is small beside the bigger problem: most advice on marketing budgets for UK trades quotes a percentage of turnover, and a percentage tells a one-van firm nothing about whether the money comes back. A better question is how many extra jobs a budget has to win before it has paid for itself, and whether that number is believable where you work.
This post puts three yearly budgets side by side, shows each as pounds, share of an invented turnover and jobs to cover it, and ends with the record to keep so the next year's figure is based on your own work.
Three yearly budgets side by side
On four-weekly fees a UK tradesman's year costs £650 for a website, £3,900 for SEO on a site he owns and £4,550 for SEO with a site built and hosted, which is 1.1%, 6.5% and 7.6% of an invented £60,000 turnover.
| Budget | Every four weeks | Thirteen payments | Share of an invented £60,000 turnover |
|---|---|---|---|
| A. Website only | £50 | £650 | about 1.1% |
| B. SEO and Map Pack, your own site | £300 | £3,900 | 6.5% |
| C. SEO and Map Pack, site built and hosted | £350 | £4,550 | about 7.6% |
The turnover is made up to show the method, so use your own. Sitework is not VAT registered, so these are the full amounts, and the SEO plans take a £150 deposit off the first payment. The full terms sit on the pricing section of the homepage.
What each budget has to win back
The test of a marketing budget is the number of extra jobs it must win, and that number swings from one job to sixteen depending on what your average job is worth.
Divide each yearly total by your average job value and round up. The figures below use three invented averages, the kind of spread you see between a small repair, a standard job and a larger one.
Extra jobs needed to cover each budget (invented job values)
| £300 job | £650 job | £1,500 job | |
|---|---|---|---|
| A. £650 a year | 3 | 1 | 1 |
| B. £3,900 a year | 13 | 6 | 3 |
| C. £4,550 a year | 16 | 7 | 4 |
Each cell is the yearly total divided by the job value, rounded up (for example £4,550 divided by £650 is 7.0, so 7). It counts revenue, not profit, so a thin margin needs more jobs than shown. It is not a forecast of jobs won.
Read across the bottom row. A trade whose typical job is £300 needs sixteen extra jobs to cover Budget C, which is a lot to ask of a small town. A trade whose typical job is £1,500 needs four. That is why a flat rule of thumb misleads: the same fee is cheap for one UK trade and heavy for another.
Why a percentage of turnover is a poor guide
A share of turnover says what you can afford, not what will come back, so use it as a ceiling and use jobs as the test.
Plenty of marketing guides aimed at small UK firms give a percentage band and leave it there. I have not relied on any of them here, partly because the ones I could see are written by people selling marketing and partly because they disagree. The percentage column in the table above is there for one reason: to show whether a fee is a rounding error or a real slice of your year.
If Budget C would be nearly 8% of what you take, ask whether your diary can actually absorb the extra work. A fee that wins nothing is dear at any percentage, and one that wins six jobs is cheap at ten.
The free spend that comes before any of them
Before any fee, finish your Google Business Profile, add photos of your own work and ask each happy customer for a review, because that costs time and every paid step builds on it.
None of the three budgets replaces this. A claimed, complete profile with real photos and recent reviews is what a stranger in your part of England, Scotland or Wales sees first, and nobody else can write your customers' reviews. The longer version for a business in its first year is in is SEO worth it for a new trade business, and most of it holds for an established firm that never finished its profile.
Which budget suits which trade
Pick Budget A if you only need a site that loads and sells your number, Budget B if you already own a site worth building on, and Budget C if you want one supplier to build, host and improve it.
- Budget A. Right when word of mouth fills the diary and the site's job is to confirm you are real. It will not climb the map on its own.
- Budget B. Right when you already have a site you own, such as a good one from a previous designer, and the gap is town and service pages and reviews.
- Budget C. Right when you have no usable site, or one that cannot be edited, and want one monthly figure covering the build, hosting and the SEO work.
For a trade where the right jobs are worth a lot, the sums lean toward the larger budgets, and I have gone through that in plumber SEO: which jobs is it worth paying for. If you are weighing a freelancer against an agency, the cost comparison is in SEO freelancer or agency for a UK trade business.
A worked choice for an invented trade
Take a made-up Yorkshire electrician with a £650 average job and a diary that is two-thirds full, and the sums point to Budget B or C only if he can name where six or seven more jobs would come from.
He already has a site from a previous designer, so Budget B at £3,900 is the closer fit than C at £4,550. Six extra jobs a year is one every two months. He asks himself two plain questions. Are there searches in his area from people who want an electrician and cannot find one? Does he have room in the diary for those jobs?
If the answer to the first is unsure, the cheap move is Budget A for a quarter while he records where enquiries come from, then decide with figures. If both answers are yes, B is a reasonable bet and the twelve-week minimum is the point to review it. None of this is a forecast. It is a way of turning a fee into a number of jobs he can judge for himself.
The same method works if you are the trade with a £300 average job. The sums say Budget C asks for sixteen extra jobs, so either the jobs are bigger than you think, the area is large enough to supply them, or the website alone is the right size of budget for now. Being told that by the arithmetic is better than being told it a year in.
What to record so next year's budget is yours
Write down, for every enquiry, how the customer found you and what the job was worth, and after twelve weeks you can divide spend by jobs for each source.
- Ask the question on every call. "How did you find us?" takes five seconds and is the cheapest tracking there is.
- Write the source next to the job. Google listing, website, a friend, a van, a platform. A page in a notebook is enough.
- Add the job value when it closes. Revenue is fine to start with.
- Divide at twelve weeks. Spend on each source over the period, divided by jobs from it, is your cost per job.
Without this, the same budget in the same UK town will be judged by mood. With it, a fee that is not working shows up in a quarter instead of a year.
What to ask any supplier before you commit
Ask what will be done in the first four weeks, which searches and area it covers, how you will see results and what the minimum term is, because Google says there is no way to pay for a better local ranking.
A budget is only as good as the list of work behind it. My own SEO plan has a twelve-week minimum then rolls, and a target of the Google Maps top 3 in 90 days for up to three agreed searches in one area, with billing paused and the work continuing if it is missed. It is a target with a remedy, not a promise. Hold any other quote to the same questions.
Bottom line: there is no right percentage, only a number of jobs you believe you can win. Choose the budget whose job count looks ordinary for your trade, record where enquiries come from, and let twelve weeks of your own figures decide whether to go up or down.