What actually decides the price
Two electricians on opposite sides of the same city can need very different monthly work. The variables that move the quote are concrete:
- Competition in your trades: emergency callouts in a busy city fight harder than EICR searches in a quieter town.
- Service area size: one town is a smaller job than a multi-town van route with area pages for each place you cover.
- Starting condition: a clean profile with consistent citations needs growth work; duplicates, wrong categories or thin service pages need clean-up first.
- Scope: profile and reviews alone cost less than a full campaign with EV charger, rewire, consumer unit and EICR pages plus monthly reporting.
Monthly retainers vs one-off projects
A monthly retainer fits how local SEO works. Reviews, content, citations and profile activity compound only if the work continues. The retainer should buy named deliverables: ranking-grid reporting across your patch, review responses, service or area pages, and citation corrections, not vague "ongoing optimisation".
A one-off project (a profile rebuild, a citation tidy, a set of service pages) can be sensible if you will maintain reviews and updates yourself afterwards. Its limit is durability: competitors doing monthly work will gradually pass a business that fixed everything once and stopped.
Why pay-on-results is usually a poor fit
"You only pay when you rank" sounds fair until you read how "rank" is defined. Providers often count easy brand or low-intent terms, measure from a postcode where you already appear, or chase shortcuts that do not last. Local electrical searches reward steady prominence: reviews naming the job and town, correct service-area settings, and pages for the work people actually search.
If a results-based offer defined success as sustained map pack positions for competitive searches verified across your service area, it might be fair. Offers written that carefully are rare.
Questions to ask before you pay
Hesitation on ownership is a disqualifier. Your profile, reviews and pages should stay yours. A free ranking audit from Azizi Technologies sets a fixed monthly quote against your real competition and starting point, with no lock-in, so you know what the fee is buying before any work starts.
- What will you do each month, in writing?
- Will rankings be checked across my patch, not from one address?
- Do reports include calls and enquiries, not only positions?
- Who owns the Google Business Profile and the content if we part ways?
- Is there a lock-in, and what does leaving look like?