Put your prices on the site

Every objection to publishing prices is about competitors. Every consequence of not publishing them falls on the customer who wanted to choose you.

The question everybody asks first

Before anybody chooses a business, they work out what the thing costs. It is the most-asked research question in almost every category, and it is asked twenty minutes before the question about who to call.

An engine answering it needs a page with a number on it. If your site has none, it will answer from a page that does — a competitor, an aggregator, a forum thread where somebody remembered what they paid in another town three years ago. You do not get to abstain from the conversation about your prices. You only get to choose whether you are in it.

That is the whole argument, and everything below is the practical version of it.

Why nothing on the site is the worst option

There are three positions available. Publish a number, publish nothing, or publish a form that asks people to enquire.

Publishing nothing does not read as premium. It reads as unknown, and unknown is where a customer with four tabs open closes one. The form is worse than it looks too: it moves the cost of finding out onto the person who has not yet decided they want you, at the exact moment they are comparing you with somebody who already answered.

And in the specific case of an engine writing a paragraph, nothing is disqualifying. The sentence about cost gets written using somebody else’s figures, attributed to somebody else’s page, and you are not in the paragraph at all.

The objections, taken seriously

They are real objections, and they mostly have the same shape.

Competitors will see them. They already can. They ring you as a customer, they read your quotes through the customers who show them, they know the market rate because they work in it. The information you are protecting is not secret; it is merely inconvenient to find, and the only person genuinely inconvenienced is the buyer.

Every job is different. Most of them are, and this is why ranges and worked examples exist rather than fixed price lists. Saying that a standard job usually lands between two figures, and naming what pushes it to the top of that range, is both true and useful. It is also considerably more informative than a form.

We will be undercut. Somebody who chooses purely on price was never going to be your customer, and finding that out before the site visit is a saving rather than a loss. Publishing a number filters — that is the point, and it filters in both directions.

We would rather explain it in person. Fair, and you still can. A published range gets you into the conversation where the explaining happens. No published range means the conversation happens with somebody else.

One more thing worth saying to anybody still hesitating. You are not publishing a contract. A stated range with the variables named beside it commits you to nothing and has never stopped anybody quoting a job properly once they have seen it. The fear is of being held to a number; the reality is that customers understand a range perfectly well, and mostly just want to know whether they are in the right shop.

Three formats that work

A from-price. The cheapest version of the job, clearly labelled as a starting point. Easiest to write, easiest to defend, and enough on its own to make you the source for a question about cost.

A range. What a typical job of this kind runs between. Better than a from-price because it sets an honest expectation, and much harder to be accused of misleading anybody with.

A worked example. The best of the three, and the one almost nobody does. Take a real job, describe it, say what it came to and why. A boiler service on a standard system, an hour on site, ninety pounds. A bathroom of that size, those fittings, that timescale, that total. It is specific, it is quotable, and it does the explaining you wanted to do in person, on a page that works while you are asleep.

Whichever you choose, put a currency figure on the page in text. Not in a PDF, not in an image of a price list, not behind a login.

Say what moves the number

The paragraph that turns a price into a useful price is the one saying what changes it.

Access, age of the property, materials, urgency, whether the previous work was done properly, how far you have to travel. Two or three sentences naming the real variables does three things at once: it protects you from being held to the bottom of the range, it demonstrates that you know the work, and it gives an engine something to say about you beyond a figure.

This is also the honest version of every job is different. You are not refusing to answer. You are answering, and then explaining the variance.

Where it goes

A page whose address plainly concerns pricing is the strongest signal, because the URL is itself a claim about the contents. Failing that, prices stated in the body of the relevant service page, next to the description of the work.

What does not work is a number buried in a testimonial, or mentioned once in a blog post from two years ago, or sitting in the footer next to a call-out fee that no longer applies. The check that matters is whether an actual amount appears in actual pricing language, somewhere a reader would think to look — which is a reasonable proxy for whether a person could find it in ten seconds.

If you have several distinct services, each one wants its own figure on its own page. That is the same work as giving each service a page, done once rather than twice.

When you genuinely cannot

Some trades cannot publish a meaningful number, and the advice should not pretend otherwise.

Regulated professions with rules about fee advertising should follow their rules. Work that is entirely bespoke — a large build, a complex legal matter — may have no typical case worth quoting.

Even then, something can be said. What the initial consultation costs, or that it is free. How you charge: hourly, day rate, fixed quote, percentage. What the smallest job you take looks like. What a previous project of a named size came to in broad terms. Any of those is a fact where there was a blank, and a blank is the only version that is guaranteed to lose.

Who answers when you do not

It is worth knowing exactly who takes the question you declined.

Aggregators have built whole businesses on it. Cost guides, average price pages, how much should I pay for this — content assembled at national scale, frequently out of date, and almost never accurate for your particular market. Those pages rank, they get cited, and they set the number in the customer’s head before you have said a word. Then they sell the lead back to you.

Forum threads take the rest. Somebody describing what they paid, in another town, some years ago, with details nobody recorded. An engine summarising that is not being careless; it is using the only evidence available.

Both of those are answering a question about your trade in your area using information you could have supplied and better. The published number is not only about visibility — it is about which figure the customer is holding when they ring, and whether it came from you or from a page with an advertising business behind it.

A page that does the whole job

The good ones follow much the same order, and none of it is long.

Open by naming the job the way a customer names it, not the way the trade does. Give the number — from-price, range or worked example. Follow it immediately with the two or three things that move it, in plain sentences. Say what is included and what is not, because that is where quotes and expectations usually part company. Add one concrete example with a real total. Say how somebody gets a firm figure, and how long that takes.

That is perhaps four hundred words, it will outlive three redesigns, and it is the page an engine reaches for when somebody asks what this costs in your town.

Keeping the number current

A published price ages, and a stale one is worse than a range because it invites an argument at the quote stage.

Two habits fix it. Put a plain note on the page saying when the prices were last reviewed, which is honest and also tells a reader the page is maintained. And review them on whatever rhythm your costs actually change — for most trades that is once a year, plus whenever a supplier moves materially.

If you would rather not commit to a figure that will date, a range with a stated review date does nearly all the same work and survives longer. What does not work is quietly leaving a number from a few years ago and hoping nobody checks.

What it is worth

Pricing carries the largest share of the content pillar, tied with service pages, and it is weighted that way because it decides the research lane — the questions people ask before they choose. Those questions are also the only lane where an owner wins by writing something, which is what makes this the most actionable item in most reports.

There is a second effect that no score will show you. A published price changes who rings. The calls get shorter, the surprise at the quote stage mostly disappears, and the people who do ring have already decided the number is acceptable. Several people who did this reluctantly report that as the actual benefit, with the visibility as a bonus.

Checking it

Open your site on a phone, as a stranger, and try to find out what your most common job costs. Time yourself. If it takes more than about ten seconds, or ends at a contact form, an engine has already given up somewhere earlier than you did.

Then ask an assistant what your kind of work costs in your town, without naming your business, and look at which pages it quotes. Whoever is being cited there wrote a number down. That is the entire difference between them and you, and it is an afternoon of work to close.