Somebody quoted my plumber $500 a month for SEO

Somebody cold-called Vince, the other plumber I keep, and quoted him five hundred a month for SEO. A year, that's a used work van. Vince asked me, "What's it actually cost to show up on page one?" I gave him the honest answer, which is that it depends, but not five hundred a month for a five page site, and not for what most of his site actually needs.

Here's the thing about local SEO. For a shop that serves one county, most of it is boring plumbing: real page titles, honest descriptions, a sitemap the search engines can read, and content that says what you do and where. That's it. The free version of Yoast SEO does all of it, and it costs nothing.

What it costs

Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin with a free version and a paid one. Free is a real tool, not a demo. Paid runs $99 a year for a single site, and their extras like WooCommerce SEO or Local SEO run about $79 each, or $229 a year bundled for one site. Those numbers come from their last published comparison pricing, and I'd expect them to move.

I paid for Premium for two years, on my own site, and let it go. Nothing dramatic happened. I just never opened the parts I was paying for. If your site is under about ten pages, the free version is genuinely enough, and I run it on every WordPress site I keep. That includes Vince's.

One warning from my Bluehost post: Bluehost resells Yoast as a checkout add-on, about three bucks a month. You can install the same plugin yourself from the WordPress dashboard for free. Don't pay a middleman for a free thing.

What the free version actually does

1. Lets you write the page title and the search snippet for every page and post, with a preview of how it looks in Google. This is ninety percent of the value.
2. Builds the sitemap automatically at yoursite.com/sitemap_index.xml and tells the search tools where it is.
3. Checks the basics while you write: is the page longer than a napkin, does the title contain the words people search, did you describe the image or paste a filename full of underscores.
4. Handles the technical bits quietly, like noindex tags and clean addresses, so you don't have to learn what those words mean.

I set Vince's up in one evening. His page titles used to read "Home - Big Ed's Plumbing and Son." Now they read "Drain cleaning and water heaters in Lorain, OH." His phone started ringing from the map listing within a couple of months. I can't promise you page one for your trade in your town. I can tell you his titles were invisible before and they aren't now.

The water heater version

The free version is a standard tank water heater. Set the dial, forget it exists, it does the job for years. Nobody photographs it at a trade show.

Premium is the tankless upgrade with the recirculating pump. Hot water two seconds faster, fancier controls, a nicer bill. If you run a big site with hundreds of pages, the paid features earn their keep: the redirect manager, the internal linking suggestions, the orphaned content finder. On a five page site those answers are all "no" or "obvious." I stopped paying for hot water I wasn't drinking.

The honest complaints, and they're fair: the free dashboard nags you with upgrade banners, and the traffic-light analysis makes some people write for the light instead of the customer. Ignore the orange dot when it's wrong. The tool grades the paragraph, it doesn't grade the plumber.

What to do Monday

Open your homepage tonight and look at the tab title up in the browser. If it says "Home" or a raw domain, that's your one job: install the free Yoast this week and write a real title that names what you do and the town you do it in. It costs nothing but twenty minutes, and it's the difference between a title and a shrug.