Home / Rural guide / What it costs
What search work costs a rural trade
Two figures cover almost every rural business in this district. The AI Visibility Sprint is a fixed £400 and the retainer starts at £600 a month, and both are printed rather than quoted on request.
This page explains what sits behind those figures for a trade, a contractor or a workshop, what raises them, and what a rural business should refuse to buy at any price.
Written 3 August 2026. ND Media LTD's own prices. No third-party market rates are claimed.
What is actually on offer
| Service | Cadence | Fee |
|---|---|---|
| AI Visibility Sprint One document, five shipped fixes, a re-check date Once, over seven days | Once, over seven days | £400 one-off |
| Search and AI retainer Technical, content, local and AI work in one fee Monthly, no minimum term | Monthly, no minimum term | From £600 per month |
fixed fee Both figures are ND Media LTD prices and neither moves once agreed. The full breakdown sits on the hatch table.
The Sprint is the sensible starting point for most rural trades. It produces a dated record of where you stand in Google and in AI answers, five fixes that actually ship, and a date to check it again.
The retainer suits a business with something to maintain. A workshop with no website and no listing gets more from the Sprint and a small build than from a monthly fee it cannot yet feed.
What raises the figure for a rural business
| Your situation | Why it changes the work | Effect on the fee |
|---|---|---|
| One trade, one area A plumber working Andover and four villages | One set of pages, one listing, one set of questions to track and re-check. | At the £600 floor |
| Several distinct services Groundworks plus drainage plus fencing | Each service needs its own page, its own tracked questions and its own citation checks. | Above the floor |
| A wide rural service area Half of north Hampshire and into Wiltshire | Coverage has to be won in writing rather than by proximity, which is more pages and more research. | Above the floor |
| Seasonal peaks to hit Hedging, drainage, log cutting | Work has to land weeks before each window opens, so the year has fixed deadlines in it. | Above the floor |
| No usable website yet A social page, or four pages built a decade ago | Nothing exists to optimise, so the first months are build work rather than search work. | Sprint first, then decide |
fixed fee £600 is the floor rather than an average. The figure for your business is quoted in writing before anything starts and does not move afterwards.
Every one of those five moves the fee upward. That is why the price is written as from £600 rather than as a headline number with the conditions hidden underneath it.
What a rural trade should never buy
- A page for every village
Suppliers sell packages of thirty or forty location pages because they are cheap to generate. Google has discounted that pattern for years and AI assistants read it as equally unconvincing.
The pages then sit on your site as dead weight. Removing them later costs money too.
- A guaranteed position
Nobody controls Google's results or an assistant's answer, so a guarantee is either meaningless or attached to a term so obscure that nothing searches for it. A supplier offering one is telling you something useful about themselves.
- A directory bundle
Paid submission to a hundred directories creates a hundred copies of your details that you now have to keep correct. Inconsistent copies actively lower confidence in your business information.
- A monthly report with no changes behind it
Reporting is a by-product of doing the work rather than the work itself. A fee that buys a document and no shipped changes has bought you nothing.
Five questions to ask any supplier
Ask these before signing anything. The answers separate a working supplier from a reseller very quickly.
- What exactly ships in month one?
A specific list of changes is a good answer. Strategy, audit and discovery on their own are not changes.
- Who does the work?
Ask whether the person on the call is the person doing it. Sub-contracted content is where most of the thin village pages come from.
- What is the minimum term?
A long lock-in usually protects the supplier from the client noticing. Month to month keeps the pressure in the right place.
- Who owns the website and the profile at the end?
Your domain, your hosting, your Business Profile and your content should stay yours. Anything held in the supplier's account is leverage.
- What figure are we measuring, and from when?
A dated baseline taken before the work starts is the only thing that makes later numbers meaningful. Without one, any improvement can be claimed.
Whether the fee is worth it for you
Work this out yourself rather than accepting anybody's projection. Take your average job value, take your typical margin on it, and count how many extra jobs a month would cover the fee.
A groundworks contractor whose average job runs into four figures needs very few of them. A domestic trade doing forty pound call-outs needs a great many, and the honest answer there is often that the Business Profile alone is the right level of spend.
That arithmetic is yours and no supplier should do it for you with invented numbers. Any agency quoting a return before it has seen your books is guessing.
Where this entry sits in the book
This page is one entry in the rural business guide for Andover and the Test Valley. The guide also covers Business Profile setup, seasonal demand and which villages justify a page.
Every fee on this site, with what sits inside each one, is set out on the hatch table.
Asked most often about the money
Is a monthly retainer sensible for a two-van business?
Sometimes, and often not in the first month. A trade with no website worth the name gets more from the £400 Sprint and a set of fixes than from a retainer it cannot yet feed. The retainer earns its keep once there is something to maintain and expand.
Why will nobody quote a fixed price without seeing the site?
The work scales with the state of the site and the number of services and areas involved. A one-page site for a single trade and a neglected forty-page site covering six services are different jobs. Quoting them the same would mean one of them subsidising the other.
What about the agencies charging under £200 a month?
A fee that low buys very few hours, so the hours go on a report rather than on changes to your site. The client pays for a year and gets a folder of graphs. The honest floor here is £600 a month for that reason.
Should I pay per lead instead?
Lead resale arrangements sell the same enquiry to several trades and put you in a bidding queue for work you already paid to be shown. The enquiry also belongs to the supplier rather than to you. Owning the pages that produce enquiries is the cheaper position over any long period.
How long before a rural trade sees anything?
Technical fixes and a corrected Business Profile can move the map results within weeks. Content and citation work runs on months rather than weeks. Anyone promising a date is guessing and should say so.
Get a figure for your business
Send your website address, your trade and the area you cover. You get a specific figure in writing with the reasoning behind it.
No minimum term, no exit fee, no commission on results.