The short answer: Most excavation companies pay $1,500 to $3,500 a month for ongoing SEO and local search work. Companies in competitive metros, or running several yards and crews across multiple counties, pay $3,500 to $7,500 a month. A custom website is a separate one-time cost of $3,500 to $12,000 or more, and most excavation companies bundle the two. Everything is month to month with no long-term contract, and you own the site, the content, and the accounts.
Nobody bids a lot clearing off a phone call without seeing the lot. Pricing search work is the same. Five things set the number.
How crowded your market is. A rural county with a handful of excavating outfits is a different job than a metro where every site-work GC and a long list of dirt contractors chase the same searches. Busier market, more pages, more months, higher number.
How long your service list is. Grading, trenching, foundation digs, land clearing, septic, ponds, demolition, haul-off. Each service is a page. Each town you will mobilize to is a page. Page volume is most of what a monthly bill buys, so as a rough example, eight services across six towns is a bigger job than three in one town.
Who you want calling. Homeowner work and builder work need different sites. A GC putting together a bid list wants equipment, capacity, crew size, insurance, and finished projects that look like his. That is more content, and more careful content, than a page about a new driveway. Want both, plan on the higher end.
How your reviews come in. You do fewer and bigger jobs than a plumber, so reviews arrive slowly, and one homeowner unhappy about a rutted lawn sits on your profile a long time. Review and reputation work is part of the ongoing list, and markets where the leaders have long review histories take more of it.
One yard or several. A second yard in the next county means a second Google Business Profile, a second set of location pages, and a second review stream to feed. Local SEO scales by location, not by company, and that is the single biggest jump in price.
$1,500 to $3,500 a month. Where most excavation companies land: one yard, one metro or a couple of counties, a normal service list. It buys a steady run of service and service-area pages, profile work so you turn up in the map results when somebody searches from a job site, technical upkeep, review requests, and an AI search layer so the answer engines have something accurate to quote when a homeowner asks one of them who does grading. It also buys a first-party lead dashboard. We run those on more than 20 of the sites we manage, so you can see which calls came from search.
$3,500 to $7,500 a month. Competitive metros, several yards, or a company chasing general contractor and municipal work on top of homeowners. More pages per month, per-location profile management, capability and past-project content written for the person reading a bid list, and a faster publishing schedule.
The website is a separate line. A custom build runs $3,500 to $12,000 or more, one time, and most excavation companies bundle it with the monthly. If the build is the number you are trying to pin down, that question has its own page.
Tools and ads sit outside the monthly. A custom tool, say a fill or haul-off estimator, starts at $600 for a calculator, and most workhorse tools run $1,500 to $4,000, plus $75 a month per tool for Tool Care. Google Ads management has no published fee here. The industry runs on flat fees or a percentage of spend; we quote flat after a free consult.
It climbs when you are starting from nothing in a busy market. A one-page site with a phone number on it means we are pouring the foundation, not tuning something that already works. It climbs when your service area crosses county lines and you want to show up in each of them. And it climbs when you want the bid-list side of the business, because capability content is slower to write and somebody has to get the equipment and specs right.
It drops when the picture is simple. One yard, one or two counties, a short service list, a site with decent bones. Specialty work helps too: a company that mostly digs ponds or clears lots has fewer people bidding against it in search than one fighting for every driveway in a metro.
Then the part nobody enjoys. Excavation revenue is lumpy. You work the weather windows, and the wet months or the frozen ones take a bite out of cash. You can stop any month you want. Search results do not stop with you, though. The pages you skip in February are pages that do not exist in May, and the ground you give up is ground somebody else takes. If money is tight, we would rather run a smaller number all twelve months than a big one for a single season. Say so while we scope it.
The general argument about what SEO costs and why is in the main cost guide. This page is only about what those numbers mean when the work is dirt, rock, and haul-off.
You want a scope before a number. Fair enough. Start with the free read: run your site through what should you pay, or dig through the more than 50 free tools we publish with no email wall. If you are still deciding whether any of this is worth doing, that argument lives on its own page.
When you want a real number, the excavation page lays out what the work involves, and a free mockup gets you a quote written against your market, your service list, and how many yards you run. Flat, in writing, before you commit to anything.
Kelly Webmasters and Marketers. Orlando, FL, working nationwide since 2008. Call or text (407) 694-2055, or email [email protected]. Month to month, and everything we build is yours.
You can. It is month to month and there is nothing to cancel out of. Just go in knowing the cost. Search does not freeze while you are parked: competitors keep publishing, and the pages you skipped in the slow months are pages you do not have when the ground thaws and the phone should be ringing. If cash flow is the reason, say so during scoping and we will size a monthly that survives the slow season instead of stopping cold.
Usually, yes. A second location means another Google Business Profile, another set of location pages, and another review stream to keep fed, and that is what moves a company from the $1,500 to $3,500 range up into the $3,500 to $7,500 range. Adding a county you already serve out of your existing yard is cheaper. That is pages, not a new location.
Same ranges, different content. Site-work relationships get made person to person and no website changes that. What the site has to do is survive the check afterward, when somebody pulls you up before adding you to a bid list and wants to see equipment, capacity, and jobs like the one they are letting. That content is slower to write than homeowner service pages, so bid-focused companies usually sit in the upper half of whichever tier they are in.
Excavation websites and SEO · What a website costs for an excavation company · Is SEO worth it for excavation companies? · The full guide to what SEO costs · What should you pay? (free tool) · The plain-English glossary
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