This piece does the arithmetic on what a bathroom fit or boiler swap is actually worth in profit, then lines that up against what Checkatrade, MyBuilder, Rated People, TrustATrader and Bark really charge tradespeople. It flags which local-search statistics are too old to trust, and covers what Gas Safe and NICEIC rules mean for a site's structured data. Closes with what Stagg Studios does and does not do, at £100 a month.
A boiler swap takes an engineer four to six hours on site. A bathroom refit runs a fitter three to four weeks, most of it labour and tiling. A house rewire is a week and a half of chasing walls and a redecoration bill the customer didn't budget for. You know the shape of your own jobs better than anyone who has ever cold called you about your website. That's the problem with most of the pitches you get: they open with a line about "growing your business online" and never once mention that a like-for-like combi swap and a full system conversion are not the same job, or that your Gas Safe ID card expires every year, or that the reason your phone rings on a Sunday is a boiler, not a bathroom.
I'm Sam Stagg. I run Stagg Studios from Dulwich in south London, on my own, doing one job: the technical work that decides whether Google and the AI search tools can find you, understand what you do, and trust that you're real. No content writing, no paid ads, no link building. Before I ask for anything, here's the arithmetic on what this is actually worth to you, and where I think your money is already going.
What one job is actually worth
Take a mid-range bathroom fit. MyJobQuote and Checkatrade's 2026 cost guides put a standard family bathroom supply-and-fit at £5,000 to £8,000, with labour and tiling alone running 45 to 60% of that bill. TradeCoach, a trade-focused business coaching firm (so worth reading with their own commercial interest in mind, but the range is a reasonable planning figure), puts gross margin on larger installation work like a bathroom refit or a boiler swap at 45 to 55%. Run the numbers on a £6,500 bathroom job at that margin and you're looking at roughly £2,900 to £3,600 gross profit before your own overheads. A like-for-like boiler swap, averaging around £2,400 all in per MyJobQuote, nets somewhere near £1,100 to £1,300 on the same basis.
That's the number that should sit behind every decision about where you spend money trying to get found. One extra bathroom job a month is worth more than most directory memberships cost in a year. The question isn't whether it's worth finding new customers, obviously it is, it's whether the way you're currently paying to be found is the cheapest way to get that one extra job.
What the directories actually charge, in one place
None of the big five publish a public price list, which is itself worth noting. What follows is drawn from tradesperson-reported figures via marketing blogs and forum threads, not the platforms' own pricing pages, so treat it as a working range rather than gospel.
| Platform | Reported cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Checkatrade | £199 to £399/month, up to £350+ in competitive urban areas | Plus £5 to £40 per lead depending on job size. Typically a 12 month contract. |
| MyBuilder | Free to join | Charges a lead fee to respond, then a shortlist fee scaled to job value, whether or not you win the work. One illustration: 20 responses could cost £100 to £300 before a single job is won. |
| Rated People | From around £30+VAT/month, priced per trade and area | Plus pay-per-lead. One Trustpilot reviewer in May 2026 reported their subscription rising from £43 to £106.80 a month year on year, a single case, not an average. |
| TrustATrader | Roughly £600 to £1,000/year, one figure quoted at £699+VAT | Requires a phone call to get a price, as it varies by trade and area. |
| Bark.com | Around £1.80/credit, 5 to 20 credits per lead (roughly £9 to £40+VAT) | From 1 November 2025 all newly bought credits expire after three months, a change that's driven a lot of the negative reviews since. |
I want to be fair to these platforms: plenty of trades do win real work through them, and for someone just starting out with no reviews and no history, that visibility has value. What I'd push back on is the assumption that this is the only lever available, or that it gets cheaper over time. It doesn't. You pay per lead, indefinitely, for as long as you use the platform. A website that ranks properly is closer to a fixed cost that keeps working.
Where people actually look, and where the data runs out
The HomeOwners Alliance, a genuinely independent consumer body rather than a platform with something to sell, runs an annual homeowner survey and reports that 42% of homeowners say finding a trusted tradesperson is a real barrier to getting work done at all. Worth sitting with that: a large share of your potential customers aren't comparing five quotes, they're stuck before they even get one. They also flag something I think is genuinely useful to know: on paid directory sites, reviews are only requested by the tradesperson, which skews the visible feedback positive compared with an open platform like Google, where anyone can leave one unprompted.
I'll be straight with you about what I can't tell you. There's no single, dated, authoritative UK survey that cleanly breaks down what share of jobs come from referral versus directory versus search. I looked. Anyone quoting you a precise percentage on that split is quoting a number I couldn't trace to a real source, and I'd want you to ask them where it came from before you believe it.
Your Google Business Profile matters more than your website, some days
If most of your work comes from "emergency plumber near me" on a Saturday night, your Google Business Profile is what puts you in the map results, and it needs to be complete and reviewed. What decides whether they call you rather than the next name down is what your site says when they check you. Keep your hours accurate, your phone number answered, and your reviews genuine, and that alone carries real weight.
You'll see figures floating around SEO blogs claiming the local map pack captures over 90% of local searches or that 88% of people who search locally visit within a day. I'm not going to repeat those numbers to you. They trace back to a Google and Nielsen study from 2014, over a decade old, endlessly recycled by agencies with something to sell. I've written more on exactly this problem, and the specific stats worth binning, at seo-statistics-that-are-not-true.html. The honest version is: local intent search matters a great deal, the exact percentage nobody can currently prove.
Where the website earns its keep alongside the Business Profile is everything the profile can't do: showing up when someone searches "how much does a rewire cost in a three bed semi", being the page an AI assistant reads and quotes when someone asks it who does bathroom fits nearby, and carrying the structured detail, service areas, trade credentials, real job examples, that a profile listing has no room for.
The bit that actually needs a specialist
This is where knowing your regulator matters more than knowing marketing. The Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998, Regulation 3, is unambiguous: nobody may carry out gas fitting work unless competent, and an employer may only allow it if they belong to a class approved by the Health and Safety Executive, currently the Gas Safe Register. Your Gas Safe ID card is valid for one year and states the specific work you're qualified to do. If your website's structured data doesn't correctly and currently reflect your registration number and qualified categories, that's not a marketing gap, it's a trust gap, and it's the kind of thing both a homeowner and an AI answer engine will check.
NICEIC works the same way on the electrical side. Approved Contractor status is assessed against BS 7671, the UK wiring regulations, and the Scheme Brandmark that comes with it can't be modified, not resized, not recoloured, not combined with anything else. I'd never touch your logo or your branding. What I do is make sure the technical structure underneath your site, the schema markup, the crawlability, the metadata, tells Google and the AI crawlers the truth about who you are, accurately, and keeps telling them that as your site changes, not just on the day it launches.
There's a capacity story behind all of this too. Trade press summaries this year, citing what looks like CITB-style forecasting though I couldn't verify the primary report directly, put UK construction short by roughly 41,200 workers a year through 2030, with plumbers, electricians and bricklayers named as the trades worst hit. Over a quarter of the current workforce plans to retire within five years, and only 8% is under 25 (Installer Online, 2026). If that's roughly right, the busiest trades do not want more noise, they want the enquiries they do get to be the right ones, people who've already found accurate information about what a job costs and what "Gas Safe registered" actually means, rather than a scattergun of directory enquiries that need chasing and qualifying.
What I actually do, and what I don't
Stagg Studios handles the whole technical side of getting found as one job, rather than selling it to you in pieces: site structure, crawlability, structured data, metadata, making sure AI crawlers can actually read your site, and then keeping all of it correct every month as your site and your business change. That's SEO and what's increasingly called AEO and GEO, answer engine and generative engine optimisation, treated as one discipline rather than three separate invoices. If the difference between those terms is new to you, I've written it up plainly at seo-vs-aeo-vs-geo.html.
It's £100 a month, no lock-in, and the first month is free. I don't write your content, run paid ads, or do link building. If your Google Business Profile is unclaimed I will tell you, because the two work together and I want both pulling in the same direction. You deal with me directly, so I only take on work I can actually do properly.
What I would do about it, and what it costs
Now think about the jobs you never hear about. Someone in your patch needs a boiler swap this week. They search, they get three names, and yours is not one of them because your site does not say clearly enough what you fit and where you cover. That is fifteen hundred pounds of profit gone to the next firm, and nothing about it appears anywhere you would look. No missed call, no unanswered email. Just a quieter month you put down to the time of year.
One extra boiler installation in a year carries more gross profit than this service costs across the same twelve months. That is the whole business case, and it is why I do not need to oversell it.
Here is what I would put in place. Service and area information structured so that Google and the AI assistants know exactly what you fit, repair and install, and where you cover, rather than guessing from your page text. Gas Safe or NICEIC registration stated in a form a machine can read. The technical basics checked so your site is not quietly invisible. Then maintained monthly, because trades add services and change patches more than most.
That is £100 a month, roughly one call out. First month free, no contract, and you are talking to the person doing the work rather than a salesperson. Start here, or send me your website and I will tell you what is currently holding it back.