Marketing that starts with a free website, not a retainer.
For Houston service businesses deciding whether to hire a marketing agency. Here is what agencies do well, what they overcharge for, and what I do instead. Including the cases where you should go hire one of them.
What you are actually choosing between.
A Houston owner looking for marketing help has three realistic options. A full service agency gives you a team and a retainer, usually somewhere between fifteen hundred and five thousand a month, and for a business with the volume to feed it, that is money well spent. A cheap template service gives you a website for a few hundred dollars and then disappears, which is fine if a website is genuinely all you need. Doing it yourself costs nothing but the time you do not have.
The gap all three leave is the same one: nobody is watching whether the phone converts. Most owner operated service businesses are not short on traffic. They are short on answered calls, chased quotes, and a site that makes a stranger trust them in four seconds. That gap is what I work in, and it is why the website is free. I would rather prove the point than pitch it.
What the work actually is.
Four things, in the order they pay off for a service business.
The website, free and built to convert
Most local marketing fails upstream of the marketing: traffic arrives at a site that does not make anyone call. So the website comes first, built by hand around the one job of getting you contacted, and it costs you nothing. Everything else is wasted until this part is right.
Speed to lead, which beats most ad budgets
The company that answers first usually wins the job, and in the trades that contest is decided in minutes. Missed calls texted back in seconds, web leads answered while they are still deciding, quotes chased until there is an answer. This is the cheapest marketing improvement available to most Houston service businesses, and almost nobody sells it.
Local search and your Google profile
For a service business, the map results and your Google Business Profile matter more than a national ranking ever will. Profile set up properly, service pages written around what Houston actually searches, schema markup so the listings read correctly, and review requests after every finished job to keep the profile climbing.
Reporting you can read in two minutes
Calls, leads, jobs, and what came from where. No forty page deck of impressions and reach. If a number on the report does not help you decide something, it does not belong on the report.
What I will not sell you.
A short list, because the fastest way to judge someone selling marketing is what they are willing to turn down.
Four things you will not be charged for
- I do not take an ad budget from a business that has not proved its follow up works. Spending on traffic while leads go unanswered is the most common way local businesses waste money. Paid media exists at the top of the ladder, after the basics are earning.
- I do not sell social media content packages. Posting three times a week does not book work for a plumber, and I would rather tell you that than invoice for it.
- I do not do long contracts or lock in. The website is yours from day one, registered to you, and the monthly systems can stop whenever they stop earning.
- I do not report on impressions, reach, or rankings nobody acts on. The numbers I show are calls, leads, and booked jobs.
How it gets priced.
There is no rate card here, and that is deliberate. A number quoted before anyone has looked at your Google listing, your website and how your calls get handled is a guess dressed up as a quote. The growth review comes first, then the work gets priced against what is actually worth fixing.
What is true before any number is discussed
- No retainer to sign up front, and no long contract.
- Nothing to pay to have the conversation, and an honest answer even when it is that you do not need us yet.
- Ads run from your own account, on your card, so you see every dollar and you keep the account if we part ways.
- You own everything: your site, your domain, your data and your customer list.
Asked before. Answered honestly.
How much does a marketing agency cost in Houston?
A full service Houston agency typically runs from about fifteen hundred to five thousand dollars a month on retainer, plus your ad spend, and often a few thousand up front for the website. That is a fair price for what a good agency does. We work differently: there is no standard retainer to sign, and what the work costs depends on what your business actually needs, decided after the growth review rather than quoted off a rate card.
When should I hire a real agency instead of you?
When you need several specialists at once and have the budget to keep them busy: a brand rebuild, heavy paid media across multiple channels, a large content operation, or marketing across several locations and markets at the same time. One person cannot be a whole department, and I will say so rather than take the work. If you are an owner operated service business trying to stop losing jobs, that is the work I am built for.
Do you run Google Ads or Facebook ads?
Yes, when a business is ready for them. Ads run from your own ad account, on your card, so you see every dollar and you keep the account. But we will not start there. If your site does not convert and your leads are not answered quickly, ad spend just buys you more leaks, and we would rather fix the cheap problems first and let you keep the money.
Do you do SEO for Houston service businesses?
Yes, as part of the monthly work rather than as a separate retainer. Every build ships with the groundwork: fast pages, clean structure, schema markup, and copy written around real searches. Ongoing local SEO, which for a service business means your Google Business Profile, service pages, and review velocity, is part of the higher stages.
What makes this different from a cheap website service?
A template service sells you a site and disappears. The site is the start of my relationship with a client, not the end of it, which is why I can afford to build it for free: hosting is set up through a partner link and the hosting company pays a referral fee that covers the build. Everything after that is optional, and you own the website either way.
Who am I actually working with?
One person. I build the sites, write the copy, set up the systems, and answer when something breaks. No account manager, no handoff, no junior doing the work after the pitch. I live in Madrid and study business and computer science with a focus on AI at IE University, and most of my clients are Houston service businesses you can call and ask about.
Find out what this is worth before you pay for any of it.
Tell me about your business and I will come back with what your free website could look like, plus a straight answer about where your marketing is actually leaking.