Author: huntgrav

How much does a website cost for a small business? Ask five web designers and you’ll get five answers, usually right after the words “it depends.” It does depend, but not on anything mysterious. There are three ways to pay for a small business website in Texas, and each one moves the money and the work to a different place.

Here’s how we lay it out for a Sherman or Denison owner sitting across the table from us.

How much does a website cost? Three ways to pay

Build it yourself

Wix, Squarespace and GoDaddy all sell monthly plans. Squarespace’s website plans currently run $19 to $99 a month on annual billing, and Forbes Advisor puts a typical do-it-yourself build at $0 to $450 upfront.

Those numbers are real. What they leave out is you. You write every word, pick every photo, sort out the search settings and fix whatever breaks. Most DIY sites we audit around Texoma look fine and don’t show up when someone searches for the service. That’s rarely the platform’s fault. Nobody did the local search work, because nobody had time.

DIY makes sense when you’re brand new, cash is tight and you’d honestly enjoy the project. If you’d rather be on a job, it’s the priciest option here once you count your own hours.

Pay someone to build it

A designer or agency builds a custom site around your services and your market, and you pay upfront. Forbes Advisor lists professional design at $1,500 and up, and “and up” is carrying a lot of weight in that phrase. For a local service business that needs a page for each main service and each town it covers, quotes in the several-thousand-dollar range are normal. When two quotes are far apart, you’re usually comparing two different products.

You own the finished custom website. You also own everything that comes after launch. Our own version is a one-time build starting at $4,000, quoted up front by the size of the site, that includes professional video, Google Business Profile setup and three months of marketing, so the site has help getting found once it’s live.

Lease it

A lease spreads the build across a monthly payment and bundles in the upkeep. Our website lease is $500 a month with nothing upfront, and it covers design, hosting, security, maintenance and ongoing updates. No big check to start, and no surprise invoice when something needs fixing.

Think of it like leasing a work truck. Over enough years you’ll pay more than a one-time build would cost, and part of what you’re paying for is never having to think about the site. For owners who’d rather keep cash in the business, that’s the whole appeal. For owners who like owning things outright, it isn’t, and that’s fine.

Why website quotes vary so much

Two quotes can be thousands of dollars apart because they aren’t pricing the same job. The number moves with:

• How many pages you need. Each service and city page takes real work, and each one is another chance to show up in search.
• Custom design versus a template with your logo dropped in.
• Who writes the words. Copy that gets people to pick up the phone takes time.
• Whether local search setup is included or billed later as “extra.”
• Photos and video of your actual crew and work, which someone has to go shoot.
• Who maintains the site after launch, and how fast they answer when you call.

When you compare quotes, ask every designer the same question: what happens the day after it goes live?

The costs that show up after launch

A “one-time” website keeps costing money. Forbes Advisor estimates hosting and apps at $15 to $150 a month for a typical small business site, and the domain name renews every year. On top of that come software and security updates, backups, and the small edits that pile up: new hours, a new service, a new photo, a price change.

If you can make those edits yourself, great. If you can’t, you’re either paying someone by the hour or living with an outdated site. We see a lot of the second one. The site was fine when it launched, and nobody has touched it since.

So add it up over three years before you decide. A cheap upfront build with no plan for upkeep tends to cost more than it looked like, in fees and in calls that never came.

What should a Sherman or Denison business pay?

Start with one question: how many new customers a month does the site need to bring in to pay for itself? For a roofer or an HVAC company with big tickets, the answer is often one. For a business with $40 tickets, it’s a lot more, and a lighter setup might be the smarter call.

If you’re just getting started and every dollar is spoken for, a DIY site gets you on the map. The lease is there when you want it done properly without the upfront hit.

Established companies with some cash on hand and someone who’ll keep the site current often do better owning a custom build. Budget the upkeep before you sign, not after.

And if you already have a site that isn’t bringing in work, get it looked at before you replace it. Sometimes the fix is a few service pages and a cleaned-up Google Business Profile, not a new website.

Common questions

How much does a website cost per month?

A DIY plan on Squarespace runs $19 to $99 a month billed annually. A professionally built site you own still has monthly hosting and maintenance costs. Our all-inclusive lease is $500 a month, and our one-time build starts at $4,000.

Why not just use a Facebook page?

You don’t own it, it doesn’t do much when people search Google for your service, and your reach is up to Facebook’s algorithm. We wrote a whole post on why your Facebook page is not a website.

Does my website affect whether AI tools recommend me?

It does. ChatGPT, Gemini and Google’s AI Overviews pull from websites when someone asks who does a job nearby. Clear service and location pages give them something to cite. A one-page site or a Facebook page usually gives them very little.

Drive US-75 through Sherman and count the franchise trucks. HVAC, lawn care, pest control, plumbing, water damage. They have national ad budgets and a name people know from TV. If you run a local business and have to compete with franchises for the same jobs, it can feel like the deck is stacked.

You won’t outspend them, and you don’t need to. Most of what decides who gets a service call in Texoma happens in places where a big budget doesn’t buy much: the map results on Google, the reviews, who answers the phone, and whether the customer feels like they know you.

How a local business can compete with franchises on Google Maps

Google says its local results come down to relevance, distance and prominence, and it spells that out in its own help documentation. A franchise can buy the ads that sit above the map. It can’t buy being two miles closer to the person searching, and it can’t buy a better-kept profile than yours if you put in the work.

Franchise location pages often read like a template with the city name swapped in. That’s your opening. Fill out every field of your Google Business Profile. Name the towns you serve: Sherman, Denison, Pottsboro, Gainesville, Bonham, McKinney. Post photos of real jobs. Build a page on your website for each city you want work from, with details a template can’t fake, like the neighborhoods you work in and the problems you see there.

If that sounds like a lot, our Google Business Profile management handles the weekly part.

Out-review them

Reviews are where a well-run local company can pull ahead fastest. A franchise location’s reviews depend on whoever manages that location and how long the techs stick around. Yours depend on you.

Ask every satisfied customer for a Google review, and text them the direct link the same day. Reply to each one yourself and mention the job. BrightLocal’s 2026 consumer survey found half of consumers are unlikely to use a business that answers reviews with generic templates. An owner writing back in their own words stands out next to a reply that reads like it came from a corporate office.

Pest control is crowded with national brands, which makes it a good test. Cole’s Pest Control, a Bossier City client of ours, went from 32 to 45 Google reviews between late May and July 2026, all of them five stars. More on building that habit in our post on online reviews.

Answer the phone first

Call a franchise at 7 p.m. and you’ll often get a call center or a phone tree. Call a local owner and you might get the owner. That’s only an advantage if somebody actually picks up, or calls back fast.

Homeowners with a dead AC in July don’t sit and wait on one callback. They keep dialing until someone answers. We went into this in the five-minute rule. If you’re under a house when the phone rings, set up an automatic text-back so every missed call gets a reply in minutes, and call back before you start the next job.

Move faster than corporate can

Franchise marketing goes through approvals. Yours goes through you. When hail rolls across Grayson County, a local roofer can have a post up, a profile update out and the phones answered by lunch. When a new subdivision fills up outside town, you can be hanging door hangers there that week.

Local sponsorships work the same way. The Little League banner, the booth at a Denison festival, the chamber lunch. Franchises can do these too. But people remember the owner who showed up in person and shook hands.

Specialize where they generalize

Franchises sell a standard menu because that’s how the model works. You can pick the work you’re best at and own it. Maybe it’s older homes on pier-and-beam foundations, or lake houses around Pottsboro, or restaurant kitchens. Maybe it’s a guarantee a corporate legal team would never sign off on.

Whatever it is, say it plainly on your website, your profile and your truck. “Family owned” is nice, and everybody says it. “We only install tankless water heaters, and we can be there tomorrow” gives someone an actual reason to pick you.

Look as sharp as the franchise does

This is the one place franchises have a real edge. They show up polished: good photos, a clean website that works on a phone, a logo that looks the same on the truck and the invoice. Customers notice, even if they never say so. A local company with a great reputation and a website from 2014 can lose calls to a franchise with a mediocre reputation and a nice-looking site.

Closing that gap costs less than it used to. Real photos of your crew and your work do more than stock images ever will. And a fast, mobile-friendly site doesn’t have to be a big check up front. Our Website Lease is $500 a month with nothing upfront.

For most service businesses in Texoma, a new customer’s first look at you happens on Google, and it isn’t your website. It’s your Google Business Profile: the listing with your name, stars, photos, hours and a call button that shows up in Maps and in the map pack at the top of local searches. Google Business Profile optimization means making that listing complete, accurate and active. It costs nothing but time.

Plenty of owners set their profile up years ago and haven’t logged in since. That’s the opening. Here’s what we work through with a new client’s profile, roughly in this order.

Why the profile can matter more than your homepage

Search “plumber near me” from a driveway in Denison and Google shows a map with three businesses before any regular results. Those three get most of the attention, and a lot of people call straight from the listing without ever opening a website.

The profile also feeds Google’s AI answers now. When someone asks Google a question about a local business, the answer draws on the profile details, the reviews and the website. A thin profile gives it less to say about you. We cover that side in our post on getting found in AI search.

Google Business Profile optimization starts with the basics

Start with the fields people get wrong most often.

• Use your real business name, exactly as it’s painted on the truck. Tacking “Best AC Repair Sherman” onto it breaks Google’s guidelines and can get the listing suspended.
• The primary category carries the most weight of anything on the profile. Pick the one that matches the work you most want, such as “HVAC contractor” or “Roofing contractor,” over a vague umbrella.
• Add secondary categories only where they honestly apply.
• If you go to your customers, set a service area with the towns you actually cover and hide your home address.
• Regular hours, plus holiday and seasonal hours, so nobody drives up to a locked door.
• Your services, each with a sentence or two of description.
• The business description. You get 750 characters. Say what you do, who you do it for, where, and how long you’ve been at it.

Then check that the phone number and address match your website character for character. Mismatches confuse Google and customers alike.

Photos from real jobs

Customers can spot stock photos, and they scroll right past them. Upload pictures from actual work: the finished deck, the new water heater, your crew, your trucks, a before-and-after of a cleaned-up yard. Add a few every month so the newest photo on the profile isn’t from 2021.

A phone camera is fine. Good daylight and a clean shot matter more than the equipment.

A review routine you’ll actually keep

Reviews move rankings and they move people. The trouble is that most owners ask when they remember, which means hardly ever.

Make it part of finishing the job. When the work is done and the customer is happy, text them your direct review link that same day (the profile’s “Ask for reviews” button gives you the link). A short text sent while they’re still pleased gets far more responses than an email a week later.

It adds up faster than people expect. Cole’s Pest Control, a client of ours in Bossier City, went from 32 Google reviews in late May 2026 to 45 by July, every one of them five stars. Next to competitors, that’s a listing that looks busy and trusted.

Two things to avoid. Don’t offer discounts or freebies in exchange for reviews, and don’t ask only the customers you’re sure loved you. Google’s policies prohibit both.

Reply to every review. Thank the good ones and mention the job. For the bad ones, stay calm, keep it short and offer to sort it out by phone. Future customers read those replies closely. There’s more on this in why online reviews are the new word of mouth.

Post updates now and then

You can publish short updates straight to the profile, a bit like a social post with a photo and a button. A seasonal offer, a finished project, a new town you serve. Every couple of weeks is plenty. Posts won’t carry your rankings by themselves, but a profile with recent activity looks open for business and an empty one looks abandoned.

Two features that are gone

Older advice still tells you to turn on messaging and fill out your Q&A section. Neither exists anymore. Google shut off Business Profile chat on July 31, 2024, and it retired the questions-and-answers section in late 2025, replacing it with AI-generated answers built from your profile, website and reviews.

So the answers to common questions (“Do you take emergency calls?” “Do you come out to Whitesboro?”) need to live in your profile fields, your services list and your website, where Google can find them. And the phone number on the profile has to get answered. Google dropped call history at the same time it dropped chat, which took away the easiest way to see how many calls the profile was sending you.

Check the numbers once a month

The Performance section of your profile shows how many people saw it, which searches they used, and how many called, clicked through to your site or asked for directions. Spend most of your time on the search terms. If people find you for “AC repair” but never for “furnace installation,” and furnaces are what you want to sell, your categories, services and description need work.

For a clearer picture of who called and where they came from, that’s what our analytics reporting is built for. And if you’d rather hand the profile off entirely, we do Google Business Profile management for businesses across Texoma.

Bring up email marketing with a room of Texoma contractors and you’ll mostly get shrugs. Most service businesses have a customer list sitting in their invoicing software and have never sent it a single email. For a lot of them, that list is the cheapest source of booked jobs they own.

Email marketing for service businesses comes down to timing. You’re reminding people who already paid you once that it’s time to call again. You don’t need a big list, a designer or a clever strategy to start.

Why email marketing fits service businesses

Social posts reach whoever the algorithm decides to show them to. Search brings in people who’ve never heard of you. Email goes to people who already know your name, already have your number, and already trusted you with their house once.

A lot of service work also runs on a calendar. AC tune-ups before the first real heat. Furnace checks in the fall. Gutters after the leaves drop. Quarterly pest treatments. Septic pumping every few years. Customers don’t think about any of it until something breaks, and when it breaks, they search and call whoever answers first. A short email at the right moment books the job before it turns into an emergency, and before a competitor gets the call.

Building the list

You already have the start of one. Pull every email address from your invoices, estimates and scheduling records. Those are your best subscribers, because they’ve paid you before.

From there, collect an email on every job. Add the field to your estimate form and your website contact form, and ask at checkout. If you want a signup form on the site, offer something people would actually want: a seasonal maintenance checklist, first pick of spring appointments, a small discount on the next visit.

A list of 150 local homeowners who use your kind of service is worth more than a few thousand strangers. Which is why you should never buy a list. Purchased addresses don’t know who you are, they don’t open, and sending to them damages your ability to reach the inbox of the people who do want to hear from you.

The federal CAN-SPAM Act covers every commercial email you send, no matter how small your business is. The short version from the FTC’s compliance guide: include a valid physical mailing address, give people a clear way to unsubscribe, and honor opt-outs within 10 business days. Any decent email platform takes care of the first two for you.

What to send and how often

Once or twice a month suits most local service businesses. Less than that and people forget you exist. More than that and you’d better have something worth saying.

The emails that book work are almost boring:

• A seasonal reminder tied to a real service. “Spring AC checks are booking now. Reply with a day that works.”
• One useful tip, like how to tell a water heater is near the end of its life
• An offer when you have gaps in the schedule to fill
• A finished project with two or three photos
• A heads-up when something changes, such as a new service or a new town you cover

One topic per email. Short enough to read on a phone in a checkout line. One next step: call, book online, or hit reply.

Then set up a couple of automated emails that run on their own. A thank-you after someone’s first job, with your review link. A reminder six or twelve months later when their recurring service comes due. Build those once and they’ll keep landing right when the customer needs them.

Writing emails people open

The subject line decides whether anything else gets read. “March Newsletter” gets ignored. “Is your AC ready for July?” gets opened by everyone who owns an AC. Be specific and plain, and skip the all caps and exclamation points.

Write the way you’d talk to a customer at their kitchen table. Sign it with a real name, and if you’re the owner, sign it yourself. People reply to a person. They don’t reply to “The Team.”

Measuring what matters

Every email platform will show you an open rate. Don’t lean on it. Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection, introduced in 2021, loads messages automatically for many iPhone users, so an “open” gets counted whether anyone read the email or not. Clicks and replies are more honest signals.

The number that matters most isn’t on the email dashboard at all. It’s booked jobs. When a reminder goes out, watch the phone and the calendar over the next week. Ask callers what prompted the call and jot it down, even in a spreadsheet. A few months of that tells you which emails bring in work and which just fill inboxes.

If you’re starting from zero, our beginner’s guide to email marketing for local businesses walks through picking a platform and sending the first one. If you’d rather someone else write and run it, that’s what our email marketing service is for.

Spring is when a lot of Texoma service businesses make their year. The first warm week fills the AC schedule, lawns wake up, and every hailstorm that rolls through sends people looking for a roofer. This spring marketing checklist for Texoma service businesses covers what to fix before the phone gets busy, because once it does, nobody has time to touch the website.

Most of it takes an afternoon. A couple of items take longer, and those are the ones to start now.

Start with your Google Business Profile

If you only do one thing on this list, make it this. Your Google Business Profile is what shows up in Maps and in the map pack at the top of local searches, and for many people it’s the only thing they look at before they call.

• Update your hours if you run longer days in season, and set holiday hours for Easter and Memorial Day.
• Upload fresh photos from recent jobs. Winter work counts.
• Make sure the services list matches what you’re selling this year.
• Post an update about spring availability or a seasonal offer.
• Call the number on the profile yourself and see who picks up.

If you’ve never claimed your profile, stop here and do that first. Our Google Business Profile optimization guide covers the rest.

Look at your website on your phone

Pull up your own site on your phone, on cellular data, standing in your driveway. That’s how most homeowners will see it. Can you find the phone number in two seconds? Does tapping it dial? Do pages load before you lose patience?

Then read it like a customer would. Is last winter’s special still on the homepage? Is the service area right? Are there services listed that you stopped offering, or new ones missing? Small things like that make a business look like it’s asleep.

If the site needs more than a spring cleaning, you don’t have to eat the whole cost of a rebuild at once. Our website lease is $500 a month with nothing upfront.

Plan a little spring content

You don’t need a blog post every week. You need a few pieces that answer what customers ask you every spring. An HVAC company might explain what a tune-up actually includes. A roofer might write about what to do the day after hail. A lawn company might cover when to put down pre-emergent in North Texas.

Those pages help your local SEO for the searches people make in season, and they give you something to share on social media and in an email to past customers. One solid piece a month beats four thin ones.

Get reviews moving before the rush

Reviews are one of the few things customers check nearly every time. Two things matter: how many you have and how recent they are. A profile whose newest review is from last summer looks quieter than the business really is.

Reply to any reviews you’ve left hanging, good or bad. Then build a habit: when a job’s done and the customer is happy, text them your review link that same day. Spring and summer are when you’ll have the most happy customers all year, so get the routine in place in March instead of trying to start it in the middle of June.

Pick one or two social channels

Update cover photos and pinned posts so they look like spring. Then post about what people need right now: the tune-up, the storm-damage inspection, the first mow of the year. Before-and-after photos from real jobs tend to do well, because people can see the work.

Don’t try to run five platforms. Pick the one or two where your customers already spend time. For most home service businesses around here, that’s Facebook first.

Check your local SEO basics

Google and the AI tools cross-check your business details across the web. Look up your name, address and phone number on your website, your Google profile, Facebook, Bing, Yelp, Apple Maps and any directories you’re listed in. They should match exactly. An old address from a move three years ago that never got fixed on Yelp is a common one.

Then make sure your site names the towns you actually work in. If you’re based in Sherman but half your jobs are in Denison, Pottsboro and Van Alstyne, say so on your service pages. Google won’t guess.

Next year, start in the fall

The part nobody puts on a spring checklist: the biggest spring results usually come from work done months earlier. Sunset View RV Resort on Lake Texoma is a good example. We rebuilt their website and took over their search marketing in October 2025. From January through June 2026, booking revenue was double what it was in the same months of 2025, and the site now pulls more than 40,000 Google impressions a month.

Spring demand didn’t create that. It paid off work that was already in place. So if you’re reading this with the rush already on you, work the list top to bottom anyway, and put a note on the calendar for October. You can see more of what that looks like on our work page.