Guides & benchmarks
Published benchmarks from our own Ottawa projects — not industry averages scraped from a survey. Use them to sanity-check any quote you receive, including ours.
Ranges reflect the projects we have quoted and delivered from our Ottawa studio. Your quote depends on page count, content readiness and functionality.
| Project | Typical range | Timeline | What it covers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Local service site (6–12 pages) | $5,000 – $12,000 | 4–6 weeks | One service area, quote form, local SEO foundation |
| Multi-service or multi-location build | $12,000 – $28,000 | 6–10 weeks | Service + location architecture, content production |
| E-commerce build | $20,000 – $60,000 | 8–14 weeks | Catalogue, payments, feeds, product URL migration |
| AI-native layer added to a build | +$4,000 – $12,000 | +2–4 weeks | Assistant, qualification flow, estimator, logging |
| Branding and identity | $2,500 – $15,000 | 3–6 weeks | Logo through to signage, print and design tokens |
| SEO retainer | $1,000 – $5,000 / month | 6+ months | Content, technical fixes, links, monthly reporting |
| Care plan | $150 – $750 / month | Ongoing | Hosting, updates, backups, monitoring, edits |
For a local service business with a healthy site, meaningful movement usually appears between month three and month six, and compounding gains continue well past month twelve. Map-pack visibility can move faster — sometimes within weeks — because profile quality, categories, reviews and proximity carry a lot of weight. Anyone promising page-one rankings in 30 days is describing luck, not method.
Only if the migration is careless. The rankings live on specific URLs with specific content. Keep the URL or 301 it, keep the content that earns the impressions, keep the internal links pointing at it, and verify in Search Console after launch. We inventory every ranking URL before design begins — it is the first document in every rebuild.
It is fine when the business genuinely needs a large editorial workflow and the build is disciplined. Most local service sites do not, and they end up paying for it in speed, plugin maintenance and security. We build custom, server-rendered front ends because they are faster, cheaper to maintain and easier to make rank.
SEO earns visibility in organic results and maps over time; you own the asset and the traffic does not stop when you stop paying. Digital marketing here means paid search, social and content campaigns that buy attention now. Most Ottawa businesses need both: paid for immediate volume, organic for the compounding base.
The same fundamentals, applied more literally. State facts explicitly with numbers, units and dates. Name entities plainly — the service, the city, the company. Answer the question in the first paragraph under the heading. Keep structured data matching what is visible. And do not lock your content behind scripts or logins, because assistants can only cite what they can read.
Free to steal
Including us. If an agency cannot answer these plainly, that is your answer.
