How Much Does Website Copywriting Cost?

Four Ways Writers Price the Same Job

Copywriting quotes are hard to compare because writers do not agree on the unit. One prices by the page, another by the project, a third by the hour, and an occasional one by the word. Each model hides a different risk, so it helps to know which one you are reading before you look at the number.

Per page

The most common model for small-business sites. It is easy to understand, and it lets you add or drop pages. The risk is that “a page” is undefined. Ask whether the price covers the page title and meta description, the button labels and form text, and a set number of revision rounds, or only the body paragraphs.

Per project

Common with agencies and senior writers. A single fee covers research, the page plan and every page on the site. This rewards writers who settle the structure early, and it protects you from paying full price for the eighth near-identical service page. The risk is scope: the quote should list the pages it covers by name.

Per hour

Usually $50 to $150 an hour for experienced web writers. Fair for open-ended work, such as rewriting an existing site where nobody yet knows how much is salvageable. Ask for an estimate of total hours and a cap that cannot be exceeded without your approval.

Per word

Rare for websites and a poor fit, because good web copy is usually shorter than bad web copy. Paying by the word rewards the writer for every sentence a visitor will skip. If a writer proposes it for your site, ask for a page or project price instead.

What the Hours Actually Pay For

The words you finally see are the smallest part of the bill. A typical small-business site splits roughly into four kinds of work, and comparing how two quotes divide their hours tells you more than comparing their totals.

• Finding out what to say. Interviewing the owner, reading enquiry emails and reviews, and looking at what customers already search for. This is where a quote either buys specific copy or generic copy. Why the owner’s knowledge matters so much, and how to hand it over efficiently, is covered in should you write your own website copy.
• Deciding what goes where. Which pages exist, what each one is for, and what a visitor should read first. A writer who skips this step produces well-written pages in the wrong order.
• Drafting. The part most owners picture when they think of copywriting, and the part that has become fastest.
• Revising and checking. Usually two rounds of changes, plus checking every claim, licence name and number against what the business can prove.

A quote that is mostly drafting is the cheap one, and it is cheap because the first two jobs have been left to you, or left out.

Words Before Pictures, or You Pay Twice

The most expensive copywriting mistake on a small-business site is not a bad writer. It is the order the work is done in. On many projects the design is approved first, filled with placeholder text, and the copy is commissioned afterwards to fill the boxes.

That sequence goes wrong in a predictable way. The homepage hero was drawn for a six-word headline, and the business needs twelve to say what it does and where. The services section has three equal tiles, and the business has one service that makes most of its money and two that support it. The contact page has no room for the service area or the hours, which are the facts a ready-to-buy visitor is looking for. At that point somebody pays again: either the writer cuts the copy until it fits and stops saying anything useful, or the designer reworks the layout.

The cheaper order is to agree the words for the homepage and the main service pages first, even in rough form, then design around them. It does not have to be every page. The pages that carry the most weight decide the layout, and the rest follow it. When you compare website quotes, ask when the copy is written. If the answer is “after the design is signed off,” budget for the rework, or change the order. Our guide on how to write a website brief shows how to put the decisions that shape the copy on paper before anyone opens a design tool, and what a small business website costs breaks down the rest of the build.

What “SEO Copywriting” Should Add to the Price

Many writers charge a premium, often 20 to 50 percent, for “SEO copy.” The label covers anything from real search work to repeating a phrase every hundred words. Pay the premium only if the quote names the work:

• A target search for each page, chosen from how customers actually describe the problem, with no two pages competing for the same one.
• A page title and meta description written for each page, within the lengths search results display.
• Headings that follow the questions buyers ask, so both readers and search engines can see what each section answers.
• Links between related pages written into the copy, not only into the menu.
• Plain statements of facts that matter for search: the services by name, the towns you cover, and your hours.

That last point matters more than it used to. AI assistants and Google’s AI Overviews now read business websites to answer questions such as “who does same-day repairs near me.” They quote pages that state facts clearly and skip pages that hint at them. Copy written that way serves search, AI answers and the human reader at once; our answer engine optimization work starts from exactly this. If you are replacing an existing site, the copy also has to protect what already ranks, which is covered in how to redesign a website without losing Google rankings.

Who Owns the Words, and What AI Changed About the Price

Copy is a deliverable you should own outright. The contract should assign full rights in the final text to your business when you pay, not grant a licence to use it. Ask also whether the writer may reuse the copy or its structure for other clients in your trade; some do, which is how two competitors end up with the same homepage. The same ownership reasoning that applies to the site itself, set out in do I own my website, applies to the words on it.

AI has made drafting much faster, and honest writers have adjusted their prices for it. What AI has not made cheaper is the first two jobs and the last one: learning the business, deciding the structure, and checking every claim. A low quote that says “AI-assisted” is fine if those steps are still listed. If they are not, you are buying a draft that you will have to fix yourself. There is also an ownership point: in the United States, material generated entirely by AI without meaningful human authorship may not be protected by copyright, so a person should be shaping and editing the final wording.

At Social Media Strategy HQ we write copy as part of the build rather than as a separate line. Drafting is done with Claude Code, and the time it saves goes into the owner interview and the fact-checking, the parts that decide whether a page sounds like your business or like everyone’s. That is how our AI website building service handles copy.

When Paying for Copy Is Not the Best Use of the Money

Professional copy does not fix every problem with a website, and a writer will rarely tell you so. Hold off and spend elsewhere first if:

• Nobody is reaching the site. Better words on pages nobody visits change nothing. Look at search visibility first.
• Enquiries arrive and go unanswered. If the form or phone line is where customers are lost, fix the follow-up before the wording.
• The site only needs one page. For a single campaign, a well-written landing page is the purchase; see how much a landing page costs.
• You cannot give the writer an hour. Without an interview, even an excellent writer can only produce generic copy, and generic copy is not worth a professional fee.

Six Questions to Ask Any Copywriter

1. Is the price per page, per project or per hour, and which pages does it cover by name?
2. Does each page include the title, meta description, buttons and form text?
3. How will you learn about the business, and how much of my time will that take?
4. Will the copy be written before the design, and if not, who pays to rework it?
5. How many rounds of revisions are included, and what does an extra round cost?
6. Will the full rights in the final copy belong to my business on payment?

Question three is the most revealing. A writer who wants an hour of your time is planning to write copy only your business could use. A writer who only needs a form filled in is planning to write copy that could belong to anyone. For the contract terms around any of this, see what to ask before signing a marketing contract.