Content pricing is the clearest market in digital marketing because it is sold by the page. Offshore and AI assisted content goes for tens of dollars a page. Competent generalist freelancers charge in the low hundreds for a thousand words. Writers who know your industry and interview your team charge several hundred to over a thousand per page. Agencies bundle it into retainers where you pay for two to six pages a month. The price difference is almost entirely research depth and how much a technician had to be interviewed.
What legitimately drives cost is subject matter difficulty and specificity. A page about what a slab leak repair involves in a particular soil type requires someone to talk to a plumber. A page about five tips for home maintenance requires nothing and is worth nothing. The expensive part is getting the detail that only your crew knows into the writing, then formatting it so both people and AI answer engines can extract the answer. Photos, diagrams and internal linking add time. Review by you before publishing adds a round.
Pure margin shows up as word count pricing, which rewards padding, and as volume packages where twenty posts a month arrive with no connection to what your customers ask. Also watch for content that is published and never updated, and for a stack of thin location pages that differ by one city name. Those used to work. They do not now, and they can hurt. If a vendor talks about content volume before they ask what questions your customers call about, you are buying filler.
At any price, content should be assigned against a real question, written in your voice, reviewed by you before it goes live, and published on your own site where you own it. A serious program should add an actual plan, meaning a list of questions mapped to pages across the next few months, internal links to your service pages, and updates to older pages as things change. The best content on a service business site is usually the cost question, the is this covered question and the troubleshooting question.
To judge a content quote, ask for two live examples on a client site in your industry and read them as a customer. If you can tell nobody talked to a technician, keep looking. Ask who approves before publishing, how often older pages get updated, and whether the writing is yours if you leave. Heights includes monthly content in the $399 a month plan, alongside monthly SEO for Google and AI search, unlimited site updates and Google Business Profile work.
| What you are buying | What it usually runs |
|---|---|
| AI or offshore bulk content | Tens of dollars a page |
| Generalist freelance writer | Low hundreds per page |
| Industry specialist writer | Several hundred to four figures a page |
| Agency content retainer | Several hundred to several thousand a month |
| Heights Digital | Included in $399 a month after a $750 build |
If yours is not here, ask it on the call. You will get a straight answer.
(210) 729-4008Two to four solid pages a month beats twenty thin ones, and it is a pace most small businesses can sustain and review. What matters more than count is whether each page answers a question your customers really ask. Twelve good pages a year, kept updated, is a serious content program.
AI assisted drafting is fine when a human who knows the work edits it, adds real detail and checks the facts. Published raw, it reads generic, says nothing only you could say, and competes against thousands of identical pages. The value was never the words. It was the specific knowledge in them.
Send the site over. We will tell you what is broken, what you could rank for, and whether AI search knows you exist. No charge and no pitch deck.
