The question sounds simple until you start asking for quotes. Then you get a range from twenty pounds to six hundred for apparently the same thing — a 1,500-word article. The difference isn’t the number of words but what’s included in the price and who carries the risk if the text brings nothing.
What the market charges
| Who writes it | Price per article | What’s usually included |
|---|---|---|
| Freelancer from a job board | £20–80 | the text only, no research |
| Experienced copywriter | £120–320 | the text, basic keyword research |
| Agency | £250–600 | the text, research, publishing on the site |
| SEO agency, monthly | £1,800–6,000 | a few articles plus everything else |
| AI tool with a per-article charge | £20–25 | the text, with no data on what’s being searched |
With AI tools I’ve listed the ones that charge for writing separately — and that’s the rule, not the exception.
The catch with cheap articles
A £25 article isn’t bad because somebody cheap wrote it. It’s bad because nobody checked whether that topic is searched for at all.
That’s the most expensive mistake in the whole story, because it doesn’t show immediately. You pay for ten articles at £40, publish them, and three months later see that not one has a single visit. You’ve spent £400 and three months on content nobody is looking for.
That’s why the order always goes like this: first you ask Google what people are searching for, and only then you write. The other way round is the most common way to lose money in SEO.
How much an article has to bring in to pay for itself
Take an engineer who installs air conditioning. An average job earns them £250.
The article “how much does air conditioning installation cost” costs them £200 at a copywriter. To pay for itself, it needs to bring in one job. Not a month — one, ever.
An article that enters the top ten for that phrase and stays there for two years brings that one job almost certainly. That’s why even the most expensive article is cheap — provided it’s written on the right topic. If it’s written on the wrong one, even £25 isn’t cheap.
What you’re actually paying for when you pay for an article
A good article for a website isn’t just text. It’s:
- research — which question is genuinely searched for and how many times a month
- structure — subheadings as questions, the answer immediately below, because that’s how search extracts answers
- a title and description for the search results, at the length Google displays without cutting
- structured data — the invisible part of the code that tells search what is what
- internal links to your existing pages
- images with alt text
- a check that you haven’t already written about the same topic
When you ask for a quote, ask which of these is in the price. With most cheap quotes only the first item on the list is — the text itself.
Where AI fits in
Honestly: AI today writes a first draft better than the average cheap copywriter, for a few pence. But a first draft isn’t a published article.
What AI can’t do on its own:
- know your price, your lead time and your experience from the field
- decide which topic is worth it — that has to come from search data
- take responsibility if it claims something inaccurate
So the right arrangement is: AI writes, data chooses the topic, a person adds what only they know. Ten minutes of your reading and polishing is worth more than a copywriter who doesn’t know your trade.
With us, writing is included in the plan price with no per-article charge — see exactly what arrives when you click.
In short
- The price of an article ranges from £20 to £600, but the word count isn’t what you’re paying for.
- The most expensive mistake isn’t an expensive article but a cheap one on a topic nobody searches for.
- An article pays for itself if it brings one job — work out what one customer is worth to you and calculate from there.
- Ask what’s in the price: research, structure, meta data, structured data, links.
- AI writes the first draft cheaply and well; the topic and your own experience are what you still have to bring.