Per-word pricing is the industry default, and it's understandable why: it's easy to quote, easy to compare, easy to put in a spreadsheet. It also rewards exactly the wrong behavior for SEO content specifically.
Per-word pricing rewards length, not outcome
If I'm paid by the word, the incentive is to write more, whether or not more is actually useful. Some of the highest-performing pages I've built are shorter than the "SEO best practice" word count templates suggest, because they answered the specific question tightly instead of padding toward a number.
What actually drives the cost of a project
- How much research, keyword mapping, and competitive analysis the topic genuinely requires
- Whether this is a single page or part of a larger content architecture that needs to be planned coherently
- How much technical implementation is involved, schema, internal linking structure, on-page optimization
- Whether the engagement includes revision based on performance data, or ends at publish
None of these map cleanly to a per-word rate. A tightly-scoped 600-word page that required real strategic thinking can be worth more than a padded 2,000-word page that didn't.
How I actually quote
Project-based or retainer pricing, scoped around the actual outcome being targeted, whether that's a content architecture, a set of ranking pages, or an ongoing content strategy function. The quote reflects the thinking and structure involved, not a word count multiplied by a rate.
Why this matters to the client, not just to me
A per-word arrangement quietly puts the client and writer on opposite sides of the same number, the writer wants to write more, the client wants to pay less per word. Outcome-based pricing puts both sides on the same side of the actual goal: does this content work.
Curious what a project scoped this way would actually cost? Happy to walk through it based on your specific goals.
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