Billing SEO content in a way that stays profitable

Content is the SEO service everyone sells in meetings and nobody sustains: producing it used to cost more than billing it. When production becomes AI-assisted the equation flips — but a question appears: how do you bill without breaking your own market? Selling at production cost would be giving it away. Here's how to frame the price, with a worked example and the clauses that protect the margin.

Sell the result, not the minutes

Billing by the hour is the trap: if you produce an article in 15 minutes, billing 15 minutes destroys your margin and signals to the client that content "isn't worth anything". SEO content is billed on the result — an asset that positions the catalog and keeps working for months.

There's a deeper reason not to index the price on typing time: that isn't where the value sits. In a content engagement, useful time is spread across choosing the topic, researching the keyword and the search intent, structure, knowing the catalog, review, internal linking, publishing and rank tracking. Writing proper is a fraction of it. Assisted production shrinks that fraction — it shrinks neither the brief, nor the judgment, nor the responsibility for what gets published under your client's name.

Three models hold up:

• The monthly editorial retainer. A defined volume (say 4 articles + 20 product pages) for a fixed price. Legible for the client, predictable for you. The most common model, and the easiest to renew.
• The project fee. "Differentiated catalog": rewriting 300 duplicated product descriptions as a dated deliverable. Billable in days, not months.
• Base plus performance. A base fee plus a bonus indexed on positions gained. Attractive, but it demands impeccable measurement and a locked scope — otherwise the bonus gets debated at every invoice.

Time and materials keeps one use: non-repeatable work (an audit, untangling a redirect history, a migration). For recurring content, it punishes you for being efficient.

How to set the retainer price

Start from value, not cost. Market benchmarks:

• An experienced web copywriter charges €150 to 350 for a 1,200-word article, an SEO consultant or agency €300 to 500 for an in-depth piece, and €50 to 150 for a worked product description. Those are your reference points on the client's side — the detail is on our pricing page.
• Your assisted production cost is a fraction of that.
• The space between the two is your margin and your review budget. Don't close it by cutting prices: bill below the copywriter, far above your cost.

A worked example, to adapt

Take a monthly retainer of 4 articles and 20 product descriptions for one store. On the market side, a client buying the same thing piece by piece would pay between €600 (4 articles at €150) and €1,400 (4 at €350) for the articles, plus €1,000 to 3,000 for the 20 descriptions. Purchase range: €1,600 to 4,400.

On the production side, your real time is the brief, the review and the judgment calls: count one to two hours per article and five to ten minutes per product description once the chain is running — half a day to a day a month, plus the tool subscription.

A retainer at €900 or €1,200 a month then sits clearly below the piece-by-piece purchase price (so it's defensible in a meeting) and far above your cost (so it's profitable). That's the range to aim for: low enough to be an obvious choice, high enough to fund the review. The trap would be dropping to €400 because "it costs you nothing": you'd have won a client and lost the ability to review.

Two guardrails on that arithmetic: the ranges above are French market orders of magnitude, to be checked against your sector; and a retainer is never calculated on one isolated month but over the length of the engagement — the first month always costs more (setup, tone, templates).

"It's the AI writing — why am I paying this?"

You'll hear the question. It's legitimate, and there's a good answer — provided you don't lie about what you do.

What the client buys isn't the typing: it's the decision to publish. They buy the choice of topics that go after buyers rather than browsers, the consistency with their real catalog, the check that nothing false is written about their products, the internal linking that sends authority to the right pages, and someone accountable in front of them if a piece goes wrong. A word processor never lowered a copywriter's rate; a production tool doesn't lower the rate of a content engagement.

The right commercial reflex is to own the tooling rather than hide it. An agency that explains its chain — brief, generation anchored in the catalog, human review, scheduled publishing, measurement — inspires more confidence than one implying three imaginary writers. It's also your best protection the day the client finds the tool on their own.

Conversely, two arguments never to use: "it's written by an AI so it's cheaper" (you've just set your own ceiling) and "it's written by a human" when it isn't.

The service you weren't billing

Rewriting a whole catalog was something no client paid for by the hour — so nobody sold it. With assisted generation, the "catalog overhaul" quote becomes viable: description, title tag and meta description around a target keyword, published after review. A new billing line, at a strong margin.

Three other services move into the sellable column:

• Getting out of duplicate supplier content. A catalog reusing the manufacturer's descriptions is invisible to Google; the job was too heavy to quote, and now fits in weeks.
• Category buying guides. A buying guide per product family captures searches product pages never reach, and sells as a deliverable rather than a subscription.
• Editorial upkeep. Updating existing content as seasons and new products come: unspectacular, very profitable, and it's what keeps positions.

Protecting the margin over time

Three reflexes:

1. Bound the scope. The retainer covers X pieces; beyond that, an amendment. Otherwise unbilled review eats the margin. Write down what counts as a piece (an article, a product description) and what doesn't (a tweak, a translation).
2. Pool the tooling. The cost of a tool subscription dilutes across the whole portfolio — hence the interest in running several stores from one account.
3. Sell the proof. A results report per store justifies both the renewal and the price. Without measurement, the renewal conversation happens on impressions, and impressions are always worse than reality.

Two clauses earn their place in the contract: the approval deadline (after n days without feedback, content is deemed accepted — otherwise your publications pile up waiting and your schedule melts) and content ownership (it goes to the client, which is normal and reassuring; say so, and you remove an objection before it's raised).

The client who wants to see before paying

It's common, and refusing any sample rarely wins. The right dose: one real piece, on their catalog, delivered as a preview — not three free articles. The prospect judges the work, you don't work a month for nothing, and the price conversation happens over something concrete instead of a promise.

In short

Bill SEO content on value (retainer or project), never on production time. AI doesn't lower your selling price — it widens your margin and unlocks services you couldn't sell. Own the tooling, bound the scope, sell the proof. To scope a setup for your portfolio, let's talk.