How much to spend on SEO content per month

A small business can get steady SEO articles for $49 to $179 a month, far below the usual alternatives. In an Ahrefs poll of 439 SEO providers, agencies charged $3,209 a month on average and freelancers $1,348, and freelance writers charge anything from $50 to $1500 per long-form article. Paperboy, which publishes this page and sells the plans, charges $49, $99 or $179 a month per site. Those prices cover articles, not a full SEO program, so the rest of this page shows what each number buys.

Quick version

• Full SEO retainers and content writing are different purchases. Compare article cost to article cost.
• Freelance writers quote per article. The range is wide, from $50 to $1500 per long-form article according to Jasper's freelance writer guide.
• Agency retainers start in the hundreds and reach $10,000 or more at the enterprise end. Most small sites do not need that to publish consistently.
• A year of the top Paperboy plan costs less than one month of the average agency retainer. The arithmetic is below.
• Content does not replace technical fixes or links. Budget for those separately if your site needs them.

What SEO costs, according to the sources

Every source below is a company that sells something, so read the numbers as market signals, not neutral facts. Ahrefs sells SEO software. OuterBox, Web Tonic and Savo Group are SEO agencies. Jasper sells AI writing software. Paperboy sells the plans in the last rows.

The Ahrefs figures come from a poll of providers, so they show what providers say they charge, not what clients paid.

For context, Ahrefs says SEO costs usually range from $250 to $10,000 per month, with most businesses (63%) spending between $500 and $5,000. Savo Group says most small businesses pay between $1,500 and $3,000 a month. So a typical small business paying for full SEO spends hundreds to thousands of dollars a month.

The $10,000 and up tier is not aimed at small sites. Web Tonic says enterprise organizations in competitive industries often invest $10,000 to $50,000 or more per month. If you run a local shop or a small product site, that figure is not your benchmark.

The per-article math

Freelancers usually quote per article or per word. Jasper reports entry level freelance writers charge $0.03 to $0.06 per word and expert level writers $0.21 to $0.30 per word. Jasper sells writing software, so treat its rate bands as a rough guide.

Here is a made-up example, not real data. Say each article is 1,000 words. At $0.03 per word that is 1,000 times $0.03, or $30. At $0.30 per word it is 1,000 times $0.30, or $300.

Now take Starter's pace of 3 articles a week and count four weeks as a month. That is 3 times 4, or 12 articles a month. Here is what 12 articles cost at different freelance prices:

The $550 figure is one writer's average, as Jasper reports about freelancer Kat Boogaard. It is an example of a working rate, not a market average.

Even the cheapest freelance row, $600, is $600 minus $49, or $551 more a month than Starter. And $50 is the floor of a wide range. Cheap writing often means you do the research and fact-checking yourself.

The other plans work out the same way. Growth publishes daily, so in a 30-day month that is 30 articles, and $99 divided by 30 is $3.30 per article. Pro publishes twice a day, so that is 60 articles, and $179 divided by 60 is about $2.98 per article.

The price is only part of the comparison. Paperboy says its articles are researched, fact-checked and published for you, and that articles that fail the fact check are held, not published. A $4 article that you have to rewrite is not a bargain. Check a few published articles against their sources before you commit.

A year of content next to one month of an agency

SEO results are slow, so budget in years, not months. Web Tonic says SEO ROI typically takes 6 to 12 months to show measurable traffic gains. That is a reason to prefer a low monthly cost you can sustain.

Here is the cost of 12 months on each Paperboy plan, with prices from Paperboy's site:

• Starter: 12 times $49 comes to $588.
• Growth: 12 times $99 comes to $1,188.
• Pro: 12 times $179 comes to $2,148.

The average agency retainer is $3,209 a month. One month of that, $3,209, is more than a full year of Pro at $2,148. The gap is $3,209 minus $2,148, or $1,061.

What content alone does not buy

This comparison has limits. An agency retainer covers more than articles. Web Tonic says people, strategists, writers, and specialists typically account for 30 to 50 percent of the total retainer budget, so writing is only part of what you pay for.

Content also does not buy links. Web Tonic puts the average price of one high-quality backlink around $509, and Savo Group, citing Ahrefs, says $508. The two sources differ by a dollar, which tells you the figure is an estimate. If your market is competitive, links may need their own budget.

An in-house hire is another option, but it costs more. Savo Group says one in-house SEO specialist costs $102,000 to $168,000 per year once you add salary, benefits and tools. That is a very different spending level from a monthly content plan.

My take: if your site has no content, or you publish in bursts and then stop, steady articles are the cheapest thing to fix. If your site has technical problems, a content plan will not repair them. This is my judgment, not a sourced fact.

How much to spend: my take

This is opinion, based on the sources above and not on first-hand testing.

1. Start at the low end. Starter at $49 a month is enough to find out whether steady publishing moves your Search Console numbers. Compare that with the $500 that Savo Group says local SEO can start at, which is the bottom of its range.
2. Move up when you run out of topics, not on a hunch. Daily or twice-daily publishing makes sense for a site with many questions to answer, such as a large product catalog or several service areas.
3. Add a specialist only for a specific problem. If you need technical fixes or link building, pay for that separately. Do not pay a full retainer for something a content plan already covers.
4. Hold the budget for at least 6 to 12 months. That matches the timeline Web Tonic gives for measurable gains. Judging after two months is judging too early.

The main reason to choose a plan like this is steady output at a price you can keep paying. One freelance writer, Kat Boogaard, reports an average article project fee of $550, according to Jasper's freelance writer pay guide. Jasper sells AI writing software, so use that page for rate examples only. At that fee, 12 articles a month cost 12 times $550, which comes to $6,600. In my view, most small sites cannot keep that up for a year. This is my judgment, not a sourced fact.

Checklist before you buy any content plan

• Does the price include research, fact-checking and publishing, or only a draft?
• Are topics picked from your own data? Paperboy says it picks topics from the site's own Google Search Console data.
• Can you read a sample article and check its claims against the sources it links?
• Is there a long contract, or can you cancel monthly?
• What happens when an article fails review: is it fixed, or published anyway?

If you also want to know whether AI assistants mention your business, the free AI check is a quick place to look. The Paperboy blog has more cost breakdowns in the same style.

Try it before you commit

The cheapest way to judge a content plan is to read one article it produced for your own site. Start with one free article and check its sources before you pick a plan.