The five rate bands, and what each one produces
Indian content pricing is unusually wide because the market spans two completely different products under one job title: text that fills a page, and text that a practitioner wrote. Both are quoted per word, which is the source of most of the confusion.
| Rate per word | Who writes at this rate | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| ₹0.30 – ₹0.80 | Volume desks and content mills, frequently AI-assisted and undeclared. | Grammatical, generic, assembled from page one of Google. Nothing you want indexed. |
| ₹1.00 – ₹2.00 | Competent generalist freelancer, working from a keyword and a word count. | Clean, readable, structurally sane, thin on anything specific. Fine for supporting pages. |
| ₹2.50 – ₹4.00 | Experienced SEO writer with a research process and an editor behind them. | Briefed to search intent, original structure, real examples, internal links planned in. |
| ₹5.00 – ₹8.00 | Subject-matter specialist — a CA writing tax content, a doctor writing clinical pages. | First-hand expertise you cannot brief into a generalist at any price. |
| ₹8.00+ | Named journalists, ghostwriters producing founder-bylined pieces and campaign assets. | Voice, access to sources, and something a competitor genuinely can't copy. |
One article, fully costed — the number that actually matters
Here's a standard 1,500-word informational post commissioned at ₹2/word from a decent freelancer, with everything else priced at Indian market rates. This is the figure to compare quotes against.
| Line | Cost | Why it isn't optional |
|---|---|---|
| Brief — keyword and SERP analysis, angle, outline, internal link map | ₹1,500 | Without it the writer guesses the intent, and usually guesses wrong. |
| Draft — 1,500 words at ₹2/word | ₹3,000 | The part everyone quotes and the part that matters least. |
| Expert input — one 45-minute interview with someone who does the job | ₹2,500 | The only reliable source of a fact that isn't already on page one. |
| Edit and fact-check | ₹1,800 | Catches the confident, plausible, wrong sentence. |
| Original images, screenshots, one explanatory diagram | ₹1,200 | Stock photos add nothing; a real screenshot is evidence. |
| On-page, schema, internal linking, publishing, QA | ₹1,000 | An unpublished article ranks about as well as an unwritten one. |
| Total | ₹11,000 | ₹7.33 per word, all in |
AI first drafts: what they save now, what they cost later
A language model will produce a competent 1,500-word draft in two minutes. That collapses the ₹3,000 line to something between ₹300 and ₹1,200 of prompting and cleanup. Genuinely useful, and we use it.
It does not touch the other ₹8,000. The brief still needs a human who's read the SERP. The expert interview still needs a human who did the job. The edit gets *longer*, because reviewing fluent, confident, subtly wrong prose is slower than fixing a human's clumsy but honest sentence. Images still need making.
So the realistic saving is ₹11,000 down to roughly ₹8,500 — about 23%. Anyone selling you AI content at ₹500 an article has removed the eight thousand rupees that made it rank, not found an efficiency.
The deferred cost is the part that stings. Google's guidance has never been about production method; it's about whether the page is helpful and demonstrates first-hand experience. Publish two hundred undifferentiated pages and you get a site that dilutes its own internal link equity, spreads crawl attention thin, and eventually needs an expensive pruning exercise. We wrote about that at length in does AI-written content still rank.
How many articles a ₹75,000 retainer actually funds
Content usually takes 40–50% of an SEO retainer. On ₹75,000/month that's ₹30,000–₹37,500 — three to four fully loaded new articles.
That number roughly doubles if half the programme is refreshes rather than new pages. Updating an existing article that already has links and history costs ₹4,000–₹6,000 and frequently outperforms a brand-new page, because you're adding to something Google already trusts rather than starting at zero.
| Monthly content budget | New articles | Or this mix |
|---|---|---|
| ₹15,000 | 1 | 1 new + 2 refreshes |
| ₹30,000 – ₹37,500 | 3 – 4 | 2 new + 4 refreshes |
| ₹60,000 | 5 – 6 | 3 new + 7 refreshes, plus one pillar page |
| ₹1,20,000 | 10 – 12 | A pillar and its full cluster, quarterly |
When ₹8 a word earns it, and when ₹2 is plenty
Paying specialist rates for every page is how content budgets die in month five. Paying generalist rates for the pages that decide your credibility is how content programmes fail entirely. Split the list.
Pay ₹5–₹8 a word for
- YMYL categories — health, finance, legal, insurance. Experience and expertise are the ranking constraint, and a generalist cannot fake either.
- B2B and SaaS, where your reader does the job for a living and will spot a writer who doesn't within two paragraphs.
- Pillar pages you expect to link to for three years. Amortised across that lifespan, the premium is rounding error.
- Anything a competitor already covers with a real practitioner's byline. You can't out-volume expertise.
₹1.50–₹2.50 a word is plenty for
- Definition and glossary pages, where the job is accuracy and completeness, not insight.
- Supporting cluster articles that exist to catch long-tail queries and pass link equity upward.
- Product and category descriptions, once someone has written the template properly.
- Location pages — provided a human adds genuinely local detail, otherwise you've built scaled content.
Test a writer before you commit to a year of them
Commission one paid trial article at the full rate, on your hardest topic, with the exact brief you'd use ongoing. It costs ₹3,000–₹12,000 and it settles the question faster than any portfolio. Judge it on three things, none of which is prose quality.
- Did they ask questions before writing? A writer who accepts a brief without a single clarifying question is about to produce something generic.
- Is there one fact in it that isn't on page one of Google? A number from your CRM, a quote from your ops lead, a screenshot of your own dashboard. That fact is the whole reason the page can outrank an incumbent.
- Does the structure match what's ranking? If the top five results are comparison tables and your writer filed nine paragraphs of prose, they researched the topic and not the search results.