Website and marketing content agencies

The four things inside the label

Site copy — home page, category pages, about, service pages. This is conversion writing, judged on whether visitors do the thing. It is usually a project, not a retainer, and it is the highest-value writing on most stores because every visitor reads some of it.

Product content — descriptions, specifications, attributes. A production problem at any real catalogue size, and covered in more depth on the product description writing hub.

Editorial and campaign content — guides, seasonal campaigns, email and social copy. Ongoing, and best judged on a body of work rather than a sample.

Sales and support material — lookbooks, line sheets, help centre articles, wholesale documentation. Unglamorous, frequently the actual bottleneck, and almost never in the proposal.

Questions worth asking

• Which of the four is quoted? Ask it in those terms and watch for a proposal that has silently merged two.
• Who writes, and what have they written in our category? Ask for a sample they wrote themselves, not a portfolio the agency owns.
• What is the research input? Good site copy comes from customer interviews, support tickets and reviews. Copy written from a brief alone reads like it.
• How many rounds of revision? The most common source of overrun here.
• Is SEO input included or separate? Both are defensible; an unclaimed boundary is how pages end up written twice.

What it costs

Site copy for a small store — home, about, a handful of category pages — is commonly $2,000–$8,000. A full messaging and copy project with research behind it runs $10,000–$40,000. Ongoing content retainers are typically $1,500–$8,000 a month depending on output. Per-word pricing exists across a very wide range; on site copy it is a poor proxy for value, because the best version of a home page is usually the shorter one.