Using website copywriting services means a copywriter, agency or platform writes the pages of your site based on your brief, your brand voice and your keywords. You then sign off and the copy goes live. The process always has four parts: briefing, brand voice, writing around a keyword, and approval plus publication.
New from us: UPGeoSEO for small SEO and marketing agencies is a workspace where you can see, per client, whether their website appears in Google AI Mode and AI Overviews, run GEO and SEO checks, connect Bing Webmaster Tools and publish articles for up to 10 client sites.
Key takeaways
- The professional association Tekstnet cites an average hourly rate of around €85 excluding VAT for a professional freelance copywriter.
- Having five to seven core pages written by a professional typically costs €750 to €2,000 excluding VAT, depending on research and SEO work.
- A brief without a target audience, a promise and a desired action produces generic copy, however good the writer is.
- Agencies with several clients can now measure AI visibility per client site, run GEO and SEO checks and publish from a single workspace.
What exactly does outsourcing your website copy mean?
You outsource the writing of your permanent pages: homepage, services, about us, contact and often blog posts. On the Dutch market, a professional service or landing page usually costs €150 to €340 excluding VAT, including research and one round of revisions. So you're paying for thinking, not just for words.
There are four ways to pay: by the hour, by the page, by the word, or with a subscription to a platform that writes on autopilot. An hourly rate suits strategic work with a lot of back-and-forth, a page rate suits a fixed set of core pages, a word rate suits large volumes of simple copy, and a subscription suits ongoing content in several languages.
| Model | Ballpark | Suits | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hourly | Senior copywriters and agencies often €85 to €120+ | Strategic work, lots of back-and-forth | Ask for an estimate of hours upfront |
| Per page | €150 to €340 per service page | A fixed set of core pages | Check whether SEO research is included |
| Per word | €0.035 to €0.05 on content marketplaces, €0.10 to €0.20 from freelancers | Large volumes of simple copy | Length becomes the goal, not results |
| Autopilot platform | Subscription | Ongoing content, multiple languages | Brand voice and approval step need to be right |
Most professional web copywriters are moving away from word rates. That makes sense: a strong service page often gets better when it gets shorter.
What goes into a good brief?
A usable brief answers five questions: who is the page for, what problem do you solve, why should they choose you, what action should the visitor take, and which keyword goes with it. Without those five answers the writer starts guessing, and guessing reads as fluff.
Take a fictional installation company that wants a service page for heat pumps. These are the owner's rough notes:
- Target audience: homeowners with a house built between the 1970s and 1990s, Utrecht region.
- Problem: high gas bills, doubts about whether a heat pump works without underfloor heating.
- Why us: our own engineers, no subcontractors, heat loss calculation upfront.
- Action: request a free home consultation.
- Keyword: "hybrid heat pump installation".
On top of that, supply three things writers rarely get: the questions customers actually ask on the phone, hard facts (warranty period, service area, certifications) and two competitors you don't want to resemble. If you want to know which keyword actually brings in revenue, choose keywords with buying intent rather than going purely on volume.
How does a writer get to know your brand voice?
You learn a brand voice from examples, not adjectives. "Friendly and professional" says nothing. Three pieces of copy you like, plus a list of words you never use, say everything.
For our installation company, it looks like this:
- Form of address: the informal "je" and "jij", never the formal "u". That's how the owner talks to customers, too.
- Banned words: "sustainable solutions", "taking the hassle off your hands", "all-in package".
- Tone: down-to-earth, likes to run the numbers, never promises savings without a calculation.
- Sample sentence from a quote email: concrete, short, with a number in it.
A human writer gets this from an introductory call and your existing copy. Our platform does the same automatically: it reads your existing content and captures the brand voice, so page ten sounds like page one. Across several markets, this is the difference between native content and a clumsy translation. A German page should sound as though a German wrote it, with the search terms Germans actually type.
How do you write website copy around a keyword without it sounding stiff?
The keyword belongs in four places: the title tag, the H1, the first sentence and at least one subheading. Beyond that, you simply write for people, using synonyms and related terms. Repeating it until it hurts hasn't worked for years.
Visitors scan in an F-pattern. They read headings and the first words of paragraphs, and drop off if those say nothing. That's why every section opens with the answer.
The rough version of our heat pump page opened with a question, called heat pumps "the future" and promised to discuss options, without answering anything. The rewritten version:
Hybrid heat pump installation in Utrecht A hybrid heat pump works without underfloor heating too, on your existing radiators. Our own engineers start with a heat loss calculation, so you know upfront what you'll save. Request a free home consultation.
Keyword in the heading, the biggest doubt removed in sentence one, the difference from competitors in sentence two, a clear action in sentence three.
The same structure works for GEO. AI answer engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity cite passages that stand on their own: a fact, a condition, a number. You can read how to build a passage like that in our guide to appearing in an AI Overview. The same principle applies to blogs, worked out in our blog strategy for Google and ChatGPT.
Who signs off, and how does the copy go live on your site?
You sign off, or one designated person on your team. Never a committee. With a professional copywriter, one round of revisions is usually included in the price; every extra round costs time and often money. So bundle all your feedback into one document.
When signing off, check three things: are the facts right (prices, warranty, service area), does it sound like you, and does the call to action appear no more than twice. Style preferences come last.
Then publication. With a freelancer you usually get a Word document and paste it in yourself, including the title tag, meta description and subheadings. That's often where things go wrong: headings turn into bold text, and the meta description stays empty. A platform that publishes straight to WordPress skips that step. You approve, we publish. If you're going international, first run through our WordPress checkpoints for multiple markets.
| Step | You supply | You get back |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Briefing | Target audience, problem, USPs, action, keyword | Confirmed assignment and page outline |
| 2. Brand voice | Three sample texts, banned words | A documented style that carries through every page |
| 3. Writing | Fact-checks in response to the writer's questions | Draft with keyword, clear heading and action |
| 4. Approval and going live | One bundled round of feedback | Published page with title tag and meta description |
What's new
UPGeoSEO has a new workspace for small SEO and marketing agencies. You can see per client whether the website appears in Google AI Mode and AI Overviews, run a GEO and SEO check per client, connect Bing Webmaster Tools and publish articles for up to 10 client sites. The result: writing, publishing and measuring website copy for all your clients from one place.
Here's how that works in practice. An agency with eight clients, including our installation company, wants to know why the heat pump page ranks in Google but doesn't show up in AI answers.
- The agency adds the client site and connects Bing Webmaster Tools.
- The GEO and SEO check shows where the page falls short, for example an opening without a citable answer.
- The agency checks whether the site appears in AI Overviews and Google AI Mode for the most important search queries.
- New articles are written in that client's brand voice, published after approval, and visibility is measured again.
No inflated visibility scores, just a check you can show your client. Exactly what's included is on our page about the workspace for agencies and their client sites.
Who should outsource, and when are you better off writing it yourself?
Outsourcing pays off if you need more than a handful of pages, publish in several languages or have had an empty blog for months. Writing it yourself wins if your expertise is so specific that explaining it takes longer than writing it.
Outsourcing suits you if:
- your website is outdated or half empty and you don't have time to write every week;
- you're expanding into new markets and don't want to hire local copywriters;
- you want Google and AI answer engines to find you, and you don't know how to build your copy for that.
Write it yourself if:
- you change one page a year;
- your copy is mostly personal stories, like a coach or artist writing from their own experience;
- you don't have time for even a brief and one round of approval. In that case any outsourcing will go wrong.
A hybrid approach often works best: you supply the raw knowledge in bullet points, and a writer or platform turns it into a page.
Frequently asked questions
What does UPGeoSEO do for small SEO and marketing agencies?
It gives agencies one workspace to see per client whether the site appears in Google AI Mode and AI Overviews, run GEO and SEO checks, connect Bing Webmaster Tools and publish articles for up to 10 client sites. A useful first step: start with the client who needs the most content, so you quickly have a measurable before and after.
How long does it take to have one page written?
A professional charges an average of 1.5 to 4 hours per service page, including research and revisions. The turnaround depends mostly on you: the sooner your brief is complete and the faster you give feedback, the sooner the page goes live.
Does Google penalise copy written with AI?
No, Google judges the quality and usefulness of content, not how it was produced. Copy that exists only to rank, without real information, does get rated lower. That's why a human approval step on the facts is still needed, even with a platform on autopilot.
Can I just have my Dutch copy translated for other markets?
You can, but you'll miss the search terms people there actually use. A Belgian, German or British customer often searches with different words than a literal translation produces. So have each language written natively based on local keyword research; for an English-language site that already exists, start with the SEO of your English-language website.
Start with one service page
Pick your best-selling service and write down the five brief answers in bullet points: target audience, problem, why you, action and keyword. That takes half an hour and is exactly what any writer needs. Don't want to do the writing, pasting and measuring yourself after that? UPGeoSEO learns your brand voice, writes native content in every language, publishes to your site after your approval and shows whether AI answer engines start citing you. You approve, we publish.
