Content marketing ROI calculator

Teams price content at the writer's fee and then wonder why the programme costs twice the budget. For a 1,500-word piece that has to compete, the realistic chain is: keyword and SERP research, a brief worth writing to, the draft, an interview or a data pull if the piece claims anything original, editing, visuals, publication, internal linking and a promotion pass. Depending on seniority, the writing fee is 40 to 60 % of that total.

This matters because the cheapest lever in content is not a lower rate, it is fewer, better pieces. Doubling the budget per article and halving the volume routinely produces more traffic, because the SERPs you are entering are already saturated with adequate content — and adequate is exactly what does not rank. The simulator makes this visible: raise the per-article cost and the per-article traffic together, and watch the break-even month usually improve.

AI drafting changes the arithmetic but less than the sales pitch claims. It compresses the drafting step, which was never the majority of the cost, and it adds an editing burden if the draft is generic. The teams getting real leverage use it for structure, research synthesis and first passes, then spend the saved hours on the parts a model cannot fake: original data, real customer language and expert review. That is the argument developed in AI content and Google.

Compounding is why content programmes look like failures at month four and successes at month fourteen. Each cohort is still climbing while the next is being published, so total traffic accelerates even at a constant publishing rate. Cutting a programme at month six — the most common decision in this field — kills it exactly before the curve turns, which is why the break-even month should be agreed before the first brief, not renegotiated in the middle.

Decay is the mirror image, and it is the part nobody budgets. Search intent shifts, competitors publish better answers, facts age, and links stop pointing at a page nobody talks about any more. Fifteen to thirty per cent a year is the usual observed range on unmaintained libraries. The practical implication is that a mature programme has to spend a fixed share of its capacity — often a quarter to a third — refreshing what already ranks rather than publishing more.

That refresh budget is also the highest-return work available. Updating a page that sits at position six with current data, a better answer and three new internal links routinely outperforms writing a new page on an adjacent topic, because the page already has history, links and impressions. The technical audit checklist includes finding these pages; the traffic forecast simulator prices what moving them is worth.