What is Content Decay And How To Reverse Traffic Drops
Content decay is the gradual drop in rankings and organic traffic when pages become outdated or lose relevance.
What is Content Decay And How To Reverse Traffic Drops
When you publish content, especially blogs or resource pages, some pieces may start to drop in performance after a while. This slow decline in organic traffic, rankings, and relevance is referred to as content decay. While it typically affects individual pages, it can slowly erode your site’s overall SEO performance if it occurs on multiple pieces. A drop in traffic can happen when existing content no longer fulfills search intent because it’s outdated, irrelevant, no longer accurate, losing to more competitive pages, or because Google’s algorithm updates have changed how it evaluates that topic.
Content Decay
Content decay is an ongoing decrease in organic performance in a single piece of content, no matter what format that content takes. Content decay happens to every website, and it is something every strategist should expect over time as new content becomes outdated or algorithm updates change the search engine results pages (SERPS). New competitors are constantly popping up, creating newer content that may be more aligned with current audience preferences.
Many brands are using AI to churn out as much content as possible without a content strategy to keep it fresh and relevant. With the right content decay strategies, you can combat content decay and ensure your content remains relevant long after you hit “publish”.
Signs of content decay are a decrease in organic traffic to that page/post, lower overall search engine rankings, outdated information, high bounce rate, low average time on page, fewer social shares, and negative user feedback.
SEO tools to find decayed content
Google Search Console is a typical option for many people as it is free and pretty robust. Checking the performance report and filtering by specific pages or queries shows you consistent traffic declines over the past six months to a year.
Ubersuggest is for tracking content decay. The site audit feature can identify pages with declining organic traffic, and the Keyword Tracking tool can monitor how your target keywords perform over time.
SEMRush platform is taking a step further with the Position Tracking tool that enables you to see exactly how your rankings change over time.
Content Decay Strategies Revitalizing Your Content
Conducting Regular Content Audit helps you identify and optimize underperforming content. Content audits go beyond text, evaluating multimedia, accessibility, and user experience for a comprehensive analysis. Tools like Google Analytics, Ubersuggest, and Screaming Frog simplify audits and drive better results.
Updating and refreshing your existing content includes adding new content, removing outdated information, improving readability, updating metadata, and enabling that the content aligns with current searcher intent. Key components of content refresh include updating the text, images, and other media elements, optimizing for new keywords. Fixing broken links, ensuring all SEO elements such as meta descriptions, title tags, and alt text, and adding internal links and backlinks for enhancing content’s value and improving website performance.
Repurposing outdated content extends its lifespan and helps you reach new audiences across various channels. The best way to do this is with blog articles, which are the easiest content type, transforming long-form pieces into social media posts and video content. repurposing, giving content a new makeover, along with exposure to new audiences and less time spent on content creation.
Sunset Content That’s Past Its Prime. Not all content is worth saving. If a piece of content is factually incorrect or no longer relevant to the target audience, then it is best to remove it entirely, or you can also choose to redirect the URL to a more relevant page on your site rather than deleting it completely.
Make use of user Feedback including comments and social media. Consider sending out surveys to your audience, asking what topics they would like to see covered or what content they find most helpful.
Create A Content Review Schedule. The easiest approach to keep up with your content refresh efforts is to design and stick to a content review schedule. Life gets busy, and having a plan will guarantee that your content remains fresh and engaging without being lost in the shuffle. For instance, you could go over all your website content every quarter and highlight anything that needs to be updated. This ensures that your content never becomes stale.
Final Conclusion: Regularly review the content, and make it a priority
Implementing content decay strategies enabling integration of new life into the old content, making it more relevant to your audience. You will also improve your search engine rankings and boost traffic to your site.
