Until recently, even Google employees had no idea what content decay was. It doesn’t mean the concept didn’t exist — it’s simply that the term itself wasn’t coined.
Now we can put our finger on it though: content decay is a gradual decline in organic traffic which affects your blog and web pages rankings over time. Declining traffic is something that is going to happen regardless of how good the content you produce is because every article has a limited lifecycle.
It sneaks up on you. It’s not a sharp drop-off in traffic that might alarm you, it’s a decline that happens over several months. Left unattended, content decay to several of your polished SEO articles will result in an overall drop-off in rankings for your website.
Now, there are two bits of good news. The first one is that the entire lifecycle of a piece takes time to manifest itself. Semrush’s recent study tells us it can take over 6 months to enter Google’s top-10. Staying there for a while is another matter: in most cases rankings would fluctuate, with posts falling out of the top-10 and then regaining ground again. However, an old(ish) study from Ahrefs tells us top-ranking results from established sites can remain top for almost three years.
The second one is that content decay can be detected and fixed: your SEO specialist and content manager just need to come up with a strategy — and carve out the time for the copywriters to implement it.
But before we get to how you can spot and fix content decay, let’s look at why it happens at all.
The main one is content freshness. Google prefers newer articles to older ones — and ranks the former higher — because there is a better chance they contain more up-to-date information, which, in turn, improves user experience. Of course, other factors — like a site’s domain rating, number of backlinks and article length also matter, so it’s not always straightforward.
There are also plenty of other reasons: below we’ll explore them in greater detail.
Google continuously works on those to improve user experience. There’s a core update at least once a year — and these can sometimes seriously impact how your SEO content performs.
For example, just in April this year, Google’s core update centered on reducing the amount of unoriginal and unhelpful content in the search results. And, though Google doesn’t say that outright, it looks like the update will affect companies that produce content at a scale.
By that they mean several — maybe several dozen articles — per day. Essentially, churning out so much content became possible mostly due to the widespread use of AI — but it’s debatable how helpful such content can be. Google seems to think quality drops, so in essence, they are saying human-generated content will be prioritized over machine-made.
The world around us is evolving at a rapid pace. Whereas 20 years ago people looking at artificial intelligence and electric cars were searching for educational articles, today they are more likely to be seeking a ChatGPT subscription or a new Tesla.
So it helps to keep an eye out on what’s happening in your industry and whether the content you produce still matches your target audience’s needs.
Your articles might be brilliant in every aspect — but if they are topical or seasonal, they will go out of fashion at some point. Few people will be interested in the US presidential election next January — just as few are searching for World Cup 2022-related articles now.
There’s not much you can do if your content is no longer the flavor of the month, unfortunately — only target new keywords. But the factor is important to keep in mind.
The concept of content cannibalization is simple: you might have several pages on your website that compete for the same keywords. These aren’t necessarily even blog posts on the same topic: you can have product or landing pages competing with SEO articles and vice versa.
What happens then is that Google might be at a loss of which page is central, the most important — and decrease all the pages in their search rankings. Yikes.
Your competitors aren’t standing still. If you produce a piece of content that starts attracting traffic, at some point your competitors will take note — and try to produce a better article to outrank you.
“Better” means many things in this regard. More in-depth (Google trusts longer articles more than shorter ones), user-friendly (quicker-loading pages, accessibility, etc.) and fresher (with more up-to-date sources — again, Google loves new articles).
The lesson here is to always keep your ear to the ground and refresh content regularly as changes in your field happen.
Decaying content — especially when multiple pieces decay at the same time — brings with it several problems. The most obvious is…
Some of the keywords you rank for tail off, and you might start sliding down the results page. But that’s not all.
Sometimes the keywords are performing just fine, but other metrics suffer, which indicates your piece of content has reached the decay phase. We are talking about things such as impressions, clickthrough rates and conversions.
So the SEO article is doing just fine in terms of attracting users — but those users simply aren’t doing what you expect them to. Conversions might be the most serious metric of the lot, as it directly affects your business’ health.
Backlinking is when someone links to your content from their website. In short, someone considers an article you’ve produced so useful that it’s used as an argument to prove a point.
Ask any SEO specialist and they’ll be quick to tell you backlinking is one of the most important factors to rank well. Google once called it the top-3 factor: alongside the content itself and how well it matches search intent.
When your content decays, fewer people link to it. Even worse: when your content becomes outdated, people might actually start removing backlinks, prioritizing fresher/more topical content instead.
While the drop in conversions affects your business directly in terms of revenue, decaying content also leads to reduced visibility for your company. Put simply, you are at risk of becoming irrelevant if your content is not consumed and people stop thinking about you as a thought leader in your field.
Actually, your content doesn’t even need to be viewed/clicked on every time when it comes to brand awareness: the articles simply have to rank high enough for your target audience to associate you with certain keywords.
For example, when people search for “Top marketing trends in 2024”, HubSpot — one of the main players on the field — is not the top result in Google: it occupies positions 2 and 6. Semrush, another prominent player, is 3rd.
Now, spotting content decay is a matter of using the right tools. The two main ones are Google Search Console and Google Analytics. Before we discuss those, there are two things to keep in mind when looking for content decay.
The first one is you can rely on user feedback when looking for signs of decay: watch out for comments under your articles or social media posts that inform you this or that part of your article might be outdated.
The second one is you should aim to have a strategy in place to prevent the rot from setting in. We are talking about regular content audits. Establish a frequency (say, once in six months) when your SEO specialists go over stagnating content and identify pieces in need of a revamp. Then give your copywriters the time to work on those.
With that settled, let’s go over the tools you’ll need to spot content decay.
Google Search Console helps you look at the impressions, click-through rate, and average position for the keywords you rank for.
Here’s (roughly) how the process looks like:
You can also assess the performance of an individual page. For example, looks like this particular article in Selzy’s blog might need an update:
Google Analytics lets you do roughly the same. You can look at how your articles are performing by comparing different periods (for example, the last 3 months and the 3 months before that): Google Analytics will have the numbers for page views, clicks and impressions.
Do keep in mind your content might be seasonal, so in some cases, it’s better to compare, say summer of 2024 with the summer of 2023 — if these are your busiest periods.
To freshen up an article in the decay stage, you need to update and re-publish it. A more recent publication date will go a long way toward pushing your article up the rankings.
However, changing the date isn’t enough in itself. Google will crawl your content and see it hasn’t actually been updated. You also run the risk of negative user feedback, once they see no difference between the old version and the new one.
You need to put a fresh coat of paint on your article. Here’s how you can do it.
It might simply be that your current piece is missing some info. Maybe it simply wasn’t available at the time of writing — there are advancements in every area of our lives.
How much to add is a question of common sense. It can be as short as a couple of paragraphs, or as long as 1,500 words. Google prefers in-depth content to shallow one, so no worries here. Just make sure you don’t break the existing article structure — the added info should fit in organically.
We are talking about minor issues here: facts, links, images. You might find there’s a new study on the subject that better proves your point, or that some links are broken and no longer lead to articles you want them to.
Images are a bit of a different story: most are unlikely to go out of date, but they might be missing alt tags, captions — or simply be too large for a user-friendly page.
The main factor is a page’s loading speed. If your article loads slowly, the first thing to check is whether the images, videos, infographics and other visual elements are optimized for better performance. In short, they should be compressed to weigh less.
However, other things contribute to a slick user experience too. Adding captions and alt text to images (in case they don’t load), creating a table of contents, using a proper heading structure — even writing shorter paragraphs all contribute to a piece of content that is easier to consume.
Your SEO articles likely contain links to your other articles. This helps create a better user experience by giving a chance to explore this or that part of the topic in-depth — it is also good for SEO. A rising tide lifts all boats.
This is why internal linking is important: it helps attract traffic from other pages. If you want to improve how a certain article performs, linking it with another, better-performing one, will help achieve that.
The initial spike of traffic you get when a new article is out is mainly down to promotion. Social media channels and your email list come to mind as the most important channels. So… re-promote decaying content to give it another bump-up in traffic.
Repromotion works best together with updating content. Did you have an article “Top Marketing Trends in 2023”? Explore which trends are the flavor of the year in 2024, add them — and promote the article again.
You can also effectively marry your SEO efforts not just with social media promotion, but with email marketing. “SEO email marketing” sounds like an oxymoron at first — but the two are not exclusive when you take a deeper dive.
Remember how we talked about content cannibalism? When you find articles competing for the same keywords, all of them will be suppressed by Google and lowered in search results.
Thus you have a chance to kill two birds with one stone. Eliminate internal competition by combining several articles — and create a new one that you can promote. Much like with updating content, make sure the new piece flows and the structure is easy to follow. And don’t forget to configure redirects from the old articles to the new ones.
Yep, taking content offline is an option too. There are two reasons why you shouldn’t fear that, despite the step looking radical at first glance.
The first one is that some content might simply be no longer aligned with your brand. You are no longer offering a specific feature, or service, for example — and the article was written around it.
The second one is that you want to keep the content on your site relevant. If you plan on creating an updated piece that will compete with the old one, then remove the old one and configure a redirect once the new article is up. But even if you don’t, there’s little point to keep desperately obsolete content around.
Content decay is a gradual decline in organic traffic that causes one or more pieces of your content to slip down the search results. Content decay can sneak up on you — simply because it’s not a sharp drop-off that can be instantly spotted.
Content decays for a number of reasons, the most prominent ones are changes in Google’s search algorithms, shifts in your target audience’s search intent, decrease in overall search demand, and external and internal competition from other articles.
Content decay should be combated because it directly affects your search rankings, leads to loss of authority on a topic and can even cause brand awareness erosion.
You can spot content decay using Google Search Console and Google Analytics — and prevent the decay by carrying out regular content audits and analyzing user feedback.
Finally, fixing content decay is a coordinated effort from your SEO specialists and copywriters, and can be done by updating, expanding, merging and pruning old content, as well as updating and re-promoting it. User experience should be kept in mind too.
