Understanding How Content Decay Affects Your SEO Practices

The unfortunate reality is that no single piece of SEO content can sustain high engagement levels indefinitely. When Google makes algorithm changes, the meaning of terms changes and data becomes stale very rapidly. As a result, after an early period of growth, your SEO content may gradually decline.

You may decide that the content is no longer worthwhile as your traffic levels off and begins to fall. There are, however, a number of things that seo agencies follow to either restore this traffic or, even better, kickstart a new period of expansion.

Content decay is a simple concept to implement into your content audits, workflows, and procedures. The term “content degradation” will be defined, and methods for recognising and reviving stale pages will be outlined.

Moreover, we will discuss how to construct a moat around your content to keep unwanted visitors out. You may make your content strategy responsive and flexible for the future this way.

What does “Content Decay” mean?

When your content’s effectiveness gradually decreases, we call this “content decay.” It may also mean a drop in ranks or conversions, as well as a decrease in the volume of organic visitors. This typically happens after a period of rapid expansion, followed by a plateau and subsequent decline.

A variety of complicated factors can contribute to this decrease, which can be rapid or slow.

Why Does Content Get Old?

There is probably not a single, easily identifiable cause of your content’s decline. Typically, a combination of things is at work. Find out the root of the problem before attempting a solution. Therefore, you can choose a better-informed strategy.

Some questions to ponder are as follows:

Is There Any New Content from My Rivals?

Decay frequently occurs when a rival publishes superior content to your own. Look up your search on Google and observe who comes up above you in the results. Why do you think they act differently? Is their content more in-depth or novel? Do they go into depth about something you haven’t before discussed?

When it comes to content, how “fresh” should it be?

Sites that accurately represent the current consensus of experts in your field will see a boost in Google’s search engine rankings. It’s possible that the course of therapy for a condition has shifted after you published a blog entry on the subject 10 years ago.

Google emphasises the need of current, reliable information on high-quality pages in their Quality Rater Guidelines. Consequently, they give preference in the SERP (search engine results page) to pages that offer the most relevant and up-to-date information for the user’s query at the time of the search, rather than 10 years ago.

See if you’re offering the most up-to-date facts in your blog postings. Maybe the topic has changed.

The term “fresh” may also be used to indicate the recentness of a page’s publication. If your page has been up for more than five years, it may be passed over in favour of one that is more recently published.

A Google Algorithm Update?

Perhaps it’s not the content itself that’s causing problems, but rather the site as a whole. Multiple times a year, Google rolls out what it calls “Core Updates.” These can have far-reaching effects on your site, reducing both ranks and visitors. If you see a general decline, you may want to look into the causes.

How popular is this subject?

There may be situations when neither your content nor your website is flawed. Instead, fewer individuals are looking for information on your issue, which explains the fall in traffic.

As a diagnostic tool, Google Trends is excellent. It can reveal whether or not a keyword is losing popularity.

‘Home office furniture,’ for instance, skyrocketed in popularity as the number of individuals working from home increased. Now that everyone has returned to the workplace, less attention is being paid to this issue.

Does a New SERP Appear?

New search engine results page (SERP) features are added on a regular basis by Google. Some searches, especially those for “how to” topics that benefit from a visual presentation, will return videos.

Even if your article is still performing well in search results, Google has started showing related videos instead. It’s possible that these movies are diverting traffic from your site.

It’s possible that a ‘Featured Snippet,’ where Google provides a small summary at the top of the SERP without the user needing to click a result, is hurting your click-through rate, too.

Do I Suffer from Cannibalization?

When numerous pages on the same site compete for the same keyword and Google is unable to determine a clear winner, this is known as cannibalisation. Therefore, search engines do not give either page a high ranking.

To see how well your website ranks for a specific term, use the query “site:[your domain] + [keyword]” in Google. Does different webpage have different landing pages for the same keyword? Perhaps this is what’s causing the decline in quality of your content.

You should now be able to pinpoint certain web pages on your site for enhancement in light of your newfound knowledge of the factors that lead to content decay.

Here are three techniques to identify decayed content:

The SEO Monitor Tool

Even though it costs money, SEO Monitor is a valuable resource for spotting content marketing chances because to its extensive database of industry-specific keywords and phrases. To see which keywords (and pages) are losing ground in the search engine rankings and visitors’ attention, you may monitor their progress. Keyword search volume trends are also displayed, with year-over-year comparisons.

Cannibalization concerns can also easily be spotted with the help of SEO Monitor. It will alert you if your keyword’s landing page has been switched around frequently, which is an indication that Google is unsure about which page to prioritise.

Google Analytics

Create a new ‘Organic Traffic’ section in Google Analytics by going to Behaviour > Landing Pages. This will reveal which of your pages are bringing in the most organic visitors and pageviews.

Limit your results to the previous six or twelve months so you have enough of information to analyse. The best results should be clicked on one by one. How does the development curve appear? To what extent is it growing, staying the same, or contracting?

Revive

The team at Animalz, a content marketing company, built a programme called Revive. You can simply enter your domain name on the site to generate a report specific to your site’s decaying pages.

The time spent manually verifying URLs in Google Analytics is reduced. In preparation for future exploration of these pages, it serves as an excellent place to starting off.

P1 SEO Company

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The extensive background of our SEO agency Australia gives us confidence that your website will thrive under our SEO company expert guidance. We can detail a variety of social media strategies that will increase your site’s traffic.

When you’ve decided on a plan for search engine optimisation services, our staff will go to work on it in accordance with the parameters of that plan. More than that, we think creatively about how to address any issues raised by our customers.

We also provide advice on the best SEO cost that suit your budget and local SEO advices on how to organise your website so that it ranks highly in search engine results, including things like link building, on-page SEO, technical SEO, and any other measures you may need to take.

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