Understanding Content Decay and Ways to Fix It

If you are running a website, you might not be paying much attention to pages that are already ranking well. But this is probably one of the biggest content mistakes you are making. If a well-ranked page is left untouched for longer periods of time, it will gradually lose its rankings. You might not even notice the decline unless your content is no longer visible among the top search engine results. This gradual decline in rankings is known as content decay.

But this doesn’t mean that there is something wrong with your content or that your content is rotten. It just gives you a sign that you need to take some action if you want to retain your site’s rankings. Maybe you need to add some content or just update some old information. In order to ensure that your site’s performance is not entirely killed by content decay, you must understand the concept of content decay and how you can fix it.

What is Content Decay?

Content decay refers to the gradual decline in a website’s rankings and organic traffic over time. It happens when a particular web page’s content is outdated and no longer relevant to the target audience. This is the reason why Google recommends website owners to regularly update their website content with the latest and most accurate information. Search engines prioritize up-to-date content. Therefore, web pages that seem to no longer add value to the audience see drops in rankings over time.

Here, you must pay special attention to the word ‘decay.’ It’s not a sudden drop in rankings. It’s a slow decline that you may not even notice for a long period until it leads to a decrease in your website’s overall online presence. Content decay is not a bad sign. It just shows that your content is not updated with the latest information. If you keep updating your site’s content regularly, there is a high possibility that it will not experience content decay ever.

Understanding The Content Lifecycle

If you are planning to establish a better online presence for your brand with content marketing, you must understand the different stages involved in the content lifecycle. From idea to content creation, management, promotion, performance marketing, to decline, every step has its own significance. There are 4 main stages of the content lifecycle as listed below:

• Early Traction: This stage continues for the first few weeks after a piece of content is published. Once you publish a web page or a blog post, it is crawled and indexed by search engines. After this, search engines may take time to understand the content of the web page and position it on SERPs. In this stage, your content might start getting small amounts of traffic.
• Growth: This is where your content’s visibility and search engine rankings grow. As it gets more clicks and backlinks, its search engine rankings keep improving over time.
• Performance at Peak: This is the stage when your content is no longer getting any backlinks or new views as it has already reached its peak. This may happen because your content is already on the top for all target keywords, it is no longer getting backlinks, or some of your competitors have come up with a new piece of content with up-to-date information. A web page or blog may remain at its peak for several weeks or even months before it starts declining.
• Decline: This is the stage where content decay happens. As your website’s content gets older and competitors keep coming up with new pieces of content targeting similar keywords, your content starts declining gradually.

Potential Reasons Behind Content Decay

Content decay can happen due to various potential reasons and it sometimes becomes challenging for website owners to identify the cause behind the declining rankings of their websites. Let us discuss some common reasons behind content deacy:

• Outdated Content: This is one of the most common factors that may lead to content decay. Do you ever see content from the early 2000s (2001-2005) in your search results? It’s very rare. This is because search engines prioritize fresh content. This doesn’t mean you just have to delete old content from your website. You just need to keep adding a touch of freshness to it.
• Internal Competition: Internal competition becomes a reason for content decay when you have published multiple pieces of content around the same topic or keyword. You blogs posts written around a particular keyword may compete with other similar blog posts on your website. Not only this, but blog posts may even compete with category pages, landing pages, glossary pages, and more, as search engines cannot identify which pages to prioritize.
• External Competition: This happens when your competitors outrank your web pages by publishing content that is more updated and of better quality. Better content quality is not the only reason, this may also happen due to higher authority, higher number of backlinks, and their better alignment with users’ search intent.
• Shift in Users’ Search Intent: This is a less considered but potential reason behind content decay. Search intent refers to what a user expects to see when clicking on a URL. The search intent of users may also change with time. And search engines prioritize content that fulfills search intent.

How to Fix Content Decay?

Once you understand the cause of content decay that your website is experiencing, you can take the following steps to overcome the issues. 

1. Maintain Freshness in Your Content

You should regularly update your website content with the latest information and relevant data. Adding just a few lines or one generic paragraph won’t give your rankings back. You will need to follow a broader approach. Add the latest stats or data to it, conduct competitor analysis to identify content gaps and try to fill them, and add anything that you feel is important but missing in your content.

2. Focus on On-Page SEO

While outdated content is one reason, external or internal competition can also be a significant reason behind content decay. In order to outrank your competitors, make sure that your content is well-optimized and fulfills users’ search intent. Consider the following SEO tips to optimize your content for better performance:

• Make sure that the meta tags of your web pages contain keyword search intent.
• Make sure that the title directly appeals to your target audience and includes the primary keyword.
• Regularly review and update your keyword strategy. See which keywords are performing well and update content written around those keywords. 
• Make sure that keywords are incorporated naturally and are not forced into the content.
• Fulfill users’ search intent and make sure you are adding value to your target audience.
• Structure your content in such a manner that it makes sense and is easily understood by the users.

3. Develop New Content

After conducting an SEO audit and SEO competitor analysis, if you think that you are missing out on some potential content opportunities, just start grabbing them. There might be keywords that all your competitors are ranking for, but you have not even targeted. Start targeting such keywords and create content around them. 

If you have already been creating content around such keywords but the content isn’t performing well, it may be because your competitors are covering that topic more thoroughly. So, just add new pieces of content around that topic, create topic clusters, and try to establish higher authority on that topic.

4. Focus on Link Building

Internal links and backlinks also play a crucial role in your website’s search engine rankings. If your content is no longer getting any backlinks, there is a high chance that it will experience content decay. To avoid this, try to follow a powerful backlink strategy and get more sites linking to your content. Also, internal linking can make crawling and indexing easier as it enables search engines to easily find your web pages. So, just make sure that every page has internal links and every page’s link has been included in some other web page.

Build a Strong Strategy Against Content Decay With MadHawks

When talking about how to fix content decay, keep in mind that you need to update information that is new. Changing historical data and just completely removing older content is not a wise solution. You can just add new information to the blogs or web pages while still keeping the older data there. The goal here is to provide the latest information to the users, but not to misguide them by replacing historical data points.

MadHawks, being a top content marketing and SEO agency, can help you keep your website content up-to-date while ensuring that it fulfills users’ search intent. If your site is experiencing content decay, you can connect with our SEO professionals to identify potential issues and get your website content properly written and updated by our content experts. For any further details, contact us today!

FAQs

1. How to fix content decay?
Ans. There are a few effective ways to fix content decay:

• Updating old content
• Acquiring more backlinks
• Optimizing website content for better SEO performance
• Creating high-quality content to gain higher niche authority

2. What are the consequences of content decay for a website or online platform?

Ans. Some potential consequences of content decay include:

• Drops in search engine rankings
• Decline in website’s organic traffic
• Drops in CTRs (Clink through Rates)
• Poor backlink performance 

3. How can I identify if my content is experiencing decay?

Ans. Here are a few tools or platforms that you can use to identify content decay:

• Google Analytics
• Google Search Console
• SEMrush/Ahrefs

4. Can content decay be reversed, or once it sets in, is it irreversible?

Ans. Yes, content decay can be reversed. By regularly updating your website content, getting more backlinks, and ensuring proper SEO practices, you can regain your search engine rankings.

5. Can content decay affect all types of content, or are there specific formats more susceptible to it?

Ans. Yes, content decay can affect all types of website content, including blog posts, landing pages, etc.