What is Content Decay? And How to Fix It

It is frustrating to see that organic traffic, backlinks, or conversion rates are going down significantly for content that used to rank well when you have invested a lot of time and money into creating a solid content marketing plan.

Whether it is due to optimization problems, dead links, or content that has become irrelevant and does not meet the user’s purpose, we have helped our clients identify these problems and solve them for better marketing campaigns.

Fortunately, it is easy to recognize and fix content degeneration if one knows what to look for—the symptoms.

In this article, we will show you how to make sure that your content stays relevant and continues to generate traffic.

What does the term content decay mean?

Content decay is the progressive decline in the usefulness, accessibility, and effectiveness of content posted on the Internet. Suppose this problem is not singled out and handled. In that case, your business will be kneeling on a significant loss of revenue and a damaging blow to the ROI of your content marketing strategies.

What is the reason behind content decay?

There are several reasons why content decays. Let us examine a few of the most prevalent ones:

• Relevance loss: It is a factor when industry growth and new learnings or shifts in trends occur in the content development process. This makes it less valuable and less appealing to the audience that seeks up-to-date information.
• Technological changes: Material that does not feature updates in terms of the revolutionized technology or modifications in algorithms, particularly in the search engine and social media sites, may reduce the relevance or visibility of the material.
• Enhanced competition: The never-ending creation of content with topics similar to yours could reduce the visibility of your content by pushing it down in search results or even relegating it to the second page altogether.
• Audience shifts: The targeted audience, which was once interested in some content type, might lose interest in it at the current period for several reasons.
• Link rot: The quality and reliability of your content can be compromised because external sources in content materials become inactive or dead as a result of several factors, such as website modification or deletion of specific pages from the Internet.
• Changes in searcher intent: The reasons for user searches might change. For example, in 2000, people looking for electric vehicles were interested in informative material. At present, similar queries are made for transactional purposes.
• Search updates: Your old content may lose visibility and rankings because of new Google search updates, including the recent proper content update.

How does content decay impact your marketing and SEO plans?

First of all, content decay may not seem to be a critical problem at first. However, it is essential to point out that the majority of the pages that are ranking at the top of the SERPs are at least two years old. As such, most brands rely on slightly older posts to drive most of the organic traffic to their website.

Your SEO strategy may be impacted in a variety of ways if older items begin to rank lower, including:

Decreased organic traffic

As a general rule, CTRs are lower on SERPs in lower positions. If a piece of content is no longer relevant or if a competitor has pushed you down the ranks, you will get less traffic.

If this happens for multiple items, you may notice a drop in the number of visitors from the search engines to your site.

Fewer chances to get backlinks

That is why citing authoritative sources in their posts is helpful for other marketers. If your posts are in the first three positions for the target keywords, these posts are more likely to be seen and referenced by brands.

On the other hand, when your SEO rankings are low, the opposite happens. When people search for sources, the authors of the content will not get to your URL right away. On the other hand, competitor articles will get more focus and backlinks that support their expansion.

The brand awareness is lowered.

Google gets more than 243 million visits every day. A large number of people come across SERP results every day. When your URLs appear in the search results, the keyword, along with your domain and brand name, is seen by the searchers, even if they do not click on the URL.

Techniques for Detecting the Content Staleness in Existing Content

For content marketing to work, one has to have an idea of the stage at which content is on the Internet. It starts with the idea and goes through development, production, marketing, evaluation, and abandonment. There is a need to recognize this voyage as it defines your content plan in the long term and can quickly detect signs of content degradation.

The reasons for content decay can be numerous, and it is often not one reason, but several at once. Hence, there is a need to define the indicators of the content’s state to determine when change is necessary. However, it will help you devise a better strategy so that such an incident does not happen in the future.

Content Continuity

The first of the most common signs of content degradation is the presence of information that is no longer relevant. Google prefers fresh and well-optimized content to old and unoptimized content, as stated above. The age of content is not a problem if it is optimized because it remains valid and effective for a longer time. Therefore, it becomes essential to make content search engine-friendly.

Despite the fact that it was published more than five years ago, optimized content gradually loses its effectiveness. This content may still be helpful because it is still current and it fits the current trends in search. As such, it is essential always to check on our content and update it in order to ensure that it remains active on line.

Threat of new entrants and the threat of substitutes

Another sign of content deterioration is that your competitors create better content than yours. It is pretty challenging to follow competitors as there are many websites that are interested in traffic and ranking in the same niche.

Still, other factors can cause your content’s performance to deteriorate; they include the meta-tags of the web page and the links available leading to the particular web page, and the overall relevance of the content provided to what the user was searching for. To improve the relevance of content it is necessary to analyze the activities of competitors and assess what is being done differently.

Intra organizational competition

Internal competition is a situation where two or more URL’s in your website are dealing with the same topic, therefore they are in competition with each other. This results into confusion on the part of the search engines and consequently the reduction in the performances of all the URLs that are at cross-purposes. It can also occur between different pages of your website, for example, category pages, product pages, and blog posts. This competition is difficult to define because it progresses gradually over time.

Behavior and Engagement Metrics

One of the most obvious signs that your content is getting worse is the traffic to your website. Sometimes, one may find that the traffic to their site has gradually decreased, and this might be due to the fact that your audience is no longer interested in the content that you are producing. If your website has high bounce rates or short time spent on page, it may mean that visitors need help in finding the information they were looking for or that the content of your website needs to be changed to make it more appealing. In an effort to get further insight into the success of your content, you may gather user feedback or even watch how they interact with it.

Modification in Search Intent

To improve the understanding of user’s intent, Google improves the way people engage with the SERP results. The sign of content degradation is that people can have different purposes when they use keywords to search.

For example, an article that contains the user intent of SEO for law firms could have changed into providing the ‘how to’ on SEO for law firms. To avoid the problem of reduced traffic and user interaction, it is necessary to track the user’s intent and adjust the content plan.

The Google Algorithm Changes

It breaks down to constantly improving the interface and rolling out more updates to the search functions as well as implementing new pieces of SERP features. Other search features such as featured snippets, videos, purchase results and others can help in growing traffic to your website when optimized for the features.

For instance, you have developed content that is well-ranked in the search results; but, recently Google has added a feature that shows videos in response to your query. This means that videos get the most views on your website. That is why, it is crucial to track the updates and new SERP features in Google; otherwise, CTR may decrease, and content decay may happen.

Seven ways to prevent content decay

In order to bring an article back to the growth stage, one has to update it and repost it. A more recent publication date will help your article to be ranked much higher.

However, simply changing the date is not enough. Google will crawl your content and conclude that it has not been updated for a while. Also, there is a risk of negative user response if users do not notice any difference between the two versions.

Enhance the content.

Perhaps, your current article is not full of information that you want to share with your readers. It is probably that it was not available at the time of writing; there are enhancements in all facets of our lives.

The question of how much to incorporate is a no-brainer. It may be as short as two paragraphs or as long as 1500 words. One should not worry, as Google prefers content that is both informative and exhaustive. Kindly make sure that the structure of the extant article is not affected; the supplementary information should therefore be incorporated.

Revise obsolete components

We are discussing trifling matters here: facts, links, and images. You may discover that a recent study has been conducted on the subject that more effectively supports your argument or that certain connections are no longer functional and no longer direct you to the desired articles.

Images present a somewhat unique situation: while the majority are unlikely to become obsolete, they may be either too large for a user-friendly page, lack alt tags, or lack captions.

Address concerns regarding user experience

The primary factor is the pace at which a page loads. The initial step in determining whether your article is loading slowly is to determine whether the images, videos, infographics and other visual elements have been optimized for optimal performance. In summary, they should be compressed to reduce their weight.

Nevertheless, there are additional factors that contribute to a smooth user experience. A piece of content that is simpler to consume is achieved by incorporating a table of contents, using a proper heading structure, writing shorter paragraphs, and adding captions and alt text to images (in the event that they fail to load).

Enhance internal connectivity

You are likely to have links to your other articles in your SEO articles. This not only enhances the user experience by allowing for a more thorough examination of specific aspects of the subject matter, but it also benefits search engine optimization. This is the reason why internal linking is crucial: it attracts traffic from other pages. Linking a specific article to a more successful one will assist in enhancing its performance.

Promote the content again

Promotion is the primary factor contributing to the initial surge in traffic that occurs upon the publication of a new article. Perhaps the most critical channels are your email list and social media platforms. Therefore, re-promote decaying content to increase its visibility.

Repromotion is most effective when implemented in conjunction with content updates. Did you publish an article titled “Top Marketing Trends in 2023“? Investigate the trends that are the most popular in 2024, incorporate them, and re-promote the article.

Combine comparable content.

Recall our discussion of content cannibalism. Google will suppress all articles that compete for the exact keywords and reduce their visibility in search results.

Consequently, you have the opportunity to eliminate two animals with one stone. By merging multiple articles, you can eliminate internal competition and establish a new one that you can promote. In the same way as updating content, ensure that the new element is logical and that the structure is straightforward. Redirects from the outdated articles to the new ones should also be configured.

Trim content

Yes, it is also feasible to remove content from the Internet. There are two compelling reasons why you should not be concerned, despite the fact that the action appears to be radical at first.

The initial reason is that certain content may no longer be consistent with your brand. For instance, you are no longer providing a particular service or feature, and the article was composed in association with it.

The second reason is that it is essential to maintain the relevance of the content on your website. The old article should be removed, and a redirect should be set up once the new article is published if you intend to create an updated version that will contend with it. However, even if you do not, it is of little value to maintain content that is severely outdated.

In conclusion

It is imperative to address content decay in order to preserve the relevance and efficacy of your online content. Determine which items would be enhanced through optimization, expansion, refreshment, or promotional support. This will ensure that your content remains visible, engaging, and valuable to your target audience.