How to Stop Content Decay in SEO
SEO Company Scotland We all know that great content can drive lots of traffic to your website. But what happens when that traffic plateaus or even starts to decline?
That’s when you have to be proactive. This article will cover strategies you can use to identify content decay and recover organic search traffic.
1. Repurpose Your Content
Just like living organisms, content and products have a life cycle. Once they reach the end of that cycle, it’s time to start considering what to do next. If left unchecked, decaying content can lead to a decline in organic traffic, rankings and conversions. But the good news is that there are several ways to stop this from happening.
One of the best ways to fight content decay is by repurposing your existing content. This could include rewriting it, refreshing it or updating it to make it relevant again.
This is an excellent way to boost your SEO because search engines love fresh content. It also gives you an advantage over competitors who may have forgotten about or abandoned their old content.
Repurposing your content can be as simple as taking a blog post and turning it into an infographic or video. For example, if you have a blog post that is getting a lot of organic traffic, you can take the main points of it and turn them into a slide presentation or infographic to share on Twitter or LinkedIn.
You can also refresh a blog post by adding new information or statistics to it. This will make it seem more relevant and current, which can help it recover lost organic traffic. It’s important to note that repurposing your content isn’t a magic bullet, and you should still monitor your analytics to ensure that your organic traffic isn’t dropping.
It’s also important to have a strategy in place before you create your content. This will ensure that your team is creating the right types of content and repurposing them in the most effective way.
Oftentimes, content marketers will have an idea of how they want to repurpose their content before it’s even created. This can be a great way to save time and money while ensuring that your content marketing is on track. Having a strategy in place will also make it easier to identify and address any issues that arise. This can be as simple as logging into your analytics and seeing a decline in organic traffic to more serious issues, such as a loss in organic rankings.
2. Update Old Content
You have invested time and resources into a successful content strategy, but your organic traffic growth is plateauing or even declining. What went wrong? It’s easy to get caught up in creating and launching new content, leaving your old content in the dust. Unfortunately, this can have negative consequences on your SEO performance.
One reason for content decay is that search engine algorithms change, and the intent behind keywords shifts over time. Google aims to provide the most relevant results for each query, so if search intent has changed and your content doesn’t align with it, you may notice a drop in organic traffic.
Another reason for content decay is that competitors may have published a better piece of content around the same topic. This can happen for a number of reasons, from improved SEO tactics to simply having more authoritative backlinks. To identify this, you can use tools like Clearscope and Google Analytics to track the performance of individual pages or articles.
Once you know which pieces are suffering from decay, the best approach is to update them as much as possible. This means adding new information, fact checking outdated statistics and ensuring that the content is still aligned with user intent. Depending on the extent of the decay, you may need to rewrite entire articles or sections to bring them up to speed.
It’s important to understand that content decay is a natural part of the life cycle for any website, and it’s not something that will suddenly stop happening – it’s something that should be anticipated and planned for. To overcome this, businesses need to implement a long-term content strategy that balances the creation of new content with the maintenance and updating of existing content.
This will help to ensure that your content is always fresh, aligned with current search intent and that it is able to compete effectively against other websites on the SERP. By implementing this strategy, businesses can recover lost traffic and boost their organic search performance. If you’d like to learn more about how to develop and execute a long-term content plan, get in touch.
3. Create New Content
Creating new content is a critical aspect of SEO. However, it’s important to make sure that you have a balance between creating new content and updating existing content. Otherwise, your website could suffer from content decay.
If you’re not regularly updating your content, you may notice that some of your pages begin to decline in their organic search performance over time. This is called content decay, and it can occur for a variety of reasons.
For example, your content might become outdated due to new research or industry trends. In addition, your competitors might create better quality content on the same topic and outrank you in search results. This can be difficult to overcome, but it is important to keep in mind that SEO is a competitive field and that it’s normal for your content to lose rank over time.
Another reason your content might lose rank is that it’s no longer relevant or helpful to users. In this case, you’ll want to consider adding more helpful information to your content or updating it with the latest insights on the subject. This can help you improve your organic search performance and attract more visitors to your website.
Finally, your content might lose rank because it’s competing with other pages on your site for the same keyword. This is known as cannibalisation and can be difficult to identify. To check whether your content is suffering from cannibalisation, you can use Google Analytics or search console to filter for organic traffic and look at the performance of individual pages over time.
If you find that some of your pages are no longer performing well, it’s important to take action immediately. By regularly auditing your content and updating it when necessary, you can ensure that your website is always providing the best possible experience for your users and attracting the most organic search traffic. With so many websites vying for top spot in SERPs, it’s essential to keep your content up-to-date and on-brand in order to stay ahead of the competition.
4. Boost Traffic
Even the most well-written, informative articles can begin to plateau and decline in performance over time. This is because search engines change algorithms, the intent behind keywords can shift, and information quickly becomes outdated. Unfortunately, this can have a significant impact on your SEO and traffic.
While it is easy to write off a stagnating or declining piece of content as a lost cause, there are many things you can do to boost traffic and help it recover from decay. The best place to start is by looking at your Google Analytics organic traffic data to identify pages that have been losing organic traffic. You can also use a keyword tool to monitor your keyword rankings and see if there are any specific keywords that are not performing as well as they used to.
When analyzing your traffic data, it is important to take into account seasonality and any other factors that may have been at play. However, it is also critical to look at the overall trend and compare data over a longer period of time to identify any potential issues that need to be addressed.
Another reason why your content may be losing organic traffic is because it has been outranked by competitors. This is a common occurrence as the SEO industry is highly competitive. It is also possible that newer, more detailed content has been published on the topic, which may be driving more organic traffic.
It is also important to consider whether the content is still relevant to the user's intent. Google is constantly evaluating search intent and trying to deliver results that satisfy the user's query. If the user's intent has changed, then your old content may be outranked by more current content that better answers their question. This is why it is so important to focus on understanding user intent when creating new content. By ensuring that your content is aligned with the users' needs, you will be able to drive more organic traffic to your site over time.
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