Content plays a key role in helping brands generate traction and attract a relevant audience to their platform. It enables brands to convey their message and promote their solutions to the right people.
However, for your content to get you the best results, you need to ensure that it’s relevant and up-to-date. The content you publish may lose its value over time. This may happen due to a number of reasons, such as algorithm updates, information obsolescence, dying trends, intent changes representing your target audience and so on.
Content decay is a common challenge for businesses with an online presence. It may severely affect their visibility online and cause a drop in organic traffic.
It also affects your ability to engage the intended audience and generate quality leads. So, it’s best to detect the problem before it’s too late and take the necessary measures to fix it.
This article will explore the impact of content decay, help you identify it, and guide you on how to fix it.
What is content decay?
Content decay refers to the decrease in relevance of the information you publish and share with your target audience.
The content you publish on your website may lose its effectiveness over time, which severely affects your online presence and organic performance.
A number of factors may cause your content to lose value. Your content’s freshness and relevance decrease with time, making it unable to help people find answers to their questions and explore relevant solutions to their problems.
This affects your ability to engage your target audience and has a devastating impact on your search engine performance.
Around 82% of businesses say that content marketing is an integral part of their business strategy. To optimize your content marketing yield, it’s best to periodically update your content and make necessary changes to ensure its relevance.
Causes of content decay
To identify and fix content decay, you should know what causes it first. There are a number of factors that may contribute to content decay. The following are noteworthy:
Industry trends
As industries undergo changes over time, new trends emerge, dictating the relevance of information published online. These trends introduce new standards and contemporary best practices, which severely affect the value of the content you previously published.
Updating existing content is an integral part of content marketing strategy for 51% of businesses. So, it’s best to be on the lookout for emerging trends or changes in market dynamics to ensure the information you share is up-to-date and effectively engages the intended audience.
Algorithm updates
Algorithm updates representing leading search engines and social media platforms contribute to content decay. To stay relevant and make your content readily accessible to your target audience, it’s best to adapt to these changes.
Competitive landscape
Sometimes, your competitors outmaneuver you and publish more authoritative and higher-quality content than you. This may cause decay and make your content irrelevant. Their take on a particular topic may be more in-depth and offer greater value, which may cause a decline in search engine rankings and organic traffic from other platforms.
Audience preferences
Your target audience’s needs, interests and preferences may change over time. What used to engage them effectively may not appeal to them now, making your content obsolete. So, the best course of action here is to know your audience and tailor the information you share with them to best serve their interests.
Link death
Link death also causes content decay. Businesses often leverage credible sources of information to create quality content. To give credit to those sources for their research, they use external links within the content published.
Over time, the information you used to create content may become obsolete, or the websites you link to may remove the respective pages. This leads to poor user experience and compromises the relevance of the content you share with your audience.
How to identify content decay
You can identify content decay by monitoring the essential metrics that reflect your content’s performance. However, looking at your overall performance may be misleading.
To identify the decay, you must assess the performance of each of your pages separately. This may seem like a daunting task, but it’s a necessary step to identifying the problem.
- Start by assessing the traffic patterns for your respective pages. A steady decline in traffic is a huge red flag, especially if a particular page has performed well for you in the past.
- Check indicators like average time on page, bounce rate and engagement rate to determine whether your content is engaging the intended audience.
- A drop in search engine rankings may also indicate content decay. If your respective pages are consistently losing their rankings, it means that search engines no longer consider them relevant or worthy recommendations for targeted queries.
- Consider periodically reviewing your external links to see if the information you used remains unchanged and the pages are still accessible.
- Analyze your content as per the current best practices. Algorithm updates may cause your content to age and perform poorly compared to the past.
- Consider assessing audience sentiment on relevant platforms online. See if people have been pointing out mistakes in the information shared by you, and let their feedback guide you to improve your content’s performance.
- Analyze your competitors and explore their content. If you see their content getting more engagement and outperforming yours with respect to search engine visibility, it indicates that you need to revise your content strategy.
- Tracking the latest trends can also help identify content decay. To ensure relevance, you should explore the market dynamics and familiarize yourself with your target audience’s changing interests.
How to fix content decay
There are a number of ways that you can consider to fix content decay and amplify engagement. Here are a few we think to be the most effective:
Schedule quick updates
Scheduling quick updates is an excellent strategy for fixing content decay. Here, you update your old content periodically – checking to see if facts and stats are still accurate, for example – and make the necessary changes to improve its value.
You should also check to see if the information you share still addresses the interests and pain points of the intended audience.
Furthermore, you need to check if the relevant information is easily accessible through the internal and external links included in your content.
When dealing with quick updates, you also explore the feedback shared by your audience and rectify the mistakes highlighted.
Content expansion
Content expansion caters to improving the topical depth of the information you share with your audience. Here, you add more depth to your content by focusing on the keywords or queries related to your main topic.
You can do so by increasing the word count, adding subheadings, leveraging visual content, including user-generated content and answering frequently asked questions.
Search engine optimization
Your content always targets particular queries or use cases. It facilitates your audience’s access to useful information and helps them find answers to their questions.
However, search engines readily update algorithms and revise their content quality guidelines. Currently, they regard user experience above all else and provide recommendations accordingly.
Therefore, it’s best to ensure that the information shared by you is easy to understand and navigate. To improve your visibility online, you should explore new queries or changes in intent that your posts should cater to and optimize your content accordingly.
Pruning
While deleting content you worked so hard to create may seem like a tough decision, when some of your published pages do more harm than good and are beyond repair, it’s best to prune them. For example, the pages you created back in the day, when keyword stuffing was a staple of SEO strategies, are no longer relevant. Today, those pages violate Google’s spam policies and are best to remove.
It’s best to prune content that’s highly underperforming, as it may have a devastating impact on the rest of your pages.
Consolidation
Over time, you may publish content on similar or overlapping topics. This may cause redundancy and compromise the experience you offer your audience. Consolidating such pages and merging them into a single detailed post may serve as a viable strategy to prevent content decay. Since these pages are created around similar topics, they technically compete with one another for better search engine visibility.
Merging these pages enables you to add more depth to your content and help you cultivate thought leadership.
Final words
If you’ve been curious about content decay and its devastating effects, we’ve covered them in great detail. If you’ve been grappling with content decay, this article not only tells you how to identify it but also presents viable solutions to fix it.