We’ve all been there—our search-optimized content starts off strong, quickly earning keywords and traffic. Then, over time, that traffic gradually trails off.
What gives? It’s called content decay, and no blog post or guide is immune.
Thankfully, there’s a fairly simple, two-step fix:
- Monitor your content for decay
- Update your content to stop—and reverse—decay
What causes content decay?
Before you can fix content decay, you need to know what causes it.
Google and other search engines are constantly updating their results for each search term, in an effort to give users the most relevant content.
Let’s pretend you published a search-optimized blog post.
Users were searching for your topic, and Google considered your post relevant for one or more search terms. The search engine served it up to users in the SERPs. The title of your post and your meta description piqued searchers’ interest, and they clicked to view the full piece on your blog. Both the search engine and its users found your piece relevant—success!
The content is losing currency
When you start seeing content decay, it's because one or more of these fundamental elements of search performance have changed:
- Declining interest. Users are no longer searching for your topic or are using different terms to find the information.
- Decline in relevance. Google is no longer finding your content to be a relevant resource for the topic and has placed your piece lower in the SERPs.
- Decrease in click appeal. Users are finding your title and meta description less relevant and are no longer clicking to your content.
Search engine behavior is changing
Why are you seeing less interest, relevance, and/or click appeal? There are a variety of factors involved:
- Evolution of search intent. The conversation around the topic may have evolved, resulting in different keyword searches or a shift in what users expect to find when searching for those terms.
- Stronger competing content. Competitors may have published new or updated content that Google and users find more comprehensive, accurate, or helpful.
- Search engine algorithm updates. Google likes to keep us all on our toes by changing up the factors in its search engine rankings, which can affect how your content performs in search results.
Your page is suffering from neglect
- Issues with content freshness. Statistics, examples, technologies, how-tos, or best practices in your content have become outdated.
- Technical problems. Your page may be suffering from broken links, content that no longer matches your title and/or meta description, slowing page speed, poor mobile compatibility, or other technical issues that develop over time.
How to identify content decay
The first step to stopping content decay is to find it, and that means monitoring the performance of your existing content.
The most important sign of content decay is a decline in search traffic—which pieces of content have seen a drop in organic traffic compared to their levels in prior months?
Like this ércule post on how to build a keyword strategy:
Find the relevant data from GA4
Many people attempt to keep an eye on organic traffic to their content with Google Analytics:
- Choose Engagement > Pages and screens from the left hand navigation.
- Choose your time range and comparison period. We recommend comparing the past 90 days to the previous 90 days.
- At the top of the page, click the button to add a filter.
- In the right hand menu, choose Session medium as your dimension, exactly matches as your match type, and organic as your value.
- Document the content pieces with a decline in organic traffic. Keep track of total traffic potential (highest traffic levels) and percentage decline.
This process can be tedious in GA4—especially if you have a lot of content, and especially if you’re reviewing your performance regularly.
Identify content decay with the ércule app
In the ércule app, you can quickly see which content pieces are losing traffic in a single step:
Just choose the Declining view of your content library in the left hand nav.
This view uses data from Google Analytics and Google Search Console to automatically surface any of your pages that have seen a 15%+ decline in traffic over the past three months compared to the previous three months.
Look for content pieces that have been generating significant traffic in the past. Prioritize these pieces first—you stand to see the biggest gains by fixing them.
How to stop content decay
Once you’ve identified pieces with a decline in organic traffic and prioritized them by potential impact, it’s time to identify problems—and freshen things up.
Starting at the top of your list, review each content piece against the factors that can contribute to content decay.
Questions to ask yourself:
- Has the conversation around this topic changed since publication? If so, how?
- Is any of the content (statistics, references, technologies, how-to steps, points of view, etc.) out of date?
- Have new pieces been published that cover the topic in more depth?
- Have new pieces been published that offer simpler language and/or better examples?
- Have new pieces been published that offer better images, graphics, videos, etc.?
- Do all of the links still work? Is the content on the destination pages still up-to-date?
- Do the title, meta description, and section headers all still make logical sense? And does the article deliver on these promises?
- Are there any SEO best practices you are not following?
Focus on fixing the specific issues you identify in each piece, then republish.
Pro tip—sometimes a refresh isn’t going to cut it.
Your content may need a full rewrite if:
- Core industry understanding or best practices have shifted dramatically.
- The depth and quality gap between your content and top-ranking pages is substantial.
- The article structure doesn't align with current user intent.
- Your brand voice or positioning has evolved significantly.
- Bounce rates are very high (85%+), which indicates lack of relevance.
Related content: How to increase search traffic with content optimization
Balance new content production with existing content updates
It’s easy to get stuck on the hamster wheel of producing new content. But to get the most out of your production efforts and investments, you should also be updating content over time.
We recommend baking these updates right into your content marketing strategy. Plan to review your content for decay at least quarterly, then add your updates into the following quarter’s production plan.
The ércule app makes it simple to review your content for decay.
Try it for free today to see which of your content pieces could use a refresh this quarter.
