seoloungeImagine this; you have worked tirelessly on building your website’s content and is getting good traffic. However, after a few years, the traffic for that content starts falling. You will see how all your hard work starts vanishing, and your website ranking falls. It is a thrill to see how your blog post ranks on the top in the SERPs, but later falls and is heartbreaking to see. This is where content decay happens.
One of the studies found that there are more than 4 million blog posts published daily. If your blog post does not even get near to it or come into the reader’s eyes, then it is discouraging. This is when you need to know about content decay.
What is Content Decay?
In simple words, content decay is declining in traffic over the period. Sometimes, this is directly related to ranking in the SERPs, which happens over a period.
There are multiple reasons why content decay happens.
Brands are focusing more moving forward, than looking back
As the company grows, traffic increases and algorithm changes, content marketers keep looking forward to leaving old content behind. They stop promoting old content in the form of ad campaigns and other areas. This halt results in a direct loss of the traffic for the blog posts.
Google looks for New Content
Google loves to read and market-fresh content and prioritise the blog that has up-to-date information. If Google finds, the site has fresh content, regularly occurring events and frequent updates; there is a high chance of content getting high ranking. Therefore, if you have been updating the blog posts regularly, your old posts are automatically stuck.
New Competitors may emerge to snag your SERP spot
Running an online company isn’t a cakewalk, and there is regular competition. To face new competition and stay ahead, web owners and content marketers need to keep posting new content to avoid being snagged from SERP spot.
How does content decay impacts SEO?
If you thing content decay and SEO are very different, then you are entirely wrong. If there is a content decay, then SEO is majorly impacted. Once you are out of SERP column, the traffic ultimately falls. This fall of traffic could be frustrating because you have spent a lot of time and money over it, you cannot see your website and content ranking falling.
You need to keep in mind that even a drop from one or third spot can significantly affect your SEO and ranking.
How to fix the content decay thing?
There are several ways on how you can keep the traffic flow in and avoid content decay. One of the best ways is to hire a reputed SEO marketing agency in Chennai to help in working towards the content decay.
Some quick actions you can take to avoid content decay:
- Keep the expanding the word count with new trend and examples.
- Re-promote the updated content to your email list and social
- Add internal links from other blogs of your website.
Some other way effective ways to avoid content decay are:
Expand your Past Blog Posts
When you update your old posts, you need to keep current aspects in mind and expand the content accordingly. Read the complete content and see what lacks and add more flavour to increase the chance of getting read and visitors stay on the site. You can also see if there are questions or comments from readers, so you can answer their question by adding content. This will bring them back to the site or will increase the traffic.
Updating with New Information
As mentioned above, Google loves a website that has the latest content and updates content regularly. Irrespective of the domain or content, you need to check what new and update the information accordingly. If it has been years of posting, there are chances that the information is old and are not relevant to the current scenario. You need to review old content and note what new and additional content you can add.
Change and Update Keywords
When you update the content, keep keywords in mind too—keyword work according to the popularity. The post you published a few years back having popular keywords, may not be popular effecting your overall ranking resulting in the content decay. Make use of tools like Google Analytics and others to research and learn which keywords are working as per the post you want to update. Use keywords naturally to ensure your post get good traffic and ranks high.
Work on Link-Building Strategy
Link building campaigns can work best on your newly updated post. If you are writing guest posts for other brands, then prioritize driving links towards the edited post. This will help in boosting SEO. In addition to this, you can also work on internal links from other posts of your site. Google understands the content structure of your site and will help in gaining traffic.
Conclusion
Content decay is the most complicated thing happens for posts which were once popular, but the finding has to gain traffic now. You will be busy managing your business growth and have less concentration on your blog post, affecting the traffic. The best you can do is hire a reputed SEO agency in Chennai that handles content decay problem and keeps posting new content and updating the previous ones.
