Episode Summary
Creating unique content becomes challenging as the business climate and customers’ knowledge and preferences change. But, as we established a while ago, we don’t expect content creators to reinvent the wheel. Instead, an occasional walk down your blog’s ”memory lane” helps reintroduce old topics, analyze their current performance, and determine where change is necessary.
Nate Turner, the CEO & co-founder of Ten Speed, joins us in this episode of Content Logistics to discuss the causes and consequences of content decay and how companies should deal with it to prevent it from hurting their growth.
Guest Profile
- Name: Nate Turner
- What he does: Nate is the CEO & co-founder of Ten Speed, a content optimization agency helping SaaS companies build and scale their content engine by leveraging content marketing and SEO.
- Company: Ten Speed
- Noteworthy: Nate was the first marketer at Sprout Social. He worked on content marketing and SEO to help drive revenue and build the processes and systems to scale the blog to a million monthly visits. He has also worked as a consultant for several SaaS companies.
Key Insights
- Most of the content we create is not evergreen. That's why every content strategy must involve not only content creation but also reevaluation. Otherwise, you risk losing prospects because of stale content. For example, ''You're working hard to build this content program: hiring writers in-house or sourcing writers, or working with agencies and building this process, figuring out what you wanna write about, figure out what the voice is. You're putting all this work into building this program. And if you're ignoring that factor, then you have this undercurrent of content working against you over time. You're publishing new content each month that's bringing in thousands of new clicks, but you're also losing hundreds or thousands each month from older stuff declining that you're not paying attention to.''
- However, don't rush into premature evaluations — a short answer to when to revisit and refresh published posts. A more detailed explanation is: ''There are two factors that are dependent on each other: the amount of content you have and how long you've been doing it. For example, we're not at a high-volume publishing approach. We have about 30 posts, but some of them are almost two years old at this point. [...] So [...] no one should worry about it in the first year to maybe 18 months of publishing [content] unless they're going after competitive stuff.''
- It's not always clear when the content will start to decay. Still, changing existing content is often a double-edged sword. Companies need tools and processes working in tandem to detect and react promptly to unfavorable changes. ''There's a finite point in which it shifts from ‘this is performing well’ to ‘here may be an issue.’ And so you don't want to address it proactively when it's performing well because some pieces could perform well for another three to six months. So why waste your bandwidth assuming it's going to be a problem and doing that? So that's what I think requires some of the systems — that there's like, it's fine until it isn't. And then you have to start understanding why.''
Episode Highlights
Indicators of Content Going Stale
”There’s a couple of factors. Before you even get into any performance or organic performance, some things happen within your company that can cause your content to go stale: the product has been updated, and the screenshots are old, or the way you talk about the product, or you’re not referencing the new features you’ve built.
All kinds of stuff internally work against you before you even get into any performance aspect — external competition that has done something better than you on that topic. Sometimes, you have an internal competition where you create multiple things that need to be played nicely together.
So you have external factors, internal factors, and general search, and that’s per page on your site. And so you multiply that across all the pages, and that’s where it gets a bit more complex.”
The Dynamics of Content Monitoring and How to Approach It
”There’s more tooling that’s bubbling up. It’s never going to replace everything that has to go into watching and analyzing it.
We made it a part of our process and built content calendars and topic roadmaps one month in advance. And so we had a time each month when our team was looking at the data to understand some of the new topics we should be building in to continue to build on this topic authority.
But then also, looking at the existing data and seeing where things have been declining over the last few months that need to get added into that. So it became part of the monthly planning process. […]
And then, you also want to say that here are the URLs that are high performing for us. We know these are revenue-generating, or they bring in a ton of traffic and backlinks, and we always want to be checking these and keep them on our radar. So even if they don’t come up in that three-month over three-month view, it should be another step: to look at the most important pages.”
How to Determine Whether Your Content Approaches the Yellow Zone of Content Decay
”There are qualitative and quantitative aspects to it. [First], you should just read the content.
It’s not just about the data and whether or not you’re losing impressions or clicks or anything like that. Read the content and understand, ‘Does this still fit what we’re doing? Does this still speak to our ICP?’
The other is checking across a couple of factors. So where you feel the pain more is when you start to lose traffic. And that leads to not having signups, demo requests, and not having revenue. So that’s where you feel the pain. But again, the early indicators that we want to check for are, ‘Is this starting to lose impressions?’ […]
Impressions are not just impressions like, oh, who cares? It’s a symptom of what’s going on that you dig in and look at the query level for that specific piece to understand what we are missing.”
Content Has Gone Stale, What Now?
”It’s still a data perspective and the same signals. It’s just that it becomes more definitive. You’re experiencing the loss, and then, when you analyze some of the SERPs around where you’re losing, you could see, ‘Okay, yeah, what we have versus what appears to be the intent behind this doesn’t match up.’ […]
The other piece to remember is the internal competition. At Sprout, we had tons of content. Twitter Analytics was a big general query. And so, we had a Twitter Analytics feature page. We talked about Twitter Analytics and some of the solution stuff. And then we easily had dozens of posts on Twitter Analytics.
And so, over time, as you keep adding more on certain topics, certain queries can overlap, and then it becomes conflicting internally. And that can ultimately confuse the search engine and make it difficult.”
