Decoding the Life Expectancy of Your Website Content
You spend hours, sometimes even days or weeks, creating engaging content that your audience will love. You post it to your preferred social media platforms and are slowly but surely generating some user engagement. But then it stops. No more shares, likes, pins, backlinks…nothing. Since you’ve optimized your content for SEO, your focus now shifts to working towards getting to the first page of the rankings. But how long does this take? And does there come a point where your content is no longer relevant to search engines or your audience? Put simply; what is the lifespan of the content you create? Let’s dive in and find out. What is the Average Life Expectancy of Your Website Content? As far as social media goes, content shelf-life is rather short. But this isn’t that surprising. After all, MarketingProfs estimates that there are over 2 million blog posts written and published every day. A large portion of those blog posts are then featured on social media platforms, which is why it’s just not possible for content to last long there. Check out these content lifespan stats from Boost the News… For a majority of these blog posts, about 74% of them, website traffic related to the post peaks on the day it is published. Within one week, traffic drops drastically by an average of 90%. And after one month, the average traffic to the content is a mere 1.7% of the peak total. Yikes! The life expectancy of your website content is looking rather dire. So, based on social media engagement and initial website traffic, we’re looking at a content life span between three hours and one week. That’s pretty disappointing. Especially after you spent about the same amount of time creating the content. But fortunately, it doesn’t stop there. Search engines provide the ultimate opportunity to extend the life of your content. And it’s where the majority of your focus should lie. The 4 Major Factors That Determine the Lifespan of Your Content Google makes changes to their algorithm at a rate of about 500-600 times per year. Many of these changes are subtle and go unnoticed. But that wasn’t the case when they introduced their new web indexing system, Caffeine, in June of 2010. The goal of the new indexing system was to provide 50% fresher results for web searches. What that meant for website owners was that, in order for their content to stay relevant and featured in search rankings long-term, they needed to take certain actions to make that happen. And while this ranking modification happened way back in 2010, Google continues to improve their indexing to value fresh content above all else. But what exactly is ‘fresh content’? And what can you do to make sure your content remains fresh? Let’s take a look at the four most important factors. 1. The Strength of the Content In any evaluation of the life expectancy of content, we’d be silly not to mention the importance of the actual strength of the content. It’s easy to judge the life expectancy of bad content. Maybe, if your headline is good enough and you share it on social media, it’ll last a few hours or even days. But is that what you’re really going for? Without great content, there are no backlinks. There is no engagement. There is nothing but a few hours of curious people clicking the link to your article and promptly leaving your website as they realize that you aren’t delivering what your headline promises. So, before anything else, you need to put in the work to create amazing, SEO optimized content. 2. Inception Date Like a lot of things with Google’s algorithms and ranking methods, the influence of the inception date is difficult to measure. What we do know, however, is that there can be two different types of inception scores. Justin Briggs, of Briggsby SEO, lays it out like this: Once the search engines have defined an inception date, it becomes a part of the Freshness Score of the content. Briggs simplified how this works through this graph: As you can see, search results initially lean towards the content with the most recent inception date. This is especially true when you’re dealing with queries that are date sensitive (ex. sports scores, data, statistics, etc.). But, after a certain amount of time has passed, the influence of the inception date is no longer as valuable. And, at this point, the factors that follow begin to take precedent. 3. Updates to Core Content As would be expected, regularly updated content receives a higher Freshness Score than content that’s never updated. But the amount and type of change also directly impacts how much the score changes. In Google’s 2011 US Patent application on Document Scoring, they mention: “In order to not update every link’s freshness from a minor edit of a tiny unrelated part of a document, each updated document may be tested for significant changes (e.g., changes to a large portion of the document or changes to many different portions of the document) and a link’s freshness may be updated (or not updated) accordingly.” As an example, let’s say you put together a blog post in 2014 titled ‘The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Ads’. If you were to go in today and simply change the link along with the date and time tags, Google would almost certainly ignore the change. If, however, you were to go in and update the content based on modern day best practices for Facebook Ads, you’d be much more likely to have your Freshness Score positively affected. And this all makes sense. After all, Google didn’t become the biggest search engine in the world by accident. They did it by ensuring that user search queries were consistently answered with the best possible results. The only way to do that is to provide updated, relevant results. At the end of the day, if you want to extend the life of your content, it’s crucial that … Read more
