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Decoding the Life Expectancy of Your Website Content

January 1, 2021June 7, 2017 by Adam Oakley

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

How to Create A Strategy for Deploying Content to Improve Your Site’s Ranking & Visibility

December 31, 2020August 6, 2015 by Josh McCoy

Annie is a Content Manager at Express Writers. Developing a content strategy can easily seem like it can be a futile exercise. Many people don’t have a clue about where to start when it comes to putting together a detailed plan for what their content should do and what sort of demographic it should be aimed at. The truth of the matter is that overthinking content marketing can be dangerous. Instead of focusing on the minor details, what you should be aiming for is to see the big picture. It’s only through that you will actually be able to experience the true power of content marketing the way it was meant to be used. The Blank Slate Theory & Your Content Strategy As artist Joe Madureira says, a blank slate is as exciting as it is daunting. What we propose to do through a blank slate comparison is to see how a company starting from no website or content marketing strategy can utilize the tools of developing a content strategy to be successful. In this fictionalized case study we will be utilizing a two-phase plan for the creation of a detailed content strategy that can be used to improve a website’s ranking and visibility. Methodology Behind Our Experiment Utilizing a free tool like Google Analytics allows us to easily track the key performance indicators (KPI’s) that we’re interested in. Indicators such as number of visitors and unique visitors over time allow us to gauge the success of our content marketing strategy. If we want to be more specific we can set up funnels in Google Analytics in order to track clicks from what content leads to which page to determine the most popular content for attracting users. The numbers from Google Analytics will be our guide to how well our content strategy is doing, just like in real life. Content Strategy Phase One: The Basics There are a handful of things that a basic content strategy should have in place as a jumping off point. These form the framework for your future content production and also aids in your SEO compatibility and your search rank score. These things are the very basics but even though they seem to be unnecessary at the start, they are a powerful means of attracting traffic and formulating leads. The basic start for a website’s content strategy comes from incorporating these key elements: 1. META tags: META tags aid in helping to describe a page’s content to a search engine. Including META tags in your site setup ensures that you are able to include the most important elements that you would expect to get your page noticed. The more relevant information you include in your META data the better your search relevancy will be. This translates into increased traffic from search engines, as relevancy is extremely important to users. No one wants to click a page and end up somewhere they didn’t expect to be. 2. Keywords: These are words that describe the content on your page and allow a user to be aware of what the site they are visiting is about. Used in combination with META description tags, your keywords form the backbone of your content strategy in the realm of SEO. You don’t want too much of your keywords cluttering up your page since search engines are usually wary of too high a keyword density. Ideally, your keyword density should lie between 3% and 5% for any particular keyword set. 3. Product Descriptions: These give your site the look and feel of a professional company and also gives Google something to reference. Your product descriptions should also have keywords considered and should conform to the limit of 3% to 5% as well. Keeping this figure is enough to satisfy the search engine that you’re not keyword stuffing just to make your content more popular. The descriptions should be meaningful as far as possible and written for the user. It’s a true test of balancing your content writing in order to appeal to both search engine robots and the average user. 4. Basic Content: Basic content gives your site a barebones for further development of content as time goes by. Through your basic content you are trying to attract users and at the same time get them to do something. Whether it’s subscribing to an email list or clicking over to a product page, your basic content should be original and should appeal to the customer. It should bring value to the customer’s life in some way. That is the hallmark of good content. Content Strategy Phase Two: Advanced Operations After setting up the initial barebones on the blank slate website, we can now proceed to monitor it for a period of time to see how it evolves and develops in terms of traffic. This sets a benchmark from where we can go on to the advanced part of the exploration and the key motivator for developing a content strategy. Does content really make a difference in generating leads and increasing visits? Let’s find out by utilizing the major vehicles of content marketing: 1. Blogs: Blogging has long been accepted as one of the ways to generate traffic and to keep your website fresh to attract new visitors. Search engines enjoy blogs because they tend to deal with a particular niche and once the search engine determines the niche the blog is in it’s easy to direct relevant traffic to the site. Blogs allow for a company or website to focus on creating high-quality content that appeals to their target demographic. Through this content the company can generate new leads or conversions, or develop customer loyalty by focusing on providing useful content to their users. Blogs need to be updated regularly in order to remain relevant. Updating too much can cause useful information to be lost. There’s a fine balance to walk here, but doing it well is worth the effort. 2. Social Media: The newest way for websites to interact with customers directly … Read more