Content decay analysis

What content decay analysis is

Content decay is the slow loss of visits and inquiries from a page that used to earn them. It happens quietly, over months, because the facts on the page have aged or somebody else has answered the question better. Decay analysis is the recurring check that finds those pages while the fall is still small enough to reverse.

The word that matters here is recurring. This is a standing check, run every quarter against the same list of pages, and its value comes entirely from repetition: a page that has dropped for three quarters in a row is a fact, and a page that dropped once is weather. That is what separates it from a content performance audit, which is a single thorough look at everything you have published, done once, usually at the start of a piece of strategy work. The audit tells you where you stand today. This tells you what is moving, and in which direction.

When you need it

When you have enough published pages that you cannot hold their performance in your head. Somewhere north of forty or fifty pages, and certainly if you have been publishing for more than three years, there will be pages sliding that nobody has noticed, including pages that were once the best on the site.

It is worth having in place if your business depends on a handful of pages. A single service page that quietly loses a third of its visits over a year is a real loss of money, and it will not appear in a total-visits figure, because something else will have risen to cover it.

You do not need this if you have published a dozen pages, or if everything you have is under a year old, since there is nothing to decay yet. And you do not need it as a first purchase if you have never looked at performance at all — in that case buy the one-off audit first, take the decisions it produces, and put this recurring check in place afterwards to protect the result.

What gets looked at

• The trend, not the month. Every tracked page compared against its own twelve-month history, so a summer dip in a seasonal trade is not mistaken for decay.
• Visits and inquiries separately. A page can hold its readers and stop producing contacts, which is a different illness with a different cure. Both lines are watched.
• The cause, where it can be established. Usually one of four: the facts have aged, a competitor now answers the question better, the page lost the internal links that fed it, or the thing it is about has genuinely stopped mattering.
• What it would take to fix. A judgement on each sliding page: a small update, a serious rewrite, a merge into a stronger page, or nothing, because it is over.
• The pages rising. The check also names what is climbing, which is how you discover which subject to write more about.

What you get

A quarterly list, ranked. Usually eight to fifteen pages, ordered by how much they have lost and how much they were worth. Each row carries the page, the shape of the fall, the likely cause and a one-line instruction.

A short covering note. Half a page in sentences saying which two or three pages to deal with this quarter and which to leave, because a list of fifteen with no order of attack gets abandoned.

The running record. One sheet, one column per quarter, so you can see a page that has slid four quarters in a row and a page that recovered after it was refreshed. The record is what makes the fourth check more useful than the first.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A Kingston firm selling and servicing commercial refrigeration has about one hundred and ten pages, of which perhaps twenty ever produced an inquiry. The owner's impression is that the site is steady, because the total visits figure has barely moved for two years.

The first check finds eleven pages sliding. Three are old blog posts about a refrigerant that was phased out, and they are simply finished; they go on the list for deletion. Five are service pages whose facts have aged — old response times, a service area that has since expanded, a photograph of a van in the previous livery. The remaining three are guides that lost their internal links when the navigation was rebuilt eighteen months earlier, so nothing on the site pointed at them any more. The covering note says to fix the two most valuable service pages this quarter and repoint the links, which takes a day. The second check, three months later, shows those two recovered and a sixth service page beginning to slide, caught this time in its first quarter rather than its fourth.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. How many pages you have, how long you have been publishing, what you can already measure, and whether this or a one-off audit is the right purchase. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. A price per check, or an annual figure for four of them, agreed before anything starts.
3. Set-up. Read-only access to your analytics and your inquiry form or inbox. The first check takes longer, three to five working days, because it also builds the twelve-month baseline every later check is measured against.
4. The quarterly check. One to two working days, delivered in the first week of the quarter: the ranked list, the covering note, the record updated.
5. The follow-up. The next check reports on whether last quarter's fixes worked, which is the part most reporting never does.

What it costs

Quoted in CAD after the half-hour call, because the work scales with how many pages are being tracked and how clean the measurement already is. A standing quarterly arrangement is quoted as one annual figure, and the first check costs more than the three that follow it. The pricing page shows the four ways of working; where this sits inside a monthly arrangement it is included rather than charged on top. The number is fixed in writing before the first check.

What happens next

Almost every check ends the same way: two or three pages go for an update to the page that used to earn, which is cheaper and more reliable than writing something new. Pages judged to be finished rather than sliding go to deleting, merging and redirecting. And where the list is long enough to need sequencing, a plan for which pages to update first turns it into a quarter's work with an order to it. None of that is bundled in. Each check is a complete piece of work, and you can take one, or four, or stop.