Explanation of the content life cycle for your #SEO clients

 Explanation of the content life cycle for your #SEO clients [so you get approvals to update old content] 👇

When you've studied the performance of individual blog posts at scale, a pattern emerges.

A piece of content will often follow a similar life cycle that has a big impact on how your content performs.

+ ESPECIALLY as you get to 100s or 1000s of blog posts on your site.

1️⃣ Early Traction

When you publish new content, it will take some time for it to start to rank/drive organic traffic.

How long this stage lasts is based on a number of factors:

- Authority on published topics
- Amount of related content on your site
- Backlinks
- Etc.

What this might look like in GSC:

You might notice a few mini spikes in traffic here and there for a couple of months.

Impressions will show up first, followed by clicks.

Keywords with the most impressions will fluctuate while Google continues to "understand" your post.

2️⃣ Growth

As your content gains more backlinks and ranks higher and for more queries, the organic traffic to the post will continue to grow.

Every post and topic is different in terms of how fast the growth happens/for how long.

What this will look like in GSC:

The longest tail/most accurate queries will generate clicks early on.

As you add internal links/backlinks - and Google understands more context, you'll see more queries generated.

As rankings for these new queries also rise and featured snippets/PAA are achieved, you'll continue to see increases.

3️⃣ Peak

The peak stage is when the growth starts to taper off.

IMPORTANT REMINDER: This is going to happen no matter what. A single piece of content will not grow forever.

Reasons a piece of content might peak:

• It stopped gaining backlinks/is no longer improving in the SERPs

• The post reached the top slot for the keywords in the topic and has hit a natural ceiling/limited by the total searches per month

• A competitor has published new content/updated their content
The peak stage is also very dynamic.

For some URLs, it may only remain at the peak for days or weeks before moving into the decay stage.

Or it may plateau at the peak and stay that way for months. Not growing, not decaying.

4️⃣ Decay

As older content becomes less relevant and/or less competitive in the SERP, it will move out of the peak/plateau stage and begin to decay.

It may not be “old” per se. Competitive/time-relevant topics see shorter life cycles than evergreen content.

Decay happens as your rankings slowly drop.

The largest appearances of decay are often associated with:

- Losing a featured snippet spot on page 1
- Slowly sliding down the rankings
- Falling from page 1 to page 2

The biggest culprits of decay:

👉 Content age (relevance)
👉 Internal competition (cannibalization)
👉 External competition (competitor posts)
👉 Search intent shifts (query intent has evolved)
👉 Topical depth (your 500-word blog is no longer covering enough of the topic)