Before I launched my agency, I worked for several others and noticed a troubling trend.
Many focused solely on creating new on-site content for their clients, often neglecting older posts and pages. This was especially common with blogs at a time when the trend was to prioritize quantity over quality.
The situation always reminded me of the “pump-and-dump” strategies in the stock market – short-term mindsets that result sometimes in wins and sometimes in massive losses.
I knew this approach was flawed and ended in what I call “content decay.” When I launched my agency in 2017, I focused on refreshing older content as much as creating new content.
The results immediately impressed – and continued to impress.
For example, earlier this year, one of our commercial pest control clients had an underperforming blog post that was created by a previous agency. The content was decent but lacked many on-page SEO elements, especially header tags and internal links (two were actually dead!).
We updated internal links and all other on-page SEO elements and rewrote around 30% of the content. That single blog post jumped to the top position for target keywords in the target location within six weeks.
After amplifying it on social media, which naturally attracted other shares, quality links, and a Google Business Profile, we were able to attribute nearly $100,000 in new revenue to that one piece of content.
This experience convinced me that content decay is a serious problem for many businesses and needs to be addressed ASAP. This issue also inspired me to restructure our service offerings, making content refresh a core service for our clients.