Contents
- Decay is slow: an article loses its traffic over several months, with no alert.
- The useful comparison is quarter over quarter, not month over month, to rule out seasonality.
- Refreshing a declining page costs far less than writing a new one.
Definition
Growth and decline of pages compares the organic traffic of each URL between two periods to spot the ones eroding.
Formula
Change = clicks in the recent period minus clicks in the reference period, relative to the latter.
Worked example
An article published two years ago goes from 640 to 310 quarterly clicks. Its content cites prices and features that have changed, and two competitors have published since. Updating the figures and adding two sections returns most of its traffic in six weeks.
Orders of magnitude
Content on moving topics, prices, tools, regulations, degrades in twelve to eighteen months. In-depth content holds far longer.
The most common mistakes
- Comparing month over month. Seasonality produces false signals in both directions.
- Rewriting instead of updating. A full rewrite sometimes loses what earned the ranking.
- Ignoring the cause. Content can decline because the query itself loses volume: refreshing it won't change that.
Where to find the metric
In Search Console, the Performance report, Pages tab, with a period comparison enabled. Sorting by click gap surfaces the pages to treat.
Frequently asked questions
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