I think we can all agree that posting fresh content on website regularly is a must. If you haven’t learned this lesson by now, you need to wake up and realize that SEO is almost completely revolving around this concept right now and probably will be in 2016 and many more years to come (and probably always in one way or another).
But this week, I want to go in the opposite direction and talk about websites where content has not been added regularly, where it’s just been stale, stagnant, and almost completely forgotten about. Sites which start with amazing content, but overtime slip up and eventually just stop the flow.
- What happens to these sites in search engines?
- Do their rankings vanish/decrease?
- Does the authority of the website suffer?
- Do profits suffer?
- If you change your mind and try to go back to an old website to keep building it, is it worth it?
Well that’s what case study 11 is going to cover. We’re going to analyze 3 different websites, their traffic stats and look at their content base, how often content was posted and what happened to it when it stopped.
These are my personal websites which for a number of reasons I just stopped working on. The main reasons I did this was because I became lazy and procrastinated in working on them. I take full responsibility for this.
But I do understand that for many people who are building websites and quit, they have different reasons:
- Certain events took away from your time on working on your website.
- Lack of results discouraged you from continuing so you slowly posted new content less and less until it completely stopped and you quit.
But whatever happened, this case study might actually give you some comfort and a new reason to keep going. I have a few websites I’ve made, but focused most of my time on about 2 of them and really just 1 because the second one has content posted on it every few MONTHS, while my first, every few days. One of the case studies is also going to go over 1 site which hasn’t has any new content posted on it for over 2 YEARS. What happened to that site and the others? Well let’s see…
Site #1: On average new content appears twice every week.
Pretty consistent traffic results. Just a quick note, I started the date from October 2015 until December 2015 because my Google Analytics code was broken and I had to put up a new one. The old stats show a gradual rise in traffic because when I first began this site a few years back, I posted content almost every single day.
So posting a few times a week when you already have decent rankings appears to be OK for the website and hopefully will continue. Let’s see what happens when we analyze a site that has posts content FAR less:
Site #2: Posts new content once every few months.
The last time I posted something new on this site was in August 2015. If you look at the stats, not much had changed since then. In fact, a few traffic spikes had occurred. You can also see the traffic dying now in December to hitting almost 0. That’s because my traffic code is broken and I have to make a new one. This site still gets about a 100 visitors a day.
Site #3: Has one that has the WORST posting record of all 3 sites.
This site hasn’t had any new content posted for over 2 years. The last posting date was somewhere in October of 2013!
Remember all we’re looking at here and on every other site we’re examining is just how the traffic stats changed in comparison to how often content was posted. In this final example, we’re going all the way back to to 2014 (even though the last post was in 2013), and as you can see, the stats have not changed much.
What I didn’t mention:
For the first 2 websites, I have comments being posted on it regularly. Those comments do help the site maintain higher rankings in my experience. If I ever had a situation where content wasn’t posted very often, it was very comforting in knowing that I had comments waiting to be approved. They really did help.
So is the lesson here that we can just stop posting after sometime and relax?
No. Absolutely not. These stats I showed don’t explain the full story.
I didn’t talk about the niche. I didn’t talk what keywords my sites were showing for and how rankings were affected by a lack of posting new content, but I didn’t feel that was as important, although I’m sure my rankings did slip for a number of them.
What I did want to explain is that if you have a website that is doing pretty well with traffic on an organic level, you should do your very best to maintain that it keeps those positions and gains new ones and the way to do that is to post new content, but should you fall into a position where you end up posting less and less, don’t let it bother you too much, because as you can see from the results above, there weren’t that many changes.
So if you have a vacation or something else takes you away from posting, know that the work you put in before will not just go away. It’ll help you maintain your site’s authority for the future.
Will sites ever lose their rankings if they stop posting new content?
Yes they will, especially in niches and keywords that have high competition and constantly new content being posted to it and that’s what you should watch out for.
If you hold a high position on a keyword that gets you a lot of visitors, but then stop posting, but there’s other people posting content targeting that same keyword, in my opinion what may happen is that yours may lose it’s position because of a lack of posting new content while theirs will overtake yours.
While this can’t really be controlled by you, all you can really do to help ensure your site doesn’t lose major positioning against competitors is to keep posting.
Very interesting case study. You said that if you have ranked well for a particular keyword but then you stop posting, then others might overtake you on that keyword. Am I correct in that understanding?
So does that mean you need to keep retargeting that same keyword again and again with fresh articles? In order to keep ranking highly for that keyword?
No absolutely not Lain, once you have a high ranking article, the way to keep it ranked high is to build out the rest of your site with it’s own, separate, but related to the niche content. The goal is to raise the authority of the site, not the article. When the authority is high, more 1st page rankings are maintained.
And the way to build the authority of the site is to get articles ranked highly based off targeted keywords…..correct?
Yes that is exactly right Iain, it is among one of the most important factors of SEO.
Hello there. It’s funny that I should happen upon this article and I suppose it caught my eye so quickly because you’re writing about a topic that’s been bugging me.
I too take full responsibility for a lack of consistent posting on my two sites. I won’t bore you with the excuses. I did find your test to have some incredibly useful insights and I appreciate you sharing it.
I would like to see (no pressure here just an observation) what would happen if you were to start publishing again on the site that’s been neglected for the longest time. Would your old articles regain their ranking?
Thanks again for sharing such an insightful study. Geoff.
Hi Geoff, they possibly would because they would already be built of the previous authority the site had and although they slumped because of a lack of content, adding new, low competition keyword targeted content would probably have the site regain it’s original status and possibly rise higher.
Vitaliy,
I have several websites also. I only work on one, the ones with no new content gets very little traffic, I have kept them as hobby sites. I am trying to get to at least 3-5 post a week on the site that I am working on, Is this enough to get traffic, I get around 25 visitors a day, not many sales.
John
Whether it’s the one site you’re talking about or the hobby sites you mentioned, any new type of content, as long as it is structured to chase a keyword will get you traffic John.
However, there may be a time where the secondary sites take longer to rank higher because there’s no high authority yet, vs the main site you have right now which does have it, meaning the new content you add will yield faster results on your main site vs your secondary ones.
Great post. I found it quite informative. I have been working on my own site and find posting to be very difficult. Not much of a writer. However, I am persevering, and your post really helped to visualize the reason to keep on posting, even when it doesn’t come easy. I appreciate your sharing the data.
This is so true. Lots of people think that once they have built their website, it will just make money all by itself. You have to be constantly engaged in content creation if you want to rank well. I know that some people will also diversify their content with podcasts and video posts if they get sick of writing new posts.
Wow thanks so much again for all of this. You are super helpful. I just have one more question about all of this.
Using the example you used, I didn’t know that you could put other words in between a keyword phrase. So to target a keyword phrase you just need the same words in the title even if there are other words mixed in?
Can you even change the order of the words? Thanks again.
Robert
Yes you can change the order of the words too in my experience. The content is what matters.
Thanks for this information, I really enjoyed this post because I’m currently in a position where I’m obsessing over traffic a little too much I think.
My website is about 6 months old and I’ve been posting an average of 4 posts per week since I started the website.
So far my organic traffic is really low, like 1 or 2 people per day. Should I be concerned that I’m not getting very much organic traffic yet or is this normal 6 months in?
FYI, I’m in the “make money online” niche so I know it’s very competitive. Cheers,
Robert
Well if you’ve been posting consistently around 4 posts a week for 6 months, by now you would have had around 96 posts and in the make money online niche, I think that’s above the point where you should start seeing results. Since you’re getting 2 people or less a day, the only thing I can see as being the problem is either the following:
You’re not targeting specific keywords for the niche, at least not the ones which get traffic. So I would recommend you find the ones which get searched a lot (check this out) and especially start chasing product reviews in this niche. They are huge for traffic.
Thanks Vitaliy,
I read your post on keywords and it cleared a lot of things up for me.
I have been using Jaaxy for my keyword research and I’ve been targeting “low hanging fruit” keywords. Also all of my posts or at least 90% of them are reviews for make money online products.
I guess I’ll just keep pushing on and hopefully get a breakthrough soon. Cheers,
Robert
Ok, it’s great that you’re working on that. How long would you say your content’s size is per post and page (words)? Also besides just targeting keywords, do you make sure to decorate the title of the post? These are both also very important.
Vitaliy,
All of my posts are at least 1000 words but I try to get them closer to 2000. I would say the average is about 1500 words per post. I don’t know very much about decorating the title of the post. Do you have information on your website about this?
Most of the keywords I target are now ranked on the second, third or fourth page of Google. I’ve only got 2 on the first page.
Cheers,
Robert
Yeah I talk about that on the site, but it’s really simple. Just take a keyword you have and add a title to it that makes it look more appeasing.
Ex: If I have a keyword such as “How to find keywords”, I could make my title something better looking like: “How to Find And Leverage Money Making Keywords”. It can be anything you want it to be. You can pose a question in the title, be controversial, anything, as long as the title still has all the words of the keyword in it, you’re fine.
And about the site itself, you’re doing excellent with the content. I am sure your rankings will jump into 1st page rankings very soon. In the meantime, there’s 3 other things you can do:
1. Add social buttons on the site and share it on networks. Get some likes on a few pages. Make sure not to spam your friends.
2. Interlink your pages and posts with other pages and posts on your site, wherever it makes sense. Please see my previous posts and look at where I link on my article and to where.
3. Get some comments on posts, it’ll be huge. You’ll naturally have this happen when you get more traffic, but social sharing can lead to this too. Maybe find people in the same niche as you who would be interested. You can find plenty of people like that in Wealthy Affiliate.
Also this is optional and I’m sure it’s fine, but make sure your Google analytics code is working properly.