Content Freshness Impact Calculator + How to Fix Content Decay

Content has a short lifecycle on the web. Searchers prefer consuming the freshest content because it’s more likely to be up-to-date and relevant in the present.

Search engines like Google also understand this human preference for freshness, which is why updating a page often leads to a ranking boost.

The opposite is also true: outdated pages can drop in rankings, even if they once occupied top positions on Google. This is especially true in AI Overviews, which are biased towards fresh content.

As such, you need frequent updates to ensure your pages remain alive and continue to drive traffic and value for your website.

This freshness impact calculator helps you estimate the traffic boost you can get by updating decaying content.

Use it to plan and prioritize your content updates based on the impact they’re likely to have on your traffic.

How to Effectively Refresh Content for Maximum SEO Results

Step 1: Identify Pages That Need Updates

To combat content decay, you first need a list of pages that you haven’t updated in a while.

The good thing is that you can easily find pages with their last modified dates in your sitemap.

You can access your sitemap by typing “/sitemap.xml” next to your root domain.

It will look something like this:

Next, you’ll need to export these URLs from your sitemap into a spreadsheet. There are lots of XML to CSV converters that you can find with a simple Google search.

Use a converter to obtain a spreadsheet containing two columns: URL and last modified date.

Sort the date column by older dates first, and you can find the pages that haven’t been updated in a while.

The smart approach is to focus on pages with a shorter lifespan, so they’re likely to be losing more traffic due to decay.

For example, news or trending topics decay very quickly. Tutorials and some guides might also become outdated if they’re on topics that change and develop rapidly over time.

In contrast, evergreen and reference content, such as glossary, FAQs, and certain blog post topics can stay fresh for a long time.

Evergreen content should be your lowest priority for content updates. Unless your existing evergreen content has substantial content gaps and quality issues.

So you can categorize your list of URLs in order to find the best candidates for updates.

This might be a tedious process to do manually. Instead, I recommend using ChatGPT to help categorize your URLs.

Take care not to overwhelm ChatGPT by giving it a massive list.

You’ll have a better result if you provide URLs in smaller batches.

Prompt ChatGPT to categorize these into evergreen, news, tutorial, and other types of content that you can use to make decisions about your content refresh plan.

At this point, you should have a refined list of potential URLs that need updating.

But there’s still one final step to perform. You need real traffic data to determine which of your older posts are suffering the greatest decline.

That piece of information will be your chief criterion for prioritizing pages to update.

You can create a simple exploration report in GA4 to identify pages with declining traffic.

For the simplest version of this report, you can use the following dimensions and metrics:

• Dimensions: Landing page
• Metrics: Views, Key events

Drag and drop the “Landing page” metric to a Row. The “Views” and “Key events” metrics go into the “Values” section.

Now, in order to narrow down your list to the URLs you finalized above, you can use the regex expression in the filter.

Select “Landing Page” as the filter variable and then choose the “matches regex” condition.

The regex contains all the URLs you want to filter, separated by the pipe ( | ) symbol. Make sure to remove the domain name part of the URL so you’re only left with the part after the first forward slash.

For example, if you want to include the following URLs:

• yourdomain.com/page-1
• yourdomain.com/page-2
• yourdomain.com/page-3

You’ll need to use this regex: /page-1|/page-2|/page-3

Once again, feel free to ask ChatGPT or any other AI tool to construct the regex for you from the raw URLs. This can save you a lot of time.

With the filters activated, use the date picker to compare the traffic and conversion stats in the last 3–6 months and an equal preceding period.

Note the pages with the biggest traffic losses.

These are the decaying pages that can improve your SEO performance most impactfully with an update.

You can plug these traffic numbers into the freshness impact calculator.

That will give you a rough estimate for the traffic gains you can make with a strong update, replacing outdated content with fresh info.

Step 2: Audit Content for Relevance and Freshness

With your list of URLs to update ready, you can begin your content audit and take notes about the flaws in existing content.

There are several reasons why your page might be underperforming. Here are a few things to check:

• Intent match: Take this opportunity to reassess how closely your page aligns with the search intent it’s targeting. Are you providing an in-depth tutorial where the dominant intent is to download an easy checklist? Don’t just guess the intent. Review the top-ranking results on SERPs to get a better idea of the intent Google is trying to serve.
• Outdated details: Your content should reflect the latest developments in your business, product, or services. For product-related content, make sure the pricing, features, and screenshots are fresh.
• Fact-check stats and sources: Information grows stale fast. Double-check statistics and references. Cite the freshest sources (peer-reviewed, official, industry-leading). If the latest data contradicts your existing topic or illuminates a new angle, enrich your content to align.
• Benchmark against competitors: Review ranking competitors for the latest content for gaps or fresher data you can one-up.

As you run your audit, you can add notes to a spreadsheet to highlight main problem areas and opportunities for updates next to each page.

Step 3: Execute Freshness Updates with On-Page Optimizations

Content updates for freshness give you a great opportunity to go a few steps further into content optimization as well.

In my experience, the maximum impact from a content refresh comes when the changes clearly signal that the page has been updated.

Here’s how you can make your changes more visible to search engines and your readers:

• Refresh title, modified date, and metadata: The strongest way to highlight your update is by adding a new title, meta description, and changing your last modified date to reflect recency. If your title mentions the year or month, make sure it’s current and aligns with other mentions of dates on your page.
• Add practical examples and demonstrate EEAT: Enrich your content with data from case studies, share expertise, and provide examples to build trust and experience, and improve the information gain score of your page.
• Enhance with visuals: Update images, infographics, and embed videos and GIFs for higher engagement.
• Structure for users and bots: Use clear subheadings, bullet points, and schema markup where possible. Consider adding data tables and charts to help skim-readers. Implement a table of contents for more complex pages to assist navigation.
• Optimize internal links: Add links to related, authoritative new content you’ve published. Review existing links to check they’re still valid, relevant, and use descriptive anchor text.

I prefer using a combination of manual analysis and automated scans to discover on-page optimization opportunities.

When you have lots of pages to analyze, I recommend using the Semrush On Page SEO Checker to find improvement ideas faster.

This tool often surfaces useful issues that I might have missed otherwise. But I still recommend putting a critical eye on each page as you’re updating to improve your content in uniquely helpful ways.

Step 4: Track and Iterate Periodically

Successful SEO is usually a result of smart content update cycles that focus on periodically updating your high-value pages.

It’s the only way to truly combat content decay.

And when it comes to tracking, you need to rely on a tool. There are a few options you can use depending on your technical skills:

Looker Studio

Looker Studio is one of the most flexible SEO reporting tools that you can connect with data sources such as GA4, Google Search Console, as well as third-party SEO tools like Semrush.

And the best part is that it’s free.

The only catch is that setting up a Looker Studio can be a tedious process. Especially if you have multiple data sources that need to be blended.

Nonetheless, it’s my preferred tool for monitoring pages for content decay due to its ability to show you all kinds of data in a single place.

If you’re familiar with Looker Studio or willing to learn it, that’s perfect. But if it’s too challenging for you, then the most user-friendly option is to use Semrush.

Semrush Reports

Semrush is a powerful tool for monitoring SEO performance. You can use its built-in tracking features, like Position Tracking, to analyze trends and keyword movements on Google.

I particularly love that it gives you the flexibility to track your performance at the keyword level as well as at the page level:

For the pages report, you can sort the data by changes in estimated traffic or average position to find your biggest losses.

Semrush also offers custom reports that you can build on your own by connecting various sources, including GA4 and Google Search Console.

Compared to Looker Studio, this is a significantly easier solution for beginners if you want to create a monitoring report you can reference for future content updates.

What metrics should I track to spot content decay?

Content marketers usually detect content decay when a page displays a downward traffic trend.

While tracking traffic is an effective way to identify content daily, it’s important to note that organic traffic is undergoing a general thinning out all across the web.

That means that some traffic decline is to be expected, even for your high-quality pages.

So instead of focusing exclusively on traffic, I recommend tracking the following metrics as well.

With these metrics, you’ll have a clearer picture of the value your content is driving beyond just raw traffic metrics:

• Key events: Traffic and key events are often connected but it’s not always true. Some channels like AI search engines deliver higher conversion rates. That means you can have high key events even at lower traffic levels. But if you see key events dropping, it’s a sign you need to improve your page with an update.
• Engagement: Track engagement rate and session duration to determine if people are consistently interested in your content. Declining engagement can indicate issues with content presentation or room for a better intent match.

Reach Your Full Potential with Fresh Content

Maintaining fresh content with regular updates is a key strategy for long-term SEO growth and prevent decay from creeping up.

Gather your URLs and their performance data and sort them by date to find the most likely candidates for outdated content.

Then, use the freshness impact calculator to predict the traffic gains you can get by refreshing struggling pages.

This analysis is much easier if you have the Semrush free trial to discover underperforming content and find suggestions for deeper updates that complement a content refresh for a stronger ranking impact.