Content decay audit

Content decay is gradual: a page that ranked well slowly loses position as competitors publish fresher material. It rarely shows up in a single-period report. You have to compare two windows.

Steps

1. Pick two comparable windows. Use two 90-day windows: the recent one ending 3 days ago, and the same 90 days from the prior year where seasonality is a factor (otherwise the immediately preceding 90 days). State which comparison you used and why.

2. Pull page-level performance for both windows. Two google_search_console.query calls with dimensions: ["page"], rowLimit: 500, one per window.

3. Compute the deltas. Join on page URL. For each page calculate the change in clicks, impressions, and average position, in both absolute and percentage terms. Sort by absolute click loss; percentage alone will surface trivial pages that dropped from 4 clicks to 1.

4. Separate the causes. The delta pattern tells you what happened:

   • Impressions flat, position worse, clicks down → ranking decay. Competitors overtook you. Refresh the content.
   • Impressions down, position flat → demand decline. Fewer people are searching. Not a content problem; don't recommend a rewrite.
   • Impressions up, position flat, CTR down → SERP change. An AI overview or new feature is absorbing clicks. Snippet edits help; content depth may not.

5. Confirm with engagement. google_analytics.run_report with dimensions: ["landingPage"], metrics: ["sessions", "engagementRate", "conversions"] for the recent window. A decaying page that still converts well is a higher-priority fix than one that never converted.

6. Report. Table sorted by clicks lost: page, clicks before/after, delta, position change, diagnosed cause, and current conversions. Recommend refreshes only for the ranking-decay group, and say explicitly which pages you are not recommending work on, and why.

Gotchas

• Don't diagnose decay from one window. A page down this month may just be seasonal.
• Check for site changes first. A URL that changed, got redirected, or was noindexed will look like catastrophic decay. If a page's clicks went to near zero abruptly rather than gradually, suspect a technical cause and say so.
• Year-over-year is the honest comparison for seasonal businesses. Comparing Q4 to Q3 will always look like decay for retail.
• Search Console keeps ~16 months of data. A year-over-year comparison near the edge of that window may return partial data.