📉 How to spot traffic decay

You’re about to learn a little SEO trick most SEO tools will charge you for.

Whether it was my time working on SEO at Webflow, doing SEO for my own websites, or growing my clients’ websites, the end of the year was (and is) always a fun time for quick traffic wins.

If you’ve been in the content creation and SEO game, you’ll know that after 1-2 years of a page ranking strong, there will be inevitable traffic decay if you don’t update your content.

And because Google (and now mostly SearchGPT) loves fresh content, it’s important to get a head start on refreshing your content for the new year.

But how do you know what pages on your website to update?

Let me show you.

Go to your Google Search Console → Search results (1) → More (2) → Compare (3):

Once you click Compare, you’ll want to compare at least 6 months from today. I’d recommend doing a custom search and trying to do a date range of around 12 months. But for the sake of this guide, I’ll do 6 months:

After clicking apply, you’ll also want to click the checkbox for Average position:

Now, you’ll want to scroll down and click Pages (1) → Clicks Difference (2). Essentially, we want to sort by the biggest negative click differences:

These are the pages (in order) that you should go through and see if they are a good candidate to update. In some cases, you might have recently updated some of these and the data hasn’t caught up.

But in most cases, this is the order of content updates you should be doing. As you can see, there are a lot of opportunities here.

Update these pages until the end of the year and watch your SEO traffic start to go up and to the right in January. It’s like clockwork. And I do it with every site I work on this time of year.

Okay, I know that was quick. But I hope that helped and you learned something! :)

If you want to learn more strategies like this, and watch me update content on my own website live (with an analysis of the results), I reveal it all in the Content Marketing Course (on sale now for the holidays!)

With that, let's get into what we have in store this week (lots of good stuff):

• Marketing news from the past week

• What you should know about PMM

• 19 tips for better copywriting

• SEO + Product Marketing blueprint

• Using influencers in B2B marketing

• Ad in the wild

• Website of the week

• Cool marketing jobs

• And much more

🗞 In the news

• Google December 2024 core update is live: What are we seeing

• ChatGPT now understands real-time video, seven months after OpenAI first demoed it

• Reddit’s new AI search tool helps you find Reddit answers without Google

• How Perplexity calculates publishers’ share of ad revenue

• Pinterest Predicts: 20 bold trends for 2025

🚀 All things growth & product

How PostHog grows, the leaky bucket theory of network effects, how to grow subscription businesses, and what everyone should know about PMM.

💌 Emails, copywriting, & psychology

The best DTC email marketing examples, 19 tips for better copywriting, why B2B customers are driven by emotions, and 9 marketing psychology concepts.

✍️ SEO & content marketing

The SEO + Product Marketing blueprint, a study of 1,000 “alternatives” keywords, and a step-by-step guide on how to scale content creation.

🤳 Paid ads, social media, & branding

How to get the most out of your ad dollars for new customer acquisition, how to leverage B2B marketing influencers, and how to build a brand culture.

🧘 For the soul

📣 Ad from the past

💻 Website of the week

🏝 Cool marketing jobs

• Social Media Manager @ Webflow

• Email Marketing Manager (Consultant) @ Right Side Up

• Lifecycle Marketing Manager @ Eight Sleep

• Senior Manager, Performance Marketing @ Mercury

• Head of Marketing @ Fella Health

Okay, that's it for now ❤️💚. See you next Tuesday (no edition next week, see you in the new year!)

“If you want to love what you do, abandon the passion mindset (“what can the world offer me?”) and instead adopt the craftsman mindset (“what can I offer the world?”).” — Cal Newport

Riddle answer: The word "ton."