How to Use the APPS Framework to Manage Content Decay at Scale
Use these practical tips to improve your content processes and accelerate your growth.
The thing about scaling a website and content engine is that new challenges are constantly popping up and require different solutions.
One in particular that we see fairly often, is the website that grew from 100-200 URLs to 1,000+ and now has more frequent content decay to deal with.
Without the right systems, it can feel like trying to clean a house room by room with a house full of kids, and the end result is that your growth rate slows, things get hard, and you no longer love what you’re doing.
Are you still getting a handle on how to fix content decay and not ready to manage it at scale? Here are a few resources to get you started on the beginning and intermediate elements of content decay.
What Is Content Decay? How To Identify & Fix To Unlock Organic Growth
How to Find and Fix Content Decay with Systems and Processes [webinar]
Content Decay Erodes Your Progress
The example below shows how you can be running a successful content program, adding over 320k in new traffic over the course of 24 months, yet only experiencing a net gain of ~38k.
This may seem like an extreme amount of traffic loss each month, but a site with 1k-3k URLs can easily experience 5-10% loss if decay is left unchecked.
You might be addressing content decay already by looking for the URLs with the greatest click loss and then updating them, but that doesn’t scale on its own. The more you lean into addressing decay, the more your new content plans become at risk. Before you know it, your content program starts to feel like a game of whack-a-mole.
The way to manage decay AND keep your new content production on track is to rely on a core set of systems and processes. For us, that’s the APPS Framework.
What is the APPS Framework?
The APPS Framework consists of four fundamental categories for your systems, regardless of whether you are doing it all in-house, working with contractors, or using an agency. Those categories are Analysis, Planning, Production, and Standardization.
The lessons in each of the four categories come from years of scaling content programs to over 1m visits/mo at companies like Sprout Social, as well as many other SaaS companies as clients of Ten Speed. Let’s dig into each.
Analysis
Analyzing the performance of your existing content cannot be ad hoc. You need to have a predetermined cadence established for analyzing your content to identify decay. Typically, monthly, quarterly, or semi-annually, depending on the size of your site and level of competition.
In order to do the analysis on a regular basis, you need a way to rate opportunities on a scale so that you can a) pick up where you left off on some URLs that were questionable but not in need of action last time and b) keep the process efficient. If it takes you too long each time and you’re repeating work, you are too likely to stop.
Example: 1 = Pursue; 2 = Investigate; 3 = Defer; 4 = No Issue
Fluctuation in performance is normal. Consider establishing a threshold or benchmark (i.e. >1 standard deviation) to prevent being subjective or emotional in your analysis.
You need to establish a way to flag frequency per URL because certain topics will be more competitive than others and require more frequent updates. Having a way to flag URLs as needing to be reviewed/updated monthly or quarterly makes sure that you keep important pages on your radar and avoids duplicating work. This can be as simple as a column in a spreadsheet or even a shared doc with a short list of the most critical URLs.
Planning
Content planning to address decay cannot be done in a silo. Content decay needs to be integrated into topic roadmaps where you plan new content. If you’re always baking a full month of new content into the schedule, you’ll never have room to update content.
Remember the first point about establishing a cadence for analyzing performance? Well, your content planning needs to align with your most frequent update cadence or you will be throwing off planning or letting your analysis go stale until the next round. It sounds simple, but it is important to ensure it runs smoothly.
If some content decays monthly, you need to plan monthly
If most decay is semi-annually, you can plan monthly or quarterly
Most teams have a relatively fixed capacity each month. If you do, you must determine the necessary ratio of new content to content updates. This allows you to have space earmarked for updates instead of battling an over-filled content calendar of new content.
Complete your content decay research ahead of planning meetings. Even if you can see a performance decline in the data, it isn’t until you do deeper research that you understand why it decayed and what needs to be done to fix it. So, planning the right amount of time/resources to fix it is difficult if you don’t know what is needed.
Production
Use a different content brief template for updating existing content. This brief requires everything in your new content brief, plus additional instructions on keeping/modifying/deleting content.
Content updates typically require someone who understands the basic concepts of optimizing existing content and can take more of an editorial approach to the content. You need writers who understand how to do content updates.
Create a unique publishing checklist for all of the things that need to be done to publish each type of content update. You may be tempted to use your normal publishing checklist for new content, but even 3-4 different publishing tasks can throw a wrench in your process or create a bottleneck with the only person who knows how to do it the right way.
Account for new/different images that may be needed. This could be updated product images, images for new sections added, or a new featured image based on the updated title (or consolidated URLs). Do this to avoid publishing being delayed.
Standardization
You need a menu of predetermined ways to handle decay (i.e., small, medium, and large updates or consolidation of multiple URLs). In order to do this, you must understand how much effort goes into each one. If your team doesn’t have a good estimate, track time for a short period.
Make this part of your planning process. You’ve done the analysis to identify decay and researched what was needed to make the content updates, and now you can determine which of your “menu items” is the right solution. Doing this will make it easy to plan for the workload properly.
Example: Two small updates might equal one slot for the month
Example: One consolidation might equal two slots for one month
Do the same for design & development resources needed to make sure that you can have a shared language with those teams and that all teams can accurately plan their work.
Modify as Necessary!
No process is ever truly complete, and most frameworks don’t fit your exact situation perfectly. And that’s okay.
Please use this as a starting point and adapt it to the way your company works and other specific needs you might have.
After all, the iteration is what makes all of this fun. 🙂
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