Informational sites can easily decline into a crisis of search visibility. No site is immune. Here are five ways to manage content to maintain steady traffic, increase the ability to adapt to changing audiences, and make confident choices that help the site maintain growth momentum over time.
1. Create A Mix Of Content Types
Publishers are in a constant race to publish what’s latest because being first to publish can be a source of massive traffic. The main problem with these kinds of sites is that publishing content about current events can run into problems, putting into question the sustainability of the publication.
- Current events quickly become stale and no longer relevant to an audience.
- Unforeseen events like an industry strike, accidents, world events, and pandemics can disrupt interest in a topic.
The focus then is to identify content topics that are reliably relevant to the website’s current audience. This kind of content is called evergreen content, and it can form a safety net of reliable traffic that can sustain the business during slow cycles.
An example of the mixed approach to content that comes to mind is how the New York Times has a standalone recipes section on a subdomain of the main website. It also has a category-based section dedicated to gadget reviews called The Wirecutter.
Another example is the entertainment niche which in addition to industry news also publish interviews with stars and essays about popular movies. Music websites publish the latest news but also content based on snippets from interviews with famous musicians where the musicians make interesting statements about songs, inspirations, and cultural observations.
Rolling Stone magazine publishes content about music but also about current events like politics that align with their reader interests.
All three of those examples expand their topics to adjacent topics in order to bulk up their ability to attract steady and consistent traffic that is reliable.
2. Evergreen Content Also Needs Current Event Topics
Conversely, evergreen topics can generate new audience reach and growth by expanding to cover current events. Content sites about recipes, gardening, home repairs, DIY, crafts, parenting, personal finance, and fitness are all examples of topics that feature evergreen content and can also expand to cover current events. The flow of traffic derived from trending topics is an excellent source of devoted readers who return to read evergreen content and end up recommending the site to friends for both current events and evergreen topics.
Current events can be related to products and even to statements by famous people. If you enjoy creating content or making discoveries, then you’ll enjoy the challenge of discovering new sources of trending topics.
If you don’t already have a mix of evergreen and ephemeral content, then I would encourage you to seek opportunities to focus on those kinds of articles. They can help sustain traffic levels while feeding growth and life into the website.
3. Beware Of Old Content
Google evaluates the total content of a website in order to generate a quality score. Google is vague about these whole-site evaluations. We only know that they do it and that a good evaluation can have a positive effect on traffic.
However, what happens when the site becomes top-heavy with old, stale content that’s no longer relevant to site visitors? This can become a drag on a website. There are multiple ways of handling this situation.
Content that is absolutely out of date and of no interest to anyone and is therefore no longer useful should be removed. The criteria to judge content with is usefulness, not the age of the content. The reason to prune this content is because it’s possible that a whole-site evaluation may conclude that most of the website is comprised of unhelpful, outdated web pages. This could be a negative drag on site performance.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with old content as long as it’s useful. For example, the New York Times keeps old movie reviews in archives that are organized by year, month, day, category, and article title.
The URL slug for the movie review of E.T. looks like this: /1982/06/11/movies/et-fantasy-from-spielberg.html
Screenshot Of Archived Article
Take Decisive Steps
- Useful historical content can be archived.
- Older content that is out of date can be rehabilitated.
- Content that’s out of date and has been superseded by new content can be redirected with a 301 response code to the new content.
- Content that is out of date and objectively useless should be removed from the website and allowed to show a 404 response code.
4. Topic Interest
Something that can cause traffic to decline on an informational site is waning interest. Technological innovation can cause the popularity of another product to decline, dragging website traffic along with it. For example, I consulted for a website that reported its traffic was declining. The site still ranked for its keywords, but a quick look at Google Trends showed that interest in the website topic was declining. This was several months after the introduction of the iPhone, which negatively impacted a broad category of products that the website was centered on.
Always keep track of how interested your audience is in your topic. Follow influencers in your niche topic on social media to gauge what they are talking about and whether there are any shifts in the conversation that indicate waning interest or growing interest in a related topic.
Always try out new subcategories of your topic that cross over with your readership to see if there is an audience there that can be cultivated.
Another nuance to consider is the difference between temporary dips in interest and long-term structural decline. Some topics experience predictable cycles driven by seasons, economic conditions, or news coverage, while others face permanent erosion as user needs change or alternatives emerge. Misreading a cyclical slowdown as a permanent decline can lead to unnecessary pivots, while ignoring structural shifts can leave a site over-invested in content that no longer aligns with how people search, buy, or learn.
Monitoring topic interest is less about reacting to short-term fluctuations and more about keeping aware of topical interest and trends. By monitoring audience behavior, tracking broader trends, and experimenting at the edges of the core topic, an informational site can adjust gradually rather than being forced into abrupt changes after traffic has already declined. This ongoing attention helps ensure that content decisions remain grounded in how interest evolves over time.
5. Differentiate
Something that happens to a lot of informational websites is that competitors in a topic tend to cover the exact same stories and even have similar styles of photos, about pages, and bios.
B2B software sites have images of people around a laptop, images of a serious professional, and people gesturing at a computer or a whiteboard.
Recipe sites feature the Flat Lay (food photographed from above), the Ingredient Still Life portrait, and action shots of ingredients grated, sprinkled, or in mid air.
Websites tend to converge into homogeneity in the images they use and the kind of content that’s shared, based on the idea that if it’s working for competitors, then it may be a good approach. But sometimes it’s best to step out of the pack and do things differently.
Evolve your images so that they stand out or catch the eye, try a different way of communicating your content, identify the common concept that everyone uses, and see if there’s an alternate approach that makes your site more authentic.
For example, a recipe site can show photographic bloopers or discuss what can go wrong and how to fix or avoid it. Being real is authentic. So why not show what underbaked looks like? Instagram and Pinterest are traffic drivers, but does that mean all images must be impossibly perfect? Maybe people might respond to the opposite of homogeneity and fake perfection.
The thing that’s almost always missing from product reviews is photos of the testers actually using the products. Is it because the reviews are fake? Hm… Show images of the products with proof that they’ve been used.
Takeaways
- Sustainable traffic can be cultivated with a mix of evergreen and timely content. Find the balance that works for your website.
- Evergreen content performs best when it is periodically refreshed with up-to-date details.
- Outdated content that lacks utility or meaning in people’s lives can quietly grow to suppress site-wide performance. Old pages should be reviewed for usefulness and then archived, updated, redirected, or removed.
- Audience interest in a topic can decline even if rankings remain stable. Monitoring search demand and cultural shifts helps publishers know when it’s time to expand into adjacent topics before traffic erosion becomes severe.
- Differentiation matters as much as coverage. Sites that mirror competitors in visuals, formats, and voice risk blending into sameness, while original presentation and proof of authentic experience build trust and attention.
Search visibility declines are not caused by a single technical flaw or isolated content mistake but by gradual misalignment between what a site publishes and what audiences continue to value. Sites that rely too heavily on fleeting interest, allow outdated material to accumulate, or follow competitors into visual and editorial homogeneity risk signaling mediocrity rather than relevance and inspiring enthusiasm. Sustained performance depends on actively managing content, balancing evergreen coverage with current events, pruning what’s no longer useful, and making deliberate choices that distinguish the site as useful, authentic, and credible.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Sergey Nivens
