SEO
How to Calculate Churn Rate + 9 Ways to Decrease It
Churn rate is a proportion of customers who stop paying for a product or service during a given time period. It’s the complete opposite of growth rate, making it one of the most important marketing and sales metrics for subscription-based companies.
It’s a seemingly easy-to-understand metric. But the simple formula to calculate churn rate has some limitations and potential traps many marketers may not take into account. Also, contrary to popular belief, you can influence churn long before someone becomes a customer.
There’s quite a lot to explore here. In this article, you’ll learn the following:
Let’s dive into it.
There are multiple reasons why keeping track of your churn rate and working with it can help to boost your marketing performance. Well, five main reasons to be specific.
1. Direct revenue impact
Churn rate is a decelerator of your growth rate. But unlike the growth rate, a certain percentage of churn is here to stay. Many fast-growing companies may fall into the trap of ignoring high churns when their growth is much higher, but it’s not a sustainable business model.
A 15% churn rate may not seem that bad when a startup grows 200% year-over-year. But that growth rate will eventually fall, and the churn may not. Any company will sooner or later suffer from high churn rates even if they weren’t such a big problem initially.
The sooner you start tackling your churn rate, the better. It has compounding effects. Let’s consider two companies with $1M ARR (annual recurring revenue) each and a similar growth rate of 25%. But they have different churn rates (scroll horizontally to see all table columns):
Year 0 ARR | Year 1 ARR | Year 2 ARR | Year 3 ARR | Year 4 ARR | Year 5 ARR | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
25% growth 5% churn |
$1,000,000 | $1,200,000 | $1,440,000 | $1,728,000 | $2,073,600 | $2,448,320 |
25% growth 10% churn |
$1,000,000 | $1,150,000 | $1,322,500 | $1,520,875 | $1,749,006 | $2,011,357 |
That’s what a difference of 5 percentage points in churn rate can do to revenue. The higher you churn, the slower you grow. Easy as that.
2. Influence your word-of-mouth marketing
Word-of-mouth marketing (WoMM) is the process of influencing and encouraging natural discussions about a product, service, or company. I’m sure you’ve subscribed to some product or service because someone you trust told you about it. For this reason, WoMM can be one of the most powerful marketing channels.
The fact that more than 14,000 new customers in 2020 told us they were referred to Ahrefs by their friends is the best proof of WoMM’s importance:
Churn rate reflects how well you meet the expectations of people who sign up for your product or service. While we can’t directly translate high churn into dissatisfaction, we can assume it’s a signal for a need to significantly improve your WoMM.
3. Early indicator of bad news for your business
Noticed a big spike in your monthly churn rate? Chances are you did something wrong that month.
Maybe product changes got negative feedback? Increased pricing? Any bad publicity? Or it could be your competitors stepped up their game and poached a significant number of your customers.
At any rate, having such an early indicator of these changes always comes in handy.
4. Customer lifetime value variable
Customer lifetime value (LTV) is a metric that estimates how much money an individual customer will spend on your products or services. Increasing your average customer’s worth not only improves your financial metrics but also allows you to spend more on acquiring new customers.
LTV is yet another important metric, even a marketing KPI, that you should keep track of. The best way for subscription-based companies to calculate the metric is as follows:
LTV = avg. monthly revenue per customer/avg. customer monthly churn rate
The fact that churn enables calculations of other crucial marketing metrics should make it a staple in your spreadsheets and dashboards.
5. Proxy for performance forecasts
Many companies and their analysts engage in forecasting future performances. Accordingly, the churn rate is an essential variable in the calculations.
We’re not talking about in-house uses only. Churn rate is also an important indicator when it comes to investing in subscription-based companies.
So what does it take to calculate churn rate?
You might have already noticed that I talked about churn rates in relation to both customers and revenue. These are two types of churn rates, and here’s everything you need to know about calculating them.
Customer churn formula
Customer churn rate = (customers lost during period/customers at start of period) x 100
For example, on May 1, you had 1,000 active customers. And on May 31, you lost 25 of them. That means your monthly customer churn rate is 2.5%.
Easy start. Let’s move on.
Revenue churn formula
Revenue churn rate = (revenue lost during period/revenue at start of period) x 100
As you can see, it’s basically the same formula. Only the variable is different and a bit more tricky.
Here’s the thing: You should only take into account the revenue generated or lost from the customers you had at the start of the period.
Let’s say you have $100K MRR (monthly recurring revenue) at the start of the period. You manage to upgrade some of your existing customers for an additional $5K MRR, lose a few customers who contributed to $4K MRR, and notice $2K worth of downgrades.
The revenue lost during the period is $1,000. This is as you lost $6K due to churned and downgraded customers. But you made $5K from customers who decided to upgrade. Your revenue churn rate for that period is therefore 1%, as the formula is (1,000/100,000) x 100.
Sometimes, your upgrades will be worth more than the revenue lost. In that case, you’ll have a negative number in the numerator, making the overall churn for that period negative. That’s your best-case scenario, as it means growth even without taking any new customers into account.
When to use which churn rate formula?
It doesn’t take a math genius to figure out that customer and churn rates usually differ. I recommend you calculate both churns because they provide additional information.
If:
- Customer churn rate > revenue churn rate, then your churned customers have a below-average lifetime value.
- Customer churn rate < revenue churn rate, then some of your higher-value customers churned.
Always try to put the numbers into context. For example, it’s possible to have a high revenue churn despite having done exceptionally well during a certain period.
Such a scenario happens when, for example, a business has a few percent of customers who contribute to the vast majority of revenue. If one of those huge accounts churned, it would make the revenue churn look bad.
What are the limitations of the basic churn formula?
Calculating churn rate is easy until it isn’t. I won’t dive into all the nitty-gritty, but you should be aware of the following:
- The formula works best when calculating churn rates on a monthly basis.
- For longer periods of time, newly acquired customers who churn within the given period can skew the results. You have two options here. Disregard all churns from customers acquired during that period or add up monthly data and calculate a weighted average churn.
- Consider calculating churns for some of your plans separately, especially if you target completely different market segments at the same time (e.g., SMBs vs. enterprises).
- If you’re a startup, your churn rates will likely fluctuate a lot. That’s because you experience rapid growth and new customers tend to churn more frequently than those who stick around for a while. Your likely small sample size (# of customers) is also a factor here.
- Your business may suffer from seasonal swings, so a higher churn rate may be natural during some months.
But the bottom line is that no matter how you calculate your churn, you should stick with it and work on decreasing whatever the number is.
So what’s really a bad, so-so, or good churn rate?
If you Googled this, you’d encounter anything between 2% and 8% to be an acceptable churn rate. That’s useless information for a metric where a 1% difference could mean tons of money. On top of that, some resources don’t even mention what type of churn over how long they’re referring to.
But we need a number. It’s important to have an anchor to recognize instances when churn is a minor problem and we should, thus, prioritize achieving other marketing objectives. Fortunately, all we need here is to get more specific with Google queries.
Make a list of competitors. Google their names in combination with “churn rate” or “retention rate” (the inverse metric). Voilà:
You should get some specific numbers. If you have publicly traded companies on your list, the chances of getting more numbers for your benchmarking are high.
That’s because these companies regularly publish financial reports and have their executives share metrics and data in interviews. But you can get lucky with private companies as well.
One important thing to keep in mind. You and your competitors likely target different segments of the market, and that has a huge impact on churn rates.
As you can see in the example above, Cloudflare reports 36% annual churn, while Fastly is at 0.7%. They’re both Content Delivery Network (CDN) providers, but Cloudflare caters to everyone in the market (including a free plan option). But Fastly is only targeting enterprise and high-value customers who usually sign long-term contracts.
All right. So you found out that your churn is probably too high and you should work on decreasing it. That’s what the second half of this post is all about.
Nine ways to decrease churn rate
There seems to be a misconception that churn happens after someone becomes your customer. No. You can influence your churn rate in all stages of the marketing funnel:
Let’s show you how.
1. Collect feedback from churned customers
Talking to your customers is an important part of market research. But you may learn even more when you talk to people and companies that stopped paying for your product or service.
Now don’t fall into the trap of taking action on everything you hear from those who churned. Just systematically collect the feedback to get a solid sample. Then decide if taking action on their objections and problems makes sense for your product roadmap and marketing strategy.
Since prioritization mainly revolves around two variables—effort and outcome—you’ll probably focus more on problems brought up by your most valuable customer segments.
You may also find out that a certain percentage of your customers only need to use your product for a month or two every year. You’ll get these insights after collecting such feedback for a while. Then you can account for this natural churn to help you tackle the more important churn.
2. Fix your positioning
Positioning is how your target market should perceive your brand. It’s the intended brand image that consists of associations people have of your brand and products.
Positioning allows you to differentiate from your competitors and, in some cases, even influence how the target market perceives your competitors.
Let’s give the theory a more actionable spin. Your marketing communication should consistently convey what your product does and how a potential customer can benefit from that. For example, here’s a humble brag about our homepage that does the job of providing clear communication well:
This plays a huge role in having new users who know what to expect from Ahrefs and how we can help them. We’re also confident that we can meet or, even better, exceed those expectations.
Churns often happen when you overpromise and underdeliver. Good positioning helps fix the first. So how do you figure out how to position your product?
Again, we’re back at market research that should tell you about the preferences of each of your market segments and what’s important for them. Adjust your positioning and communication based on this.
3. Make sure you target the right audience
Some customer segments churn more than others. You saw the brutal contrast between Cloudflare (with 36% churn) and Fastly (with 0.7% churn). In an ideal world, you’d be spending most of your resources on reaching audiences that allow for product-market fit.
In other words, you can decrease your churn rates if you get more qualified visitors to your website. This especially applies to the middle and bottom parts of the marketing funnel.
Most people probably associate the word “target” with advertising. You can be visible at more relevant places, narrow down targeting options in advertising platforms, etc. That’s pretty straightforward.
But you can also improve the quality of your organic traffic. It influences all parts of the funnel and is a major traffic driver for many companies.
The key to this is solid keyword research. Your best content opportunities are found in topics with high traffic potential, low keyword difficulty, and high business value that’s about naturally plugging your product. However, in reality, you’ll almost never find a keyword that meets all three criteria, so you’ll have to make compromises.
For example, the keyword “churn rate” has a solid traffic potential and a so-so KD score (for our website):
It also provides a few opportunities to naturally mention Ahrefs as a solution to some of the problems here. See what I did right now?
4. Better sales and customer service experience
The experience you have with the customer-facing staff makes a big difference in how you perceive a product, service, or brand. Just think about your best hotel or restaurant experience, how you felt there, and how much of that experience was influenced by great customer service.
This principle can apply to any service you’re subscribed to. I once worked for a B2B company that made “best customer experience” as one of its USPs (unique selling points). Customers truly cherished that, especially if they had so-so or bad experiences with that company’s competitors.
What’s more, even if a customer thinks about churning, a great sales or customer service representative can save the day.
Here are a few suggestions to improve direct communication with your prospects and customers:
- Have communication guides or SOPs that your staff adheres to
- Implement an evaluation and feedback system for your customer-facing teams
- Build a product that your sales and customer service teams truly believe in and like
- Make sure to not shoot your staff in the foot, e.g., don’t make huge changes on Friday or plan outages for busy periods
- Be a good employer
5. Offer a trial or freemium version of your product
Yes, there are still subscription-based companies that don’t let you try their product without any commitments. This is especially true for enterprise products.
The objective of a trial or freemium is to meet or even exceed a prospect’s product expectations. Making your prospects confident in their decisions when they’re about to make the conversion pays off in the context of higher LTV and lower churn.
An important takeaway here is you can make people try your product way before they’re ready to sign up. Our keyword generator, for example, is one of many free SEO tools we offer:
People looking up keywords that lead to this page aren’t often well-versed in what SEO toolsets like Ahrefs have to offer. But providing free solutions to problems higher up the funnel makes them familiar with our tools one step at a time.
A similar use case is our free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. It provides SEO data, insights, and recommendations that are useful and actionable even for beginners. After a few weeks or months of using these products, the beginner may consider stepping up their SEO game and signing up for the full version.
But it’s difficult to make SEO beginners experience the full potential of our tools right away. This leads us to…
6. Improve onboarding experience
The best way to keep a customer is to show them how they can squeeze the most out of your product as soon as possible. This hugely depends on the complexity of your product, so I’ll show you how we do it. (By the way, I already mentioned that our all-in-one SEO toolset can be complex and overwhelming for a beginner.)
We start by sending an email that sets the stage for diving deeper into each tool:
OK, an onboarding sequence of emails is a common practice. Let’s level up.
We have an extensive academy of video courses going through every nook and cranny of the toolset, showing you how to crush SEO:
And if that’s not enough, all of our tools and reports contain explanations, tooltips, and how-to guides so that you can apply the best practices right away:
7. Provide great product education resources
This is related to the previous point but applied to the whole marketing funnel. Product education is at the forefront of our communication strategy. And there’s one thing we know for sure: You can’t over-educate your audience about the product. There are countless ways to use Ahrefs, and we’re glad that even independent experts share their tips:
12 none obvious SEO use cases of @ahrefs 🔥
Here’s a thread of threads (that no one asked for):
— Jake (@jsvxc) November 8, 2021
The more complex your product is, the more you should prioritize education in your marketing communication.
Generally, our prospects already know Ahrefs pretty well before signing up. We took this to the extreme and even discouraged some people from signing up for our now-discontinued $7 trial:
We can afford this claim since we produce product-led content and educate our readers on how Ahrefs can help them solve hundreds of SEO and marketing problems.
Use every channel possible to distribute your product education resources. Here’s a list of all the channels we own and use for product education (feel free to take inspiration from them):
- Newsletter
- Ahrefs social media accounts + our personal accounts
- Ahrefs FB Insider group
- Ahrefs blog
- Ahrefs YouTube channel
- Ahrefs Academy
- Ubiquitous how-to guides and tooltips across the tool
8. Keep on improving your product
You can have the best product in your niche, but there will always be a huge list of features and improvements you can work on. Getting a new customer who assesses that you have the best product for them is great. But that favorable opinion can change in months or years to come if you rest on your oars.
There are three ways to guide your product roadmap:
- Collect and evaluate customer feedback (we do this partially in public)
- Monitor what the market wants (on social media, forums, industry events)
- Consult with experts using the product
9. Track and improve Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Remember the point about the influence of churn rates on your WOMM? NPS is the best proxy for improving both churn rate and WoMM.
NPS represents customer satisfaction and loyalty based on how likely they are to recommend your product or service to others.
You’ve surely encountered many NPS surveys already. Often, they look like this:
The score the user selects dictates whether they’re a detractor, passive, or promoter:
The NPS score is then calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. It can range between ‑100 and 100. Anything above zero means that you have more promoters than detractors.
Most types of software that manage these surveys for you will also calculate the NPS. Generally speaking, an NPS score above 70 is considered exceptionally good. But always check benchmarks for your industry, as they may be much lower.
Improving your NPS will most likely decrease your churn and vice versa. Do note the tactics for achieving these objectives are interchangeable. NPS is just another method for tracking your progress and gaining more insights.
Final thoughts
Now, as we’re approaching the end, I want to mention a tactic that can decrease your churn but will most likely hurt your brand and reputation in the long run. And that’s making your subscriptions difficult to cancel. Don’t do this. Make your sign-up and cancellation processes clear and frictionless.
And remember this: A certain percentage of churn rate is completely fine and natural. Don’t obsess over the metric if you’re already doing well against the industry benchmarks.
Here’s wishing you lower churns and higher growth! If you’ve got any questions, ping me on Twitter.
Understanding the Impact of Google’s November 2024 Core Update on Global Search Rankings
Introduction
In November 2024, Google launched its latest core algorithm update, a broad refinement designed to enhance the quality of its search engine results. Rolling out over approximately two weeks, the update continues Google’s ongoing commitment to delivering more relevant, useful, and high-quality search experiences for users worldwide. This article explores the nature of the November 2024 Core Update, its potential impact on websites, and strategies for site owners to adapt and thrive in its aftermath.
1. What Is a Google Core Update?
Core updates are large-scale changes to Google’s search algorithms. Unlike targeted updates aimed at specific sectors or issues, core updates broadly impact all regions and languages. They reflect Google’s effort to re-evaluate how content is assessed and ranked based on relevance, usefulness, and reliability. Previous updates include significant releases like the March and August 2024 updates, illustrating the frequency and scope of these changes.
2. Goals of the November 2024 Core Update
The November update focuses on refining the quality of search results. According to Google’s official statements, it seeks to amplify genuinely useful content while reducing the visibility of content primarily designed to manipulate rankings without meeting user needs. This effort emphasizes Google’s consistent push for “people-first” content—engaging and useful information that serves users, not search engines.
3. Key Features and Characteristics of the Update
- Global Impact: The update affects search rankings on a global scale and is not confined to any particular industry or niche.
- Rollout Duration: Spanning about two weeks, the rollout’s timing allows Google to fully implement algorithmic changes and assess their effects.
- Broad Adjustments: The update doesn’t target specific sites but involves systemic reassessment across Google’s ranking systems.
- Dynamic Search Environment: This core update follows in the footsteps of the August and March 2024 updates, representing a year of significant search result refinement.
4. What This Means for Site Owners
- Traffic Fluctuations: Websites may observe shifts in rankings and traffic during the update’s rollout and subsequent completion. These changes highlight the dynamic nature of Google search and require continuous monitoring and adaptation.
- Recommended Actions:
- Wait and Analyze: Site owners experiencing changes should wait until the rollout’s completion before making significant adjustments.
- Utilize Google Search Console: Compare traffic and ranking data from before and after the update to identify potential areas of improvement.
- Focus on High-Impact Pages: Pages with notable drops in ranking should undergo thorough content evaluation using Google’s guidelines
5. Recovery and Adaptation Strategies
Recovering from a negative impact due to a core update may take weeks or months as Google’s systems adjust and validate content changes. Site owners should prioritize delivering high-quality, reliable, and user-focused content. Specific steps include:
- Content Evaluation: Assess content against Google’s guidelines, focusing on readability, user satisfaction, and factual accuracy.
- No Quick Fixes: Avoid superficial changes aimed solely at improving rankings. Sustainable improvements are more valuable and impactful(November 2024 core upda…).
- People-First Content: Ensure content serves real user needs, as opposed to purely SEO-driven objectives. This aligns with Google’s long-term priorities for search quality
6. Comparative Analysis with Previous Updates
The November 2024 Core Update continues trends observed in previous updates like March and August 2024. While each update has its nuances, their collective goal remains consistent: bettering search quality and delivering relevant results. Comparing data from these updates can reveal patterns and offer insights into Google’s evolving criteria
7. Broader Implications for the SEO Industry
Google’s ongoing core updates underscore the critical importance of a user-centric approach to SEO. For digital marketers and SEO specialists, adapting strategies to these updates involves staying informed, using reliable analytics tools, and keeping content fresh and engaging. The need for adaptability is paramount, as Google continually shifts the parameters of what defines quality content
Conclusion
The November 2024 Core Update serves as a reminder that Google’s algorithmic changes are not designed to punish but to reward helpful, authentic, and user-focused content. Site owners and marketers who embrace this philosophy are better positioned to weather core updates and even benefit from improved rankings and traffic over time. By maintaining a focus on user experience, transparency, and relevance, creators can align with Google’s evolving standards and thrive in the ever-changing digital landscape
SEO
How to Revive an Old Blog Article for SEO
Quick question: What do you typically do with your old blog posts? Most likely, the answer is: Not much.
If that’s the case, you’re not alone. Many of us in SEO and content marketing tend to focus on continuously creating new content, rather than leveraging our existing blog posts.
However, here’s the reality—Google is becoming increasingly sophisticated in evaluating content quality, and we need to adapt accordingly. Just as it’s easier to encourage existing customers to make repeat purchases, updating old content on your website is a more efficient and sustainable strategy in the long run.
Ways to Optimize Older Content
Some of your old content might not be optimized for SEO very well, rank for irrelevant keywords, or drive no traffic at all. If the quality is still decent, however, you should be able to optimize it properly with little effort.
Refresh Content
If your blog post contains a specific year or mentions current events, it may become outdated over time. If the rest of the content is still relevant (like if it’s targeting an evergreen topic), simply updating the date might be all you need to do.
Rewrite Old Blog Posts
When the content quality is low (you might have greatly improved your writing skills since you’ve written the post) but the potential is still there, there’s not much you can do apart from rewriting an old blog post completely.
This is not a waste—you’re saving time on brainstorming since the basic structure is already in place. Now, focus on improving the quality.
Delete Old Blog Posts
You might find a blog post that just seems unusable. Should you delete your old content? It depends. If it’s completely outdated, of low quality, and irrelevant to any valuable keywords for your website, it’s better to remove it.
Once you decide to delete the post, don’t forget to set up a 301 redirect to a related post or page, or to your homepage.
Promote Old Blog Posts
Sometimes all your content needs is a bit of promotion to start ranking and getting traffic again. Share it on your social media, link to it from a new post – do something to get it discoverable again to your audience. This can give it the boost it needs to attract organic links too.
Which Blog Posts Should You Update?
Deciding when to update or rewrite blog posts is a decision that relies on one important thing: a content audit.
Use your Google Analytics to find out which blog posts used to drive tons of traffic, but no longer have the same reach. You can also use Google Search Console to find out which of your blog posts have lost visibility in comparison to previous months. I have a guide on website analysis using Google Analytics and Google Search Console you can follow.
If you use keyword tracking tools like SE Ranking, you can also use the data it provides to come up with a list of blog posts that have dropped in the rankings.
Make data-driven decisions to identify which blog posts would benefit from these updates – i.e., which ones still have the chance to recover their keyword rankings and organic traffic.
With Google’s helpful content update, which emphasizes better user experiences, it’s crucial to ensure your content remains relevant, valuable, and up-to-date.
How To Update Old Blog Posts for SEO
Updating articles can be an involved process. Here are some tips and tactics to help you get it right.
Author’s Note: I have a Comprehensive On-Page SEO Checklist you might also be interested in following while you’re doing your content audit.
Conduct New Keyword Research
Updating your post without any guide won’t get you far. Always do your keyword research to understand how users are searching for your given topic.
Proper research can also show you relevant questions and sections that can be added to the blog post you’re updating or rewriting. Make sure to take a look at the People Also Ask (PAA) section that shows up when you search for your target keyword. Check out other websites like Answer The Public, Reddit, and Quora to see what users are looking for too.
Look for New Ranking Opportunities
When trying to revive an old blog post for SEO, keep an eye out for new SEO opportunities (e.g., AI Overview, featured snippets, and related search terms) that didn’t exist when you first wrote your blog post. Some of these features can be targeted by the new content you will add to your post, if you write with the aim to be eligible for it.
Rewrite Headlines and Meta Tags
If you want to attract new readers, consider updating your headlines and meta tags.
Your headlines and meta tags should fulfill these three things:
- Reflect the rewritten and new content you’ve added to the blog post.
- Be optimized for the new keywords it’s targeting (if any).
- Appeal to your target audience – who may have changed tastes from when the blog post was originally made.
Remember that your meta tags in particular act like a brief advertisement for your blog post, since this is what the user first sees when your blog post is shown in the search results page.
Take a look at your blog post’s click-through rate on Google Search Console – if it falls below 2%, it’s definitely time for new meta tags.
Replace Outdated Information and Statistics
Updating blog content with current studies and statistics enhances the relevance and credibility of your post. By providing up-to-date information, you help your audience make better, well-informed decisions, while also showing that your content is trustworthy.
Tighten or Expand Ideas
Your old content might be too short to provide real value to users – or you might have rambled on and on in your post. It’s important to evaluate whether you need to make your content more concise, or if you need to elaborate more.
Keep the following tips in mind as you refine your blog post’s ideas:
- Evaluate Helpfulness: Measure how well your content addresses your readers’ pain points. Aim to follow the E-E-A-T model (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness).
- Identify Missing Context: Consider whether your content needs more detail or clarification. View it from your audience’s perspective and ask if the information is complete, or if more information is needed.
- Interview Experts: Speak with industry experts or thought leaders to get fresh insights. This will help support your writing, and provide unique points that enhance the value of your content.
- Use Better Examples: Examples help simplify complex concepts. Add new examples or improve existing ones to strengthen your points.
- Add New Sections if Needed: If your content lacks depth or misses a key point, add new sections to cover these areas more thoroughly.
- Remove Fluff: Every sentence should contribute to the overall narrative. Eliminate unnecessary content to make your post more concise.
- Revise Listicles: Update listicle items based on SEO recommendations and content quality. Add or remove headings to stay competitive with higher-ranking posts.
Improve Visuals and Other Media
No doubt that there are tons of old graphics and photos in your blog posts that can be improved with the tools we have today. Make sure all of the visuals used in your content are appealing and high quality.
Update Internal and External Links
Are your internal and external links up to date? They need to be for your SEO and user experience. Outdated links can lead to broken pages or irrelevant content, frustrating readers and hurting your site’s performance.
You need to check for any broken links on your old blog posts, and update them ASAP. Updating your old blog posts can also lead to new opportunities to link internally to other blog posts and pages, which may not have been available when the post was originally published.
Optimize for Conversions
When updating content, the ultimate goal is often to increase conversions. However, your conversion goals may have changed over the years.
So here’s what you need to check in your updated blog post. First, does the call-to-action (CTA) still link to the products or services you want to promote? If not, update it to direct readers to the current solution or offer.
Second, consider where you can use different conversion strategies. Don’t just add a CTA at the end of the post.
Last, make sure that the blog post leverages product-led content. It’s going to help you mention your products and services in a way that feels natural, without being too pushy. Being subtle can be a high ROI tactic for updated posts.
Key Takeaway
Reviving old blog articles for SEO is a powerful strategy that can breathe new life into your content and boost your website’s visibility. Instead of solely focusing on creating new posts, taking the time to refresh existing content can yield impressive results, both in terms of traffic and conversions.
By implementing these strategies, you can transform old blog posts into valuable resources that attract new readers and retain existing ones. So, roll up your sleeves, dive into your archives, and start updating your content today—your audience and search rankings will thank you!
SEO
How Compression Can Be Used To Detect Low Quality Pages
The concept of Compressibility as a quality signal is not widely known, but SEOs should be aware of it. Search engines can use web page compressibility to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords, making it useful knowledge for SEO.
Although the following research paper demonstrates a successful use of on-page features for detecting spam, the deliberate lack of transparency by search engines makes it difficult to say with certainty if search engines are applying this or similar techniques.
What Is Compressibility?
In computing, compressibility refers to how much a file (data) can be reduced in size while retaining essential information, typically to maximize storage space or to allow more data to be transmitted over the Internet.
TL/DR Of Compression
Compression replaces repeated words and phrases with shorter references, reducing the file size by significant margins. Search engines typically compress indexed web pages to maximize storage space, reduce bandwidth, and improve retrieval speed, among other reasons.
This is a simplified explanation of how compression works:
- Identify Patterns:
A compression algorithm scans the text to find repeated words, patterns and phrases - Shorter Codes Take Up Less Space:
The codes and symbols use less storage space then the original words and phrases, which results in a smaller file size. - Shorter References Use Less Bits:
The “code” that essentially symbolizes the replaced words and phrases uses less data than the originals.
A bonus effect of using compression is that it can also be used to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords.
Research Paper About Detecting Spam
This research paper is significant because it was authored by distinguished computer scientists known for breakthroughs in AI, distributed computing, information retrieval, and other fields.
Marc Najork
One of the co-authors of the research paper is Marc Najork, a prominent research scientist who currently holds the title of Distinguished Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. He’s a co-author of the papers for TW-BERT, has contributed research for increasing the accuracy of using implicit user feedback like clicks, and worked on creating improved AI-based information retrieval (DSI++: Updating Transformer Memory with New Documents), among many other major breakthroughs in information retrieval.
Dennis Fetterly
Another of the co-authors is Dennis Fetterly, currently a software engineer at Google. He is listed as a co-inventor in a patent for a ranking algorithm that uses links, and is known for his research in distributed computing and information retrieval.
Those are just two of the distinguished researchers listed as co-authors of the 2006 Microsoft research paper about identifying spam through on-page content features. Among the several on-page content features the research paper analyzes is compressibility, which they discovered can be used as a classifier for indicating that a web page is spammy.
Detecting Spam Web Pages Through Content Analysis
Although the research paper was authored in 2006, its findings remain relevant to today.
Then, as now, people attempted to rank hundreds or thousands of location-based web pages that were essentially duplicate content aside from city, region, or state names. Then, as now, SEOs often created web pages for search engines by excessively repeating keywords within titles, meta descriptions, headings, internal anchor text, and within the content to improve rankings.
Section 4.6 of the research paper explains:
“Some search engines give higher weight to pages containing the query keywords several times. For example, for a given query term, a page that contains it ten times may be higher ranked than a page that contains it only once. To take advantage of such engines, some spam pages replicate their content several times in an attempt to rank higher.”
The research paper explains that search engines compress web pages and use the compressed version to reference the original web page. They note that excessive amounts of redundant words results in a higher level of compressibility. So they set about testing if there’s a correlation between a high level of compressibility and spam.
They write:
“Our approach in this section to locating redundant content within a page is to compress the page; to save space and disk time, search engines often compress web pages after indexing them, but before adding them to a page cache.
…We measure the redundancy of web pages by the compression ratio, the size of the uncompressed page divided by the size of the compressed page. We used GZIP …to compress pages, a fast and effective compression algorithm.”
High Compressibility Correlates To Spam
The results of the research showed that web pages with at least a compression ratio of 4.0 tended to be low quality web pages, spam. However, the highest rates of compressibility became less consistent because there were fewer data points, making it harder to interpret.
Figure 9: Prevalence of spam relative to compressibility of page.
The researchers concluded:
“70% of all sampled pages with a compression ratio of at least 4.0 were judged to be spam.”
But they also discovered that using the compression ratio by itself still resulted in false positives, where non-spam pages were incorrectly identified as spam:
“The compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6 fared best, correctly identifying 660 (27.9%) of the spam pages in our collection, while misidentifying 2, 068 (12.0%) of all judged pages.
Using all of the aforementioned features, the classification accuracy after the ten-fold cross validation process is encouraging:
95.4% of our judged pages were classified correctly, while 4.6% were classified incorrectly.
More specifically, for the spam class 1, 940 out of the 2, 364 pages, were classified correctly. For the non-spam class, 14, 440 out of the 14,804 pages were classified correctly. Consequently, 788 pages were classified incorrectly.”
The next section describes an interesting discovery about how to increase the accuracy of using on-page signals for identifying spam.
Insight Into Quality Rankings
The research paper examined multiple on-page signals, including compressibility. They discovered that each individual signal (classifier) was able to find some spam but that relying on any one signal on its own resulted in flagging non-spam pages for spam, which are commonly referred to as false positive.
The researchers made an important discovery that everyone interested in SEO should know, which is that using multiple classifiers increased the accuracy of detecting spam and decreased the likelihood of false positives. Just as important, the compressibility signal only identifies one kind of spam but not the full range of spam.
The takeaway is that compressibility is a good way to identify one kind of spam but there are other kinds of spam that aren’t caught with this one signal. Other kinds of spam were not caught with the compressibility signal.
This is the part that every SEO and publisher should be aware of:
“In the previous section, we presented a number of heuristics for assaying spam web pages. That is, we measured several characteristics of web pages, and found ranges of those characteristics which correlated with a page being spam. Nevertheless, when used individually, no technique uncovers most of the spam in our data set without flagging many non-spam pages as spam.
For example, considering the compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6, one of our most promising methods, the average probability of spam for ratios of 4.2 and higher is 72%. But only about 1.5% of all pages fall in this range. This number is far below the 13.8% of spam pages that we identified in our data set.”
So, even though compressibility was one of the better signals for identifying spam, it still was unable to uncover the full range of spam within the dataset the researchers used to test the signals.
Combining Multiple Signals
The above results indicated that individual signals of low quality are less accurate. So they tested using multiple signals. What they discovered was that combining multiple on-page signals for detecting spam resulted in a better accuracy rate with less pages misclassified as spam.
The researchers explained that they tested the use of multiple signals:
“One way of combining our heuristic methods is to view the spam detection problem as a classification problem. In this case, we want to create a classification model (or classifier) which, given a web page, will use the page’s features jointly in order to (correctly, we hope) classify it in one of two classes: spam and non-spam.”
These are their conclusions about using multiple signals:
“We have studied various aspects of content-based spam on the web using a real-world data set from the MSNSearch crawler. We have presented a number of heuristic methods for detecting content based spam. Some of our spam detection methods are more effective than others, however when used in isolation our methods may not identify all of the spam pages. For this reason, we combined our spam-detection methods to create a highly accurate C4.5 classifier. Our classifier can correctly identify 86.2% of all spam pages, while flagging very few legitimate pages as spam.”
Key Insight:
Misidentifying “very few legitimate pages as spam” was a significant breakthrough. The important insight that everyone involved with SEO should take away from this is that one signal by itself can result in false positives. Using multiple signals increases the accuracy.
What this means is that SEO tests of isolated ranking or quality signals will not yield reliable results that can be trusted for making strategy or business decisions.
Takeaways
We don’t know for certain if compressibility is used at the search engines but it’s an easy to use signal that combined with others could be used to catch simple kinds of spam like thousands of city name doorway pages with similar content. Yet even if the search engines don’t use this signal, it does show how easy it is to catch that kind of search engine manipulation and that it’s something search engines are well able to handle today.
Here are the key points of this article to keep in mind:
- Doorway pages with duplicate content is easy to catch because they compress at a higher ratio than normal web pages.
- Groups of web pages with a compression ratio above 4.0 were predominantly spam.
- Negative quality signals used by themselves to catch spam can lead to false positives.
- In this particular test, they discovered that on-page negative quality signals only catch specific types of spam.
- When used alone, the compressibility signal only catches redundancy-type spam, fails to detect other forms of spam, and leads to false positives.
- Combing quality signals improves spam detection accuracy and reduces false positives.
- Search engines today have a higher accuracy of spam detection with the use of AI like Spam Brain.
Read the research paper, which is linked from the Google Scholar page of Marc Najork:
Detecting spam web pages through content analysis
Featured Image by Shutterstock/pathdoc
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