What is evergreen content and how does it help your brand and marketing strategy? Plus, how do you create it?
Today we’ll explore what evergreen content is and how you can utilize it in your content marketing strategy. If you apply this information to your own content you’ll be on your way to gaining more traffic, growing your brand’s audience, improving SEO, and more.
What is Evergreen Content?
Simply put, evergreen content is a piece of writing that will remain relevant and useful for a long time. It can take many forms including how-to guides, explainer articles, or listicles. Evergreen content will work for you long after you create it, leading to a higher ROI.
What isn’t evergreen content?
It’s essential to understand what isn’t evergreen content to avoid wasting time on pieces that won’t help your website in the long run.
Some examples of non-evergreen content include:
- News Articles – these are timely pieces of content that are trending and will lose traction quickly.
- Seasonal Guides – guides that are seasonal or relevant to a short period are not evergreen. An example of a seasonal guide would be “Your Guide to the 50th Anniversary Celebration at Disney World”. Once the anniversary is over, the guide will lose traffic and become irrelevant.
- Event Recaps – Recaps of events such as a review of a SuperBowl halftime show will only garner searches for a short period after the event occurs. After a few weeks, the conversation over the event will fade away, and people will stop searching for recaps.
While these pieces can be fun to write and may even do well in the short term, they won’t be relevant a year from now.
However, this doesn’t mean you should never write these types of articles – sometimes time-sensitive articles are helpful to your readers or can help you gain quick attention on a buzz topic. Just be aware that they shouldn’t make up the majority of your content strategy. You want to build traffic, not chase it.
What are some examples of evergreen content?
Some examples of evergreen content include how-to guides, explainer articles, and listicles. The type of content is less important than the topic, you’ll need to choose a timeless topic that won’t change much as time goes on for it to be evergreen! Below we’ll explore a few of the common types of evergreen content, plus examples from leading brands.
How-To Content
How-To content teaches readers how to do something. These can be articles, ebooks, infographics, and more and are instructional content. They typically include step-by-step guides on how to do something. You could create a blog for your business explaining how to do something related to your business. For example, a wedding planner could make a blog “How To Plan A Wedding”.
Source: The New York Times
How-To Content IRL
In the image above you’ll see an example of an evergreen “How To” article published by The New York Times, How To Start Running, in the article, they guide readers through how to start running, including the gear new runners will need, proper running forms, and proven methods to get started! Year after year people will search for answers on how to start their running journey, and this article will be there to help with minimal updates needed!
Informational Articles
Informational articles are similar to how-to’s in that they can be a valuable resource for people looking to learn more about a topic. However, instead of guiding a reader through how to do a process, an informational article simply informs a reader by explaining a concept and covering relevant details to the topic.
Informational Articles IRL
The example below is an informational article from Swapcard, a leading event platform. Their article Best Virtual Event Platform: The Ultimate Guide for 2022 helps guide readers through choosing a virtual event platform and positions them as thought leaders within their industry. This is a topic that will continue to have search queries for years to come and require minimal updates year over year making it evergreen.
Source: Swapcard
Listicles
Listicles are pieces of content that are in a list format. You’ve probably seen articles like this, such as “10 Best Fall Coats,” these articles are a bit different from the others because they tend to be more lighthearted and fun.
Listicles IRL
Not all listicles are considered evergreen but can be evergreen and very useful if done correctly. For example, Epicurious created a listicle of tips, ”How to Bake a Cake: 11 Tips for Perfect Cake”. Baking a cake is a long-standing process and the steps and technology don’t change drastically year over year. You may have to update the listicle and add new tips with time, but you wouldn’t need to rewrite the entire article.
Source: Epicurious
Checklists
Checklists are an easy-to-digest and understand form of evergreen content. For example, if you sell a service or product, you can create a checklist on how to purchase your product.
Checklists IRL
Below is an example of how Better, a company whose mission is making homeownership simpler and faster, created The Definitive Home Buying Checklist. The evergreen content guides readers through seven steps to follow when purchasing a home. You could apply this to any industry and business to help your audience through some of the challenges relevant to your product or service.
Source: Better
How Can Evergreen Content Help My Website?
There are many benefits to having evergreen content on your website. Let’s explore some of the top benefits below.
Helps Improve SEO
Evergreen content helps improve your SEO. When you have articles that are relevant year after year, they have the potential to bring in organic traffic long after you’ve published them. This means people will be more likely to find it when searching for keywords related to your evergreen content. To keep your SEO strong, make sure to update the content as needed, so it stays relevant. Small updates over the years will help the content stay strong.
Evergreen Content Builds Trust
In addition, evergreen content can help build trust with potential customers. If someone reads an article of yours and finds it helpful, they are more likely to come back for more in the future.
This is especially true if you are in a niche where information doesn’t change too often – like history or science. In these cases, your evergreen content can become a go-to resource for people looking for reliable information.
Evergreen Content is Long Lasting
It takes a lot of time to write a great blog. You spend hours researching, writing, and optimizing your posts. Evergreen content allows your hard work to last longer, making it a more sustainable option for writing. Other sources like news articles quickly lose traction or need frequent updating, which costs you more time to continue updating the content.
How do I create evergreen content?
Now that you know what evergreen content is and why it’s important, you probably wonder how you can start creating it.
If you follow the steps below, you’ll be well on your way to creating successful evergreen content that continues to bring in traffic for the long run helping your website.
Brainstorm Topics
The first step is to develop a list of topics that you think would make for good evergreen content. If you are having trouble coming up with a topic, utilize a tool like Answer The Public, which will help give you insight into what consumers are searching for, or a blog topic generator tool.
Choose a topic that can stand the test of time. Most subjects will need updates over the years, but try to think of a topic that doesn’t change dramatically year to year.
Source: SEMRUSH
Research Keywords
Once you have a few ideas, you can start doing keyword research to see what people are actually searching for. You’ll want to pick a topic with decent search volume that will not be too difficult for your site to rank for.
Write Your Evergreen Content
Once you’ve found a few keywords that you want to target, it’s time to start writing! Use simple to understand terms, do not overcomplicate the subject. Explain the evergreen content so that anyone can understand and learn from it. You want it to be helpful and informative, not confusing.
Add Internal Links
Link to other blogs or pages that are relevant on your website. Internal linking helps increase the time a visitor spends on your website and helps with SEO.
For example, if you’ve written a blog about how to bake a cake, you could link to related blogs like chocolate cake recipes or the best baking tools. This helps your readers find other content that may be relevant to their needs and improves site navigation.
Include Outbound Links
To provide additional context and source information to support your piece of content with outbound links. Outbound links allow your readers to have a better user experience because they can simply navigate to the sources or more information if they want to learn more. When linking to other sides, always ensure they are relevant, high-quality, and trustworthy sources.
Source: Pexels
Break Up Your Text with Visuals
According to Blogging Wizard, blog posts that include images generate 2-4x more traffic, 30% more shares, and 25% more backlinks. It makes sense, no one likes staring at a wall of text and images help make the content easier to digest. Boost traffic and provide a better user experience by breaking up your text with images, videos, or infographics. Remember, when adding your images make sure to properly source images or use royalty-free sources such as Pexels.
Source: Grammarly
Check For Errors
Focus on creating something that is error-proof. Use spell check or a tool like Grammarly to ensure everything is free of spelling errors and grammatically correct.
Repurpose Your Content
Repurpose your evergreen content! You spent a lot of time creating your evergreen content, make it stretch, and distribute it to many channels to extend your blog’s reach. For example, repurpose a quote from your article into a social media graphic or take one tip from your article to share on LinkedIn with a link back to the full article to encourage people to read more and drive traffic back to your website.
Ideas on how to repurpose and promote your content include:
- Email Marketing
- Social media posts
- Link Building
- Turn several related posts into a guide
- Create a video
- Design an infographic
Below is an example of how The Northwest Event Show repurposed a quote from their blog Sustainable Events: How To Overcome Challenges and Find Key Opportunities into a social media post to gain more traction and direct their social followers back to their website.
Source: Northwest Event Show
Do I Ever Need to Update Evergreen Content?
Even though your topic is evergreen, you’ll need to update it periodically. Specifics of your topic can change over time, new information could come out that would improve the content, and SEO best practices can change.
By keeping your content up to date, you help maintain the relevance of the content. While auditing your evergreen content, check your links and make sure they all work, optimize the content to adhere to SEO best practices, refresh the images, and add any new information that could be helpful. As a general rule of thumb, go through your best-performing evergreen content at least once a year and make improvements.
What Is Evergreen Content? Final Thoughts
The bottom line is that evergreen content is a great way to improve your website and build trust with your readers. By creating helpful and timeless articles, you can bring in organic traffic for years to come.
So what are you waiting for? Start bringing in organic traffic with helpful content that stands the test of time. If you’re not utilizing it, you’re missing out. If you need help creating content that will drive traffic for the long haul, contact us today, and we’ll help you get started!
