Evergreen Content: The What, The Why, The How

With every organization trying to top the charts on the SERPs, it is easy to lose perspective. Everyone is caught up with ranking higher, using the age ol’ buzzwords that only seize on subjects currently trending on the internet. It’s true that Google responds to search queries with the latest content but time-proof and high-quality legacy content is just as rewarding.

If you have been in the SEO marketing industry for some time, you must have come across the phrase ‘evergreen content’. So, what exactly is evergreen content, and do you actually need it? Let’s find out the relevance of evergreen content and how you can create it to boost your SERP rankings.

What is Evergreen Content?

Evergreen content is a term used for the type of content that remains fresh and relevant to readers over time. It is called evergreen content because it is sustainable and continues to be relevant long past its publication.

But the question is – how is it different from other pieces of content?

Evergreen topics are the ones that continue to grab customers’ interest and search volume for a long time.

Some common evergreen content formats are:

• Tips: Offering hacks or useful ways like ‘5 tips for increasing sales by tweaking your lead generation strategies’.
• Listicles: Curating a list of something customers are looking for like ‘list of 7 security plugins’.
• Tutorials (How-to Content): A comprehensive guide on some expertise like ‘how to write an eBook’.
• Reviews: Offering honest opinions about something like software or movies.

Evergreen content is not about just format. It boils down to topics that stay useful to readers regardless of the time. We’re talking about formats because once you understand some of the key formats, you can put them into practice.

Why Do You Need Evergreen Content?

Following are some instances of evergreen topics –

• 5 tips to strategize your campaign to boost sales
• How to migrate from Salesforce Classic to Lightning

It doesn’t matter whether the aforementioned topics were written in 2021 or 2015, the tips or tutorials will still be useful.

On the other hand, ‘Most popular cloud services in 2021’ is an example of a non-evergreen topic because it is a rather seasonal topic. It may bring a spike in traffic but once people start to come to terms with certain cloud services that are highly popular in the said year, the traffic will start to drop.

Now, this puts you on the hamster wheel of content creation. It means you will have to continuously publish content or else your traffic will stop. That’s exactly why you need to create evergreen content.

Apart from being relevant, it helps you:

• Bring Regular Traffic: Search engines like Google focus on providing accurate answers to search queries. Your content won’t rank if it is irrelevant or out-of-date. That’s what makes evergreen content your best bet. If you are creating content around evergreen topics, you won’t see a decline in your traffic in weeks, months, or even years, so long as you periodically promote it. You can expect more organic traffic, because:

  1. It contains a sustainable amount of interest.
  2. Even though it may have been published a few months or years ago, it would still be relevant to readers that are searching for content like your blog/article is offering.

• Reap Maximum Results With Fewer Efforts: The pressure of coming up with creative content to grab the attention of your readers can be overwhelming. With evergreen content, you don’t have to publish the content as often, which saves time and helps boost your productivity.

5 Tips to Generate Evergreen Content

Before you get to work, let’s dig into some quick tips that will help you create compelling evergreen content pieces.

1. Pick Time-Proof Topics

The first thing that makes your content evergreen is the topic you write about. You can use tools like Google Analytics to distinguish between seasonal and evergreen keywords. Start with taking a look at your own blog posts and identify the ones with persistent traffic potential. Analyze if there are related topics that are already covered by your competitors. Focus on the gaps you have uncovered to generate content around it. Next, check the highest-performing blog posts in your niche using competitive analysis tools like SEMrush. It will help you identify the gaps in your competition’s content so you can do better.

2. Choose Timeless Keywords

The use of appropriate keywords is vital to make your posts appear in SERPs. Start with using a keyword discovery tool like ‘keyword.io’ and take some ideas for related keywords. For instance, if you want to write a post about strategizing a campaign to boost sales, consider the following –

• Your content should contain multiple keywords that potential readers may search for including ‘trouble growing sales’ and ‘sales boosting tips’.
• Ensure that you include subheadings that are optimized around popular related keywords like ‘marketing automation tools to boost campaign results’.

3. Avoid Time-Sensitive Topics or Data

Including time-sensitive content in your evergreen content would defy the whole purpose of creating time-proof content. When you use dates or events, you shorten the lifespan of your content piece because –

• The event or date mentioned in the blog post is relevant to the context, it is seasonal content. For instance, a blog on ‘top 5 CDN service providers in 2021’ is not evergreen.
• People lose interest in a ‘trending’ topic after the trend has passed. Therefore, the content piece automatically goes out of trend.

4. Create Detailed Tutorials

Educational articles or eBooks are the most evergreen type of content. When people want to learn something, they look for tutorials or guides. The comprehensive nature of such content keeps it relevant to readers over time. That’s because it breaks down the process into steps for effective website building. Ensure that your guide offers relevant information while showcasing your authoritativeness in a specific niche.

5. Update Existing Content

The key to search-optimized evergreen content is regular updates. There are a number of variables involved like changes in approaches, requirements of your customers, or new tools entering the market. It can make your content less relevant as it is not addressing new issues. But if you spruce it up from time to time, it keeps ranking on SERPs while being relevant to readers. Updating content is easy, all you have to do is:

• Eliminate outdated information
• Backlink a recently received testimonial/review for your evergreen content
• Include new information/ recent stats)
• Change images (with new color-palettes or trending graphics)
• Repurpose your existing content pieces into other content assets like infographics, videos, etc, and market them on multiple platforms

You might have noticed that most of the first-page results on Google are the ones that have been recently published. This trick can come in handy for you too. Updating your existing content will change its publication date, leading to an instant boost in SERP rankings.

Evergreen content busts the myth that you need to post 10 times a week to bring traffic to your site. When you focus on quality instead of quantity, the content pieces that you curate never go out of fashion. Therefore, focus on educating your audiences to position yourself as an industry authority.

All you need to do is identify the topics that matter to your audience, put forth a fresh point-of-view, and generate relevant content that covers all related aspects.

Want to level up your content marketing strategy using evergreen content? Talk to us!