What is Evergreen Content & Why Should You Be Focusing On It?

When it comes to your content marketing strategy and SEO strategy, you should always be considering how to keep your traffic steadily increasing. While simply putting out trendy content will bring bursts of organic traffic to your website, this is not the most effective way to achieve this.

The issue with this kind of content creation is that the new content you release can often have a short shelf life. No matter how in depth and high quality, the content eventually will get stale. You may see a sharp spike in conversions for a little while after posting a new piece of content, but that will eventually level off and traffic will decrease over time. That’s where evergreen content comes in.

What is Evergreen Content?

Evergreen content is content that remains to be relevant for prolonged periods of time. It gets its name from the Evergreen tree, which remains green year-round. It is named after this because while most types of content will bring in traffic for a while before eventually becoming stale and irrelevant, evergreen content will stay topical for long after it is posted and continue growing in traffic over time.

To do this, evergreen topics need to be perpetually relevant. For example, a piece of content that is a tutorial for how to use a certain product has the potential to be evergreen, because as long as that product is used then the content will be relevant and drive traffic to your website.

Difference Between Evergreen and Seasonal Content

Seasonal content is kind of the opposite of evergreen content.

Whereas evergreen posts are constantly bringing in organic traffic, seasonal posts are time-sensitive, and only relevant for certain periods of time throughout the year. For example, an article about Christmas decoration ideas will be relevant during Christmas time, but not any other point in the year. This is seasonal content.

Examples of Evergreen Content Ideas

There are many different types of evergreen content that you will see online. Regardless of the format, evergreen pieces just need to have a topic that will remain important to readers over time. These pieces can be written in a variety of ways such as:

How-To Guides & Tutorials

One of the most popular types of evergreen content is tutorials and how-to guides. These types of content tend to have a long lifespan, as people will continuously need guidance on certain topics, such as step-by-step guides on how to use a specific tool or product.

Listicles

A listicle is an article that is written in the format of a list. This type of content is commonly used as top # lists. Articles like this are easy to make into evergreen content, as you can use a wide variety of topics to create a listicle, many of which will stay relevant for extended periods of time.

Reviews and Case Studies

Reviews can make for terrific evergreen content if done for the right products. So long as the subject of the review is something that has been commonly used for a long time, and shows no signs of diminishing usage, it can make for great evergreen content. Case studies are also long lasting testaments to your company’s success.

FAQs

FAQs that answer common questions about your business and industry are great evergreen content, as the questions are likely to remain relevant for a long period of time. They also help save you time by easily providing answers to your users without having to tie up customer support staff.

Benefits of Evergreen Content

Now, we’ve gone over how evergreen content stays relevant, and the types of content you can use to achieve this. But, why should you be doing it? What are the key benefits of using evergreen articles as a part of your content strategy?

Sustained Traffic

As mentioned above, evergreen content can bring in more organic traffic, as well as sustain this higher level of organic traffic for longer. Not only is this good by itself, it also has SEO benefits. Overall, evergreen content is terrific for boosting your rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs), and getting your business in front of more potential customers.

More Backlinks

Due to the higher traffic and consistent relevance, there will be far more motivation for other websites to add backlinks to your website onto theirs. Not only will there be more backlinks, but high quality content linking to your content. This will have a terrific effect on your own rankings as a result.

Higher Return on Investment (ROI)

Due to all of the other factors involved, evergreen content tends to have a much higher ROI than other forms of content. This means that the time and budget that you spend on producing evergreen content will yield more than if you spent the same amount of time and budget on regular content.

Beginner’s Guide: Tips for Evergreen Content Strategy

Now that you know what evergreen content is and what the benefits are, you’ll need some tips to be effective in your content creation and strategy.

SEO Optimization

Firstly, before you write anything at all, you need to understand how to optimize your content for SEO. To do this, you will need to do keyword research. This will help you with determining topics, and optimizing your content on those topics.

Make sure to include relevant keywords with high search volume and low competition. This will make it easier for your content to rank highly in search engines.

Don’t Depend On Trending Topics

In digital marketing, it can be difficult to ignore trending topics. However, with evergreen content, you will need to avoid them to have success. Evergreen content thrives off of a topic remaining relevant for long periods of time. Trending topics, current events, and pop culture references are the opposite of this.

This does not mean that you cannot create content about trending topics. You can – and should – but you need to balance it out with an evergreen content strategy. Expect content based on trends to fizzle out relatively quickly.

Update Regularly

In order to ensure that your evergreen content stays relevant, you need to update and repurpose the content as often as necessary. Some content may not need to be updated as frequently as others. It largely depends on how frequently new information about the content’s topic is released.

Promote the Content

The key to getting your new evergreen content off the ground is promotion. A great way to do this is to integrate your social media marketing strategy into your evergreen strategy. By promoting your evergreen content on social media platforms, you will be able to give your content a good starting point for gaining traffic.

Start Writing Evergreen Content

Now that we’ve reached the end, you have the ultimate guide to create the best content for your target audience that will keep your website high up in SERPs. Whether you are writing blogs or creating infographics, always try to provide the most relevant content that you can for your audience, and keep it relevant for as long as possible.

If you still don’t feel that you are ready to get your evergreen content marketing strategy going into full effect yet, that’s ok! Lift Marketing has experts in all facets of digital marketing who can take your strategies to the next level. Get in touch with us today so we can help you get started.