When it comes to an industry as fast paced as digital marketing, you’d be forgiven for thinking there was no such thing as evergreen content for SEO. Especially as marketers spend a good portion of their time carefully crafting content that aligns with the latest buzz-worthy trends. These on trend, easily digestible, and timely content pieces serve a purpose, but their shelf life is limited. As trends come and go, transient content follows suit; created, published then lost and forgotten in the internet abyss. With that in mind, you can see why a content strategy that only churns out single-use content is not an effective or sustainable one.
Thankfully, there’s evergreen content. As per the name, evergreen content will stand the test of time and hold value long after it has been published. As a result, it works harder for you and increases authoritativeness, SEO and trust.
What Is Evergreen Content?
Evergreen by name and evergreen by nature, this type of content is timeless. Furthermore, it holds its relevance and value with little to no maintenance. The type of content can be anything from video, how-to-guides, FAQs to long-form knowledge base articles.
As a result of its longstanding relevance, evergreen content continues to accumulate traffic over time. Moreover, the longer it’s published, the harder it works for you and the better ROI.
Why Is Evergreen Content Important?
Both evergreen content and topically relevant content have an essential role in your content marketing strategy. However, evergreen content drives more traffic in the long-run. Its long-lasting value makes it a rewarding time investment Therefore, evergreen content is a beneficial addition to your SEO efforts.
With that in mind, it’s worth mentioning its essential role when it comes to backlinks too. Producing an in-depth, informative, and timeless piece of content is more likely to achieve backlinks. This is as a result of the added value it brings to people. By having other sites link to your content you are increasing the authoritativeness of your site and brand.
Long-form, knowledge based articles are especially advantageous in niche areas as they have a higher chance of being shared, linked to and tagged.
As briefly touched on earlier, evergreen content is also great for building trust and authority, while simultaneously positioning your brand as an industry thought leader.
What distinguishes evergreen content?
You’ve probably already published evergreen content, perhaps without even realising you’ve done so. What distinguishes evergreen content from single-use content? Its longevity. Content such as statistics, opinions and news articles will not stand the test of time as they’re likely to lose their relevance.
Relevant: “Marketing During Covid-19 | How Will It Effect The Industry?’
The latter article will lose value as time goes on because it’s topically relevant, and Coronavirus won’t be sticking around forever. A guide to conversation marketing will retain its value (until major changes occur).
How can you produce evergreen content?
There’s no disputing the benefits, but the question is: how do you produce evergreen content? Here are a couple of tried and tested methods to get you started.
Method #1: Answer the questions your audience is asking
There are some questions that rarely change, for example, someone out there will always want a Beginners Guide to SEO. Therefore, deliver that content and do it well, in fact, do it better than anyone else out there. Your objective should be to answer your audience’s questions with as much depth as possible.
Tools such as Google Keyword Planner can help you establish what people are searching for, or even the ‘people also searched for’ section on the right hand side of the results page.
Ultimately, the key is to ensure that your evergreen content addresses the topics that people ask about.
Method #2: Find recurring trends and ideally a niche
Some things happen on a regular basis, like holidays and Christmas or industry events. Take advantage of this and write content you can simply upgrade each year. Write how-to-guides that you can simply amend as new information comes to light.
As with the digital marketing industry, things are continuously evolving but if the fundamentals are there it doesn’t take much to add in a little update from time to time.
It’s a good idea to try and drill down too. Instead of a simple guide on how to write content for your website try being more specific, for example:
- How Many Topics Should Be In A Content Cluster?
- Do You Have Topically Relevant Content?
- 5 Reasons Your Business Needs A Content Cluster Strategy
You get the gist. The more you can narrow down your subject area and target long-tail keywords, the better. Then, every now and then repurpose your content and add new, relevant information and promote it on social media.
Method #3: Draw inspiration from other high-performing evergreen articles
It’s always important to keep an eye on the competition, and if you see they’re doing something well, you can take inspiration from that. Taking note of the word ‘inspiration’, don’t simply copy.
Keep your eyes peeled because some things are universal, just because it’s a different topic or industry doesn’t mean to say you can’t get inspiration or value from it.
That being said, if you keep up to date with what your competitors are writing, you’ll gain valuable insight about what your audience likes.
The key is in establishing which articles are evergreen content.
Added bonus: you can repurpose your evergreen content
To get even more ROI from your evergreen content you can repurpose it and even take bitesize information from it to use across other platforms. Ideally, you’ll be able to easily isolate bitesize sections of your long-form content for snippets or social platforms.
These bite-sized pieces should remain valuable even out of context and in their own right. Additionally, search engines can use the information for featured snippets. Or you can even create video content from your article using tools such as Animoto for even more opportunities to share.
If you add visual elements to your repertoire, you can also make use of highly-visual social platforms such as Pinterest and Instagram.
After all, the more types of content you have, the more likely people are to find your content on their preferred channel.
Time To Get Started On Your SEO Evergreen Content
If you’ve got this far, you should have a good idea about what evergreen content is, why you should publish it, and how to create it effectively for SEO. Also, you may have noticed that this article is an example of Evergreen content, so if you need to bookmark it for future reference, go ahead.
Now it’s time to get started and create your own evergreen content in order to start reaping the benefits of increased SEO, authority and most importantly, your sanity.
