If you’re involved with content creation, SEO or really any kind of digital marketing, you’re probably familiar with the phrase ‘evergreen content’. You’ve probably also been told it is something your business needs to have.
But what exactly is evergreen content and why is it so important?
In this guide, we’re going to take a look at the basics of evergreen content and why incorporating this into your strategy is important for killer content marketing. We’ll then look at x solid practices for getting your evergreen content marketing right.
What is evergreen content?
OK, so let’s first look at what evergreen content is.
In a nutshell, this is content that will never go out of date or become tired and irrelevant. To achieve this, it is typically related to popular topics that will always be popular with readers regardless of the news, current economic or political climate or what season it is.
This is why it is called evergreen because much like the evergreen plant that retains its green color all year round, this content remains relevant at any point.
To get a better understanding, we’ve pulled together some examples of evergreen topics:
- How to lose weight
- How to make lasagna
- Things to do in Sri Lanka
- A guide to cutting your own hair at home
These are just a few examples but as you can see, these topics can be relevant to searchers at any time of year. Plus, the content within will change very little overtime – as such, this content will remain evergreen.
Creating evergreen content has a number of benefits, the first being that you can actually save yourself work in the long run. Once you’ve got evergreen content out, you only need to update it every so often and it can save you having to write more and more over time.
Secondly, you can keep driving regular traffic to your pages and your website which is ultimately the aim of creating content anyway! Not only this, but it can be great for SEO purposes. Search engines like Google want to help people find relevant and useful content and posts that are out of date won’t rank as highly.
So, if you’re hoping to strengthen your evergreen content marketing strategy, here are 8 best practices to help you do just that.
1. Make sure you’re choosing evergreen topics
One of the most important aspects of your marketing strategy needs to be choosing the right evergreen topics. This often means staying away from trending subjects or news stories that will lose interest within the week, but we’ll look at this in more detail in the next section.
The best way to find evergreen topics is to do some keyword research. After brainstorming a few topics related to your business, use keyword tools to reveal the different keywords around the subject. Then look at search volume to see which are remaining consistently popular over time.
You can also use these tools to see which keywords have a positive trend of growing in popularity and which have consistent search intent. It can then be a good idea to target these keywords and topics as they’re only getting more popular.
This research will form the basis for your evergreen content strategy.
2. Avoid topics and words with a short lifespan
In your bid to choose evergreen topics you should avoid those that have a short lifespan. This tends to include news stories or trending stories as these will likely be less popular within a week or two – the news cycle moves very fast!
Similarly, popular culture trends tend to move very quickly so celebrities, songs, TV shows or movies that might be big at the time, will not always be as popular with such a wide audience.
You also need to avoid using language that has a short lifespan as this only serves to date your content. Some examples of this include:
- This year
- Last month
- Yesterday
- 2020 (or relevant year)
Of course, you can argue that the year serves a purpose as people often include this in their search terms, for example, ‘digital marketing best practices in 2021’.
If you’re able to create evergreen content within this title and then update the year as you go, this can work out and can be a great way to drive traffic. You just need to ensure that the content within the article is not year-specific but will remain relevant in years to come.
3. Write killer content
Once you’ve settled on your topic, it’s no good quickly tapping out a 500-word blog post in 10 minutes and hitting publish. Evergreen content needs to be helpful and valuable, otherwise, people aren’t going to read it the first time around, let alone keep coming back to it.
As such, you need to make sure your writing provides insights (data-driven where possible) and actionable advice. This is the content that is going to perform best in the long term.
4. Refresh your content as often as necessary
We’ve been talking about evergreen status as if it quite literally lasts forever. Now, the internet only became mainstream in the 1990s so we could have no possible way to know this. However, we do know that the content that has performed best over the years still requires the occasional refresh.
This might mean going through and:
- Updating outdated statistics
- Getting rid of broken links
- Changing the year in the title or text
- Adding or removing points/advice depending on whether these are still relevant
Doing this will ensure that your content is truly evergreen. As such, these posts should be reviewed regularly, certainly at least once a year. Performance marketing data will give you a clear indication on where to get started.
5. Be sure to build links
Another aspect of evergreen content that is important for both SEO and its lifespan is link building. Pages with fewer backlinks tend not to rank as high on search engines and therefore aren’t as popular.
There are articles out there with as many as 11,000 links! And though this is an extreme example, it has helped this content to remain at the top of SERPs for years.
This is why you need to build links to your evergreen content. Encouraging sharing on social media or guest posts is the best way to get started. Then, if your content is genuinely valuable, people will continue to share and link to this throughout the years, helping it to gain its evergreen status.
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