INDEX

What is evergreen content?

Evergreen content is the sort of content that is timeless and valuable over a long period. Like the pine trees that are always green in any season, evergreen content stays fresh and relevant to its readers. It’s a strategy to ensure that the published content stays up-to-date, so it can generate traffic.

Why is evergreen content important?

Publishing evergreen content is very important. Because this type of content is timeless, it will keep attracting readers even after some years of its publication date. Therefore you can drive organic traffic to your website over some time. If your evergreen content is SEO optimized, it will rank well in Google and other search engines.

Evergreen content is also very valuable as it can help you receive backlinks. If you produce comprehensive and informative evergreen content, others will link it. They will be referring to it because it is a useful resource. And backlinks can be helpful with respect to having a higher search engine ranking.

Another advantage of timeless content is you can share it on social media numerous times without worrying that it will get outdated. And it will be less time-consuming than producing new content every single time.

How do you make evergreen content?

The first step to creating evergreen content is doing keyword research. People need to be actively searching for this topic. Otherwise, it would be pointless to create content if no one wants to read it. To do the keyword research, you need to use an SEO tool. You can use SEO tools such as Ahrefs, Moz, or SEMrush. Then you can pay attention to the “Search Volume” metric. More specifically, if your keywords generate at least 1,000 searches every month, you can be sure that people are really interested in your topic.
Then you can check Google Trends. In order to be sure if your topic is evergreen or not, you can use Google Trends for your keywords. If you see that the interest fades or it is very seasonal, you can conclude that it is not an evergreen topic.
The next step is optimizing for SEO. The content you produce can be phenomenal but needs to be discovered by readers first. You can employ the SEO strategies such as:

Putting the keywords in the H1 and H2 headings.
Not including paragraphs that are longer than five lines.
Not using technical language and keeping it easy to follow.
Being very useful to the reader and staying relevant to the search query.

How to maintain your content’s evergreen status?

In order to retain your content’s evergreen status, you need to update it periodically. But there are certain aspects to updating your website’s evergreen content. Such as:

When to update the article or start from the beginning, luckily, when you update your previous articles, you will allocate less time than starting fresh. But when you need to make extensive changes, it will probably take the same time as writing a new piece. So it’s better to start fresh.

There will be cases where you will need to do more than exclude outdated screenshots, old statistics, dates, etc.

You can do certain things to determine what needs to be re-written. For example, estimating the time for updating the article. Then you can compare it to the amount of time you will spend if you write it from scratch. If these two are similar, then it needs to be re-written. If the article’s main points and vision will change to a great extent, then it’s a re-write too.

Employing SEO to update your evergreen content is a good strategy as well. You need to ensure the SEO tailored for that content is still useful. To do that, you can unpublish the blog posts and then publish them again when the changes are made. You also need to ensure that the title, URL, and keywords are the same. Because that way, the previous backlinks, shares on social media, and SEO can still be valid.

Benefits of evergreen content

Evergreen content is highly valuable. It has certain benefits, including ranking well in search engines, driving more traffic to your website, and generating more leads.

Ranking well in search engines

Google and other search engines can crawl and analyze the content that is being published. If your evergreen content proves its value and is optimized, search engines will reward your website by giving it a higher ranking in search results.

Driving more traffic to your website

The evergreen content you produce will help you rank higher in search engines. When people search the same keywords you have used in your article, it will be recognized by the search engines. And even though your content was published long ago, the search engines will direct readers to your website. Therefore you will drive more traffic to your website.

As your content is evergreen, it will stay useful to readers for the long haul. Unlike the trending topics that will be forgotten after a short time, evergreen content will keep driving traffic to your website.

Generating more leads

Driving more traffic to your website makes you more likely to generate more leads. But of course, you need to include a tempting call-to-action section on your website for readers to take action.

Examples of evergreen content

‘How to’ articles are considered evergreen content since:

They are relevant without a time restraint. An article on ‘How to fix your bike’s brakes’ is timeless, and thus it can be read even in 5 years.
They are helpful because they give their readers an answer to their problems.
People like searching for how to do something on the internet, so this concept will not go outdated.

Other types of evergreen content