Skip to content

Beginners’ Guide to Evergreen Content

Highly effective content marketing strategies use search-optimized content that retains its value and relevance long after it has been published.


evergreen content main image
What is evergreen content and how can you leverage it for your content marketing purposes? Simply put, it’s content that maintains relevance throughout minor changes in industries and trends. It’s content that maximizes the return on your investment by steadily driving traffic to your website, shares on social media, subscriptions to your mailing list, and initiated sales.
 
The longevity of a piece of content is best highlighted in its ability to drive traffic. For example, an article or blog post detailing a new industry development, news article, or pop culture post will likely draw a spike in traffic that diminishes within days:
trending growth chart
 
Content that highlights basic tips, concepts or theories, however, can attract unique visitors for years:
evergreen content effectiveness graph
 
Ultimately, a combination of both evergreen content and informative pieces about current industry trends are essential to a comprehensive content marketing strategy.
 

Benefits of Evergreen Content

Google and other search sites crawl the internet and its content for value and search optimization. Because evergreen content inherently retains more long-term value, it’s often rewarded with higher ranking on the SERP.
 
Like a domino effect, an improved SEO ranking typically drives more traffic to the source of your content – a website or blog. Increased web traffic is driven to your site when someone searches for specific keywords that were implemented within your content or when evergreen infographics, videos or articles are shared on social media.
 
With higher rankings and increased web traffic, evergreen content then establishes a continual source for lead generation highly dependent on the quality of your calls to action. If your goal is to grow your social media following or blog subscriber base, a direct CTA should be in place to compel visitors to take action.  
 

Types of Evergreen Content

Innovating evergreen content is truly its primary challenge: Popular industry topics have been discussed at length, often written about in hundreds of articles and posts. One solution is to search for long-tail keywords that produce steady traffic but offer less competition so that your content’s relevance ranks higher in the search engine results. The other is to consider the following types of content that serve as basic starting points for evergreen content:
 
Lists
A list can be of extreme value to your target audience if it provides useful and relevant information about a clearly defined topic. Easy to follow and quick to digest, lists can be crafted around tools specific to your industry, common mistakes that your target audience should avoid, or desired outcomes from your product or service.
 
Tips to Understand Best Practices
Tips directly instruct your audience on best practices in your industry. Search query research can serve as a guide in choosing individual topics to address. For example, you may offer your top tips for developing high-quality content, your best blogging tips for maximizing SEO, or the hottest tips for best using your product.
 
Beginners’ Guides
Tutorials and guides are functional and primarily geared towards a “beginner” audience. Clarity and simplicity are essential when your audience is seeking to understand concepts that can be deconstructed into a step-by-step guide. For example, creating a video tutorial on how to start a blog or a post on how to build a free website (with photos), aims to help your readers put the information immediately into practice.
 
Product Reviews
Reviews typically originate from either public opinion – a source of questionable reliability – or what an expert in the field determines. Because credibility is built around competence, reviewing a product or service within your expertise builds long-term engagement. For instance, a tech-oriented company may review an app or new product designed for a specific niche within the industry. If updated frequently, the review validates your credibility and image within your niche.
 
Rethinking Confirmation Bias
Reaffirming readers’ theories and confirmations is a safe way to guide an audience deeper into a topic, but the opposite tactic can be used to create long-lasting buzz. For example, approaching SEO or email marketing as “dying” or “outdated” marketing strategies has been a powerful approach to gain traction with users who are forward-thinking and concerned about future relevance in the digital marketing world. Similarly, debunking industry misconceptions or myths provide readers with years of informative content.
 

Update to Stay Evergreen

For evergreen content to remain relevant, it should be revisited and updated from time to time. As Google or social media platforms roll out new ranking and relevance algorithms, for example, informative content should be updated to reflect changes and new outcomes. With a focus on long-term relevance and value, you will create content that gets seen by more people over a longer period of time.
 
Still, evergreen content is not the only strategy to drive traffic. A mix of both trending and timeless content will keep a variety of readers engaged. Breathe new life into your blog or social media content through a content marketing strategy that prioritizes value to your audience.
 

SHARE THIS POST