Both short and long-form content can gain your audience’s attention and show your brand’s authenticity, but not all content stands the test of time. Creating evergreen content can help you stay relevant and gain traffic over long periods of time. Keep reading to learn what you need to know about evergreen content!
What Is Evergreen Content?
Evergreen content is any content that stays relevant no matter when someone sees or reads it. In contrast, seasonal or time-sensitive content, such as news articles, statistics that go out of date quickly, and posts about a specific event or current trend, are only valuable for a short time before becoming inconsequential. For content to be truly evergreen, it needs to attract traffic over time.
When to Use Evergreen Content
While seasonal and timely content has its place, relying solely on trends limits your reach and long-term impact. To build a lasting audience and attract customers over time, focus on evergreen topics that stay relevant—such as subjects that won’t become outdated and your audience will revisit.
When Not to Use Evergreen Content
Evergreen content isn’t the only strategy that works, and there are some instances that are better served with trending content. For short-term marketing campaigns aimed at quick traffic boosts or industries focused on breaking news, pop culture, social media, or fashion, timely content is more effective. However, in most cases, having an appropriate balance of contemporary and evergreen topics should be the goal.
Examples of Evergreen Content
You should aim to create evergreen content in mediums that fit your brand style and content strategy. Explore some common examples below:
- Articles
- Blog posts
- Ebooks
- Podcasts
- Social media posts
- Videos
- Webinars
Example of an Evergreen Article
Providing overviews for topics that don’t often change, such as workers’ compensation in the example above, are great additions to your evergreen content strategy. These often explain the who, what, or why of a service in your industry and are consistently searched over time, which can help bring in reliable traffic to your website.
Example of an Evergreen Blog Post
Blogging has the potential to bring in continuous traffic to websites. So much so that 53% of marketers say blogging is their top content priority! The above example about renovation tips is evergreen because the main subject will stay the same and can be routinely updated as trends change or new information becomes available.
Example of an Evergreen Video
This evergreen video is in a guide-style format, meaning it’s teaching the viewer how to do something in stages. A video like this will stay relevant because it’s demonstrating something those interested in this industry could want or need to know at any time, possibly even five years from now.
Videos offering tips and tricks or guide-style content often stay relevant because they demonstrate industry knowledge that people may want or need to know at any time, even years down the road.
Evergreen Topic Ideas
Brainstorming evergreen topics can be a fun way to get creative with your content ideas. In addition to the examples above, there is an array of content formats to explore. Here are just a few formats with some sample headlines:
- Case Studies: The Productivity Effects of Bank Mergers or How This Burger Restaurant Streamlined Its Operations
- Definitions/Key Terms: Glossary of Common Dental Terms or 40 Podcasting Phrases You Need to Know
- FAQs: Answering a Few of Your Frequently Asked Questions or Questions and Answers from The Swimming Center
- Interviews: Get to Know Our CEO, Jane Smith or Interviewing a Professional Public Speaker
- Lists: Resources to Help You Find the Right Realtor or The Ultimate Writing Checklist for Bloggers
- Reviews: Our Top Customer Reviews in 2024 or Reviewing Small Businesses on Popular Street
- Templates: 12 Templates for Successful Social Media Posts or Use Our Free Employee Newsletter Templates
Why Is Evergreen Content Important?
Creating evergreen content is important because it ensures your business and brand are found regularly over time. Even if you haven’t actively published a new piece of content recently, anyone may find and engage with your evergreen content at any point. Timeless content is also highly shareable, so online users are likely to generate more traffic for you! Below are the main reasons evergreen content is crucial for your overall content strategy.
Increases Visibility
Especially if your business is just starting out or getting an online presence, building visibility is essential to help people find you. Search engines use Google E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authority, trustworthiness) to rank content in SERPs, and strong evergreen content can go a long way in establishing your brand within those guidelines. Forging brand authority, in particular, will help you continue to be found and seen as credible to online users. Demonstrating your authoritativeness and knowledge on topics relevant to your business can also gain you backlinks from other reputable sites over time, further setting up your brand as an expert in your field.
Appears Higher in Search Rankings
Showing up higher in the search engine results page (SERP) is the key to increased traffic. Very few people click to the second page of Google, so you want your content to appear in the top 10 slots of the SERP. When users type in a query, search engines try to show the most relevant and helpful content, so if your content is evergreen, it may show up higher than content that’s only related to a current event or trend. For example, if a user types in “indoor workout ideas,” an evergreen post with ways to boost fitness from home is more likely to appear than one about finding ways to work out at home during quarantine.
Attracts Traffic Over Time
After you’ve at least somewhat established your business online, evergreen content can generate more traffic over time. Trendy topics might result in short traffic spikes, but evergreen topics will help you receive steady month-over-month and year-over-year user traffic due to its timeless value. Particularly if you have a smaller budget, beginning with an evergreen content strategy can help bring more attention to your business.
How to Create Evergreen Content
How to go about creating evergreen content depends on the type of content you’re making, but the basics are the same. Think about which topics are relevant to your industry and niche that you think people will probably still be looking up a year or two from now. What types of content or topics do you want your business or brand to be known for online? Here are some tips for how to create evergreen content.
Come Up with a Strategy
Before trying to create any content, think about strategy. First and foremost, consider what evergreen topics might serve your business now and in the future. Conduct topic research, look into what competitors are making content about to see if there are any gaps you can fill, then compose a list of ideas you could create evergreen content around. Think about your business, marketing goals, and target audience to develop a clear path forward.
Cater to Beginners
When creating evergreen content, be straightforward, use simple terms, and avoid technical language. Not everyone is an industry expert like you, so take the time to clarify concepts they could be unfamiliar with. In fact, short content explaining industry terms is a great evergreen topic idea! When writing evergreen blogs, ensure you have well-structured copy that creates a good experience for the reader and don’t forget to edit to confirm that your content is strong, direct, and accurate. Keep in mind the best practices for the format you’re using, such as including FAQs and creating engaging social media videos.
Optimize for Search Engines
The main idea is to get your content found, so you need to know what your target audience is likely to type into a search engine. Conduct keyword research to get to know your audience better and find the different types of keywords that work best for your business. Include SEO basics such as writing clear title tags, ensuring your website loads quickly for a better user experience, and internally linking to your other evergreen content that relates. Depending on your business, you’ll perhaps also want to incorporate local SEO and combine different forms of content together, like creating a short evergreen video to embed into a blog post.
Update Your Evergreen Posts
No content will stay evergreen if it’s never updated or improved. Some evergreen content will only need minor upgrades, such as swapping outdated keywords, adding links to content you’ve created since the original publishing date, and amending any information that may have changed. However, some content only stays evergreen because you update it periodically. For instance, a list of the best romantic comedy films isn’t evergreen anymore if you haven’t taken any newly-released movies into consideration in the last three years.
How to Make Existing Content More Evergreen
An excellent way to create evergreen content is to repurpose old content! By recycling content, you can get more traffic to your posts without having to start from scratch every time. You can also conduct a content gap analysis to see what’s missing from your published content and identify problem areas. The following are a few ways of updating obsolete content to be more evergreen.
Keep Up with Your Industry
One of the most necessary reasons to update evergreen content is when something within that topic or industry has changed. As it’s your business, you should be keeping track of trends and developments in that field, so when something comes along that might change what your content is saying or showing, you should update it as soon as possible—this illustrates your authority and expertise on the topic. Also, look for broken links and outdated stats and language that may need to be revised.
Connect to a Related Topic
A relatively simple way to update content is to tie in a related topic so the focus is wider. As an example, say you have an article celebrating Single Women’s Work Day on August 4th. That’s a seasonal topic that won’t get much traffic the rest of the year, but if you add facts about how this unofficial holiday got started and why it’s important to recognize women in the workforce, then tweak the title and keywords to reflect that, people searching for those types of topics will still find your article, even in January. Connecting to an evergreen topic and expanding your timely or seasonal content to naturally reflect that is an evergreen content win!
Restructure
If you have a timely post, like a piece that caters to a specific event, you can still make it evergreen. If that content had success when it was first posted, the links and expertise it attracted can be put to use. Suppose you wrote a post about the winners of the Academy Awards in 2024. Every year afterward, you can update the article to be about the new winners and what happened at the current year’s event. Your content will stay evergreen because when people look up who won an Oscar this year, they’ll find your post, and then your piece will be especially relevant again after the new show airs.
How to Optimize Existing Evergreen Content
If you already have evergreen content, you should reoptimize it semi-regularly to get even more traffic and update it for today’s audience. Keeping content fresh is better for your readers and SEO strategy, allowing you to review your keywords and enhance your content over competitors’ work. Here are some ways to optimize evergreen content you’ve already posted.
Look for Something New
New surveys and data are being published all the time, so take advantage of that for your evergreen content. Including the latest statistics and topics related to your content will make it newly relevant and add more information and insight for the reader, even if they find it six months from now. You can also add new developments to illustrate your point. If your content is about ways AI can help the average worker, provide links and context about the latest algorithm or app. Just remember to update this kind of post down the line, in case that piece of AI technology didn’t catch on—then just add the newest thing again.
Include an Expert Opinion
Prove your trustworthiness and authority to readers by inserting an expert’s opinion. Adding a short bio, photo, and links to the expert’s social media or information establishes their qualifications for the topic and demonstrates the accuracy of your content’s assertions, therefore providing more longevity. Having an expert weigh-in also means your content is more likely to be shared by others in the industry wanting to convey that person’s knowledge, which brings in more traffic for you. Even if you’re an expert on the topic yourself, sharing another expert’s opinions and quotes makes your content even more evergreen and reliable for readers.
Incorporate a New Element
Though this depends on your business and topic, adding a sharable or interactive element to your evergreen blog post can help it attract more attention and make your existing content even more interesting to readers. Including an infographic in your written content can help you easily explain concepts, and it may improve your search engine ranking. Providing a gamified element (making something interactive or game-like) to your content adds a bit of fun, allowing you to collect user data and boost engagement. Other elements to consider adding are printables, listicles, checklist graphics, and surveys.
If you need help with content marketing, Hurrdat Marketing offers services including content strategy, content creation, blogging, and more. Find out more about our content marketing services!
