Evergreen Content A Beginner’s Guide

Evergreen Content | Beginner’s Guide | Content Creation | Company Services Agency Production

Evergreen Content

Evergreen Content A Beginner’s Guide

What is evergreen content and how can you leverage it for your content marketing strategy? Put simply, it’s content that retains relevance, it’s not time-sensitive and continues to drive traffic long after it is first published. Below, we’ve listed the formats that best complement this approach to content generation and how you can make it work for your business.

What is Evergreen Content?

Evergreen content is search-optimized content that is continually relevant and stays “fresh” for readers over a long period of time – as the name implies. You may think that all online content is sustainable; after all, a blog post doesn’t just disappear after you publish it. But evergreen content is different. It continues to be relevant long past its publication date, with search traffic growth over time.

Common Evergreen Formats

Below are some common evergreen formats you may consider creating:

Listicles
Tips
How-to content
Product Reviews
(Some) videos

Writing in these formats does not automatically make your piece evergreen, but these types of content do tend to lend themselves to evergreen writing more than other formats. Instructional videos providing useful information, like how to change a tire, have more longevity than a less practical video.

Now that you understand some of the key formats for creating evergreen content, here’s how you put them into practice.

Ways to Make an Article or Blog Evergreen

Answer frequently asked questions from your users/personas
Provide industry tips, “how to” explanations or advice
Explain common industry concepts that may be confusing for readers

5 reasons to create evergreen content.

Examples of Evergreen Content

Here are some specific examples of what would be considered evergreen articles for a variety of industries:

The Essential Guide to Social Media Marketing – this can be narrow in scope and extremely valuable for someone who is new to developing and implementing campaigns on social media.
How to Care for a New Puppy– Animals and the internet are a pretty strong combination but pieces like this are fun and instructional for new pet owners.
10 Ways to Enjoy Hot Chocolate – Coming into the colder months, a blog like this can provide a lift in traffic. Twists on old classics can be a great starting point for an evergreen article.

Of course, some or all of these topics won’t be relevant to your business. You must create content that provides value to your particular audience. The difficult part of evergreen content is that often the most popular industry topics have already been covered, maybe even hundreds of times. In this case, you should add your own unique spin on the topic or search for long-tail keywords that have a decent amount of traffic but not as much competition. This will make your content more valuable and more likely to move up in the search engine results.

30 Evergreen Content Ideas. Source: CoSchedule

What Isn’t Evergreen Content

To further explain what evergreen content is, let’s look at what it is not.

To better clarify what kind of writing is considered “evergreen,” we can examine what types of pieces are specifically not evergreen.

News articles
Statistics or reports that will quickly go out of date
Articles focused on pop culture or a current trend
Current clothing and fashion trends

Remember, evergreen content has no real expiration date and retains its value long-term, so an article about a presidential election or this year’s marketing trends may be popular content for now but it won’t make the cut as evergreen content.

Tips for Writing Evergreen Content

Now that you know what evergreen content definitely is and is not, along with the types of formats that work best, here are some specific tips for writing evergreen content:

Choose the right keywords. We briefly mentioned already that longtail keywords may be best. Even the most lasting evergreen piece isn’t worth much if people aren’t searching for that topic, so do your keyword research.
Optimize for SEO. Once you have your keywords (one per piece), don’t forget to use SEO best practices for on-page optimization. Add alt text to images, and put the keyword in the title, URL and throughout the body copy – but don’t stuff your keywords! You should also hyperlink related evergreen articles together to improve SEO rankings.
Write for Beginners: You may feel the need to share your expertise, but do so in a way that caters to beginners. Experts aren’t likely to be searching on broad topics, and you want to generate evergreen content for a large and recurring audience.
Avoid Overly Technical Language: Along the same vein as the previous note, beginners often don’t understand overly-technical language, so try to avoid using it whenever possible.
Repurpose Your Content: When you create a great piece of content, there are many ways you can spin it and re-use your great ideas in various formats. Here are some great ideas for busy content editors.

Evergreen Content Isn’t the Only Way to Success

Evergreen content is great, but don’t think that everything you create needs to be (or should be) evergreen. Timely and topical pieces are also important. These pieces are perfect for short-term marketing campaigns when you want to drive a lot of traffic and leads in a small amount of time. The best content marketing strategy includes a mix of long-lasting evergreen posts and more topical articles.

Don’t Bury Evergreen Content on Your Blog

Once you’ve created your evergreen content, don’t simply bury it on your blog. If you publish your content and “set it and forget it,” you won’t get the results you’re hoping for. Instead, you need to make an effort to highlight your valuable evergreen content so that it’s immediately seen and accessible by site visitors. There are a few ways you can do this:

Build training guide pages on your website that are targeted to beginners in the industry and help your audience quickly and easily point to your how-to and terminology content.
Highlight your evergreen blog posts in the sidebar of your blog or in a banner on your homepage.
Re-run top evergreen posts on your blog periodically (with updates, as applicable) to showcase your work to the largest audience.
Create a “start here” page on your website that helps people with the basics and features tutorial content.
Build a social media campaign around your content, across all of your networks.

The call-out method(s) you choose doesn’t matter as much as the fact that you do highlight the content and give it the best chance to succeed.

Update Evergreen Content Regularly

In addition to highlighting your content, you must also ensure that it stays up-to-date. While there shouldn’t be much you have to do to update evergreen content, there will be new findings, new articles to which you can hyperlink, and other new developments. In addition, updating content and it’s published date can help with SEO rankings. There are many case studies of how updating evergreen content can skyrocket SEO rankings. Once you’ve updated your content, promote it as if it’s a new piece.

Once you’ve updated your content, promote it as if it’s a new piece of content. *Image via Cognitive SEO.

To see if your content has dropped in the search rankings over time and should definitely be updated, use the Ahrefs positions tracker. Using this tool, you can check your weekly digest email to see which of your pages need more effort if you want your pieces to be found. Remember, there’s new content being created all the time, and some of it is going to be competing for the same keywords you’re targeting. You need to keep your content fresh and comprehensive to stay on top.

When you’re updating content, keep the following elements in mind:

Usefulness (Can users take action immediately?)
Clarity (Is there any confusing terminology? Does the piece flow logically?)
Tone (Is your writing friendly, approachable, and full of expert advice?)
Shareability (Can readers easily share the content on social media via sharing apps or otherwise?)

How To Create Content That Lasts

If you are not using evergreen content to deliver ongoing growth, there is a good chance that you are missing out on valuable search traffic.

There is no denying the importance of content as part of your SEO strategy, and it has previously been confirmed as one of Google’s top three ranking factors alongside backlinks and RankBrain.

But, at least when it comes to powering organic search growth, not all types of content can contribute to success in the same way.

However, evergreen content is what usually forms the backbone of a successful strategy. In this guide, we will take a deep dive into this all-important type of content, specifically looking at:

You will learn what it is and why creating evergreen content is essential, as well as a scalable process that you can use to deliver compounded growth in organic search traffic.

What is Evergreen Content?

The topics that evergreen content covers have a constant level of sustained interest, and they do not experience significant seasonable peaks and troughs in demand.

Whatever the news, whatever the time of year, there are always people wanting to consume content around these topics. The information contained in evergreen content pieces is always fresh for readers who are looking to answer a question or learn more.

Think topics such as:

How to Start a Blog

how to start a blog google trends

Best Savings Accounts

best savings accounts

While there might be a gradual increase or decrease in interest over time in the long-term, this is not impacted by seasonality.

On the other hand, this contrasts with seasonal content, topics such as:

Christmas Cake Recipe

christmas cake recipe

Super Bowl Results

superbowl results

When a topic has an always-on level of interest, it is evergreen.

By effectively utilizing evergreen content as part of your SEO strategy, it can become a powerhouse that drives ongoing growth with every piece that you publish.

What Type of Content is Not Evergreen?

There is often confusion surrounding what classes as evergreen content and what does not fall into this category, and when planning a content strategy, it is vital to effectively determine the type of content that you need to be producing to drive success.

So to set the record straight, evergreen content is not:

News posts and articles
Product announcements
Statistics and trends that go out of date
Seasonal content (relating to Christmas, Easter, specific events, etc.)
Content about current trends

If a piece of content is expected to see a decline in interest and relevance after a set timeframe (let’s say after an event has finished or a holiday season has ended), then it is not evergreen.

We can think of evergreen content as covering topics that do not have an expiration date, where the interest is not expected to drop off any time soon.

Of course, this does not mean that seasonal content does not have a place in your strategy because it does. It just serves a different purpose and has other amplification tactics put behind it than an evergreen piece.

The Importance of Evergreen Content for SEO

Evergreen content can help you to implement a strategy that ranks for competitive keywords on the SERPs and earns sustained traffic.
It takes time to rank a piece of content on the SERPs. Great content on its own is rarely enough to hit top rankings (unless we are talking long-tail topics or a very authoritative brand that is publishing the content).

Most businesses also need to actively build backlinks to their content and promote it to their audience. This means that it is common for it to take time to see a piece of content increase in visibility and reach its top performance. Plus, evergreen content typically earns more links due to the fact you can continue to promote these pieces over the long term. Get your content ranking in the top spots, and you will benefit from it long-term.

And Marketing Insider Group sums this up perfectly, by providing data on the compounding effects of evergreen content and stating that “useful, valuable content will stay relevant over time, and will continue to generate traffic and leads past their publication date”:

Compounding Evergreen Content Image Source: Marketing Insider Group

In an ideal world, this is how the growth that evergreen content delivers should look. While different pieces will always yield different results, this should be what you are ultimately working towards… the point where every article you publish drives traffic and leads.

3 Examples of Awesome Evergreen Content

We could easily share hundreds of examples of excellent evergreen content that performs well. But we will show you a few examples, and then you can hunt down top pieces of evergreen content in your sector to build into your content marketing strategy.

Have questions about creating evergreen content? We will teach you a scalable process for developing it, but here are three examples that we love and think will help you to understand what is possible when you can produce content that delivers the results around an always-in-demand topic:

1. Amerisleep: Reset Your Broken Internal Sleep Clock and Fix Sleep Schedule

Worldwide, many people struggle to sleep. That is why Amerisleep created a great guide that gives those who suffer from the problem of a broken sleep schedule a solution.

We can see that over 14,000 people search for just three variations of the primary search term here every month. By creating content about improving sleep habits and answering questions about adjusting or fixing sleeping schedules, Amerisleep has built out a solid piece of evergreen content that answers a big question posed by consumers. This piece of content will always be relevant, helping build their reputation and assisting with their organic growth.

how to fix sleep schedule keyword data screenshot

2. Healthline: The Ketogenic Diet: A Detailed Beginner’s Guide to Keto

We have already outlined the fact that in-depth informational guides make the perfect format for evergreen content, and this piece from Healthline is the perfect example.

This 2,500+ word guide does give a detailed beginner’s introduction to the Keto diet. If we look at how it performs, we can see that this single piece of content drives over 800,000 hits from organic search every month, as well as having earned 13.5k backlinks.

semrush keto diet organic data overview screenshot

3. Bankrate: Mortgage Calculator

Tools and calculators make great pieces of evergreen content. The demand for these tools is not going away, and Bankrate’s mortgage calculator is an excellent example of a resource that users want and use frequently. It identifies a need and opportunity as there are thousands of searches every month for ‘mortgage calculator.’ Plus, it serves an actual purpose to the audience by delivering a solution.

And the result of this is a staggering 2.4 million organic hits every single month:

semrush bankrate mortgage calculator organic data screenshot

A Scalable Process for Creating Evergreen Content

Now that we have looked at what evergreen content is (and what it is not) and have shown you some of the different formats that work well to create content around long-lasting topics let us take a look at a scalable process that you can use to drive growth.

From finding topics and content ideas through to promoting your evergreen assets, you can use this framework to stack one successful piece on top of another to compound your site’s organic growth.

Coming Up With Content Ideas

Every successful piece of content, evergreen or not, starts with a great idea. To launch a solid strategy that compounds growth, you need to be able to come up with idea after idea.

So, where do you start?

Topic Research

Using the SEMrush Topic Research tool, you can identify topics around your core product or service offerings in minutes, giving you full insight into the content your audience is looking for.

Enter a keyword and hit ‘get ideas,’ and you’ll see a series of topic suggestions that you can prioritize by volume, difficulty, or efficiency.

SEMrush Topic Research Tool Screenshot

This should set you up with a whole host of ideas. However, the most effective evergreen content goes one step further to understand both the primary and secondary keywords that are being targeted and how the pieces stack and align with your broader SEO strategy.

Keyword Research

Keyword research allows you to understand the size of the opportunity from your piece of content. The Keyword Magic tool is perfect for this.

Let us assume you have identified ‘renovation costs’ as a great topic from the research you conducted above. Go ahead and run this through the Keyword Magic tool to get a wide array of keyword ideas, from long-tail keywords to questions, related suggestions, and more.

renovation costs keyword magic tool screenshot

Without this step, it would have been easy to push ahead and create content that targeted the top-level term of ‘renovation costs.’ But when we dig deeper, we can see that volume exists to target specific keywords within this content. Another alternative is to use the Keyword Gap tool to uncover keywords that your competitors rank for but that you do not.

Keyword research helps to shape the scope of a piece of content, and we can already see from this research that we would need to ensure that we work into our strategy key content around the costs associated with kitchen and bathroom renovations.

Realistically, these could end up being their own evergreen pieces. If you miss out on this step, you could be missing out on tremendous opportunities to pick up traffic from your content; it would be like working blindfolded.

Use Topic Research to identify the broader topics, and dig deeper into these with keywords so you can find a title for your content and how to structure it.

Planning Evergreen Content

Once you have identified the topic and title of your piece of content, you need to get to work planning the content’s structure.

Think of this as creating a blueprint. When it comes to creating content, you need to focus on creating the best piece out there on the topic that meets the searcher’s intent.

It would be best if you analyzed the top-ranked web pages for the main primary keywords being targeted by your piece of content to understand precisely how the piece should be structured. And you can use the SEO Content Template tool to help you to plan your content.

For example, let us assume that we are going to push ahead with creating an evergreen piece around the topic of ‘how much does it cost to renovate a house?’

Add in your target keywords and hit ‘create SEO template.’

SEMrush create seo template screenshot

The tool will then analyze the top 10 ranked web pages for these keywords and build out a template that you can use.

SEMrush create seo template screenshot

This should help you to create a solid brief for your content writing team, ensuring that you have set expectations around:

Word count
Semantically related keywords
Terms to include in the page title, H1, and within the content

And you can go ahead and export this to a doc to share with whoever needs to have sight of the plan.

Promoting Your Content

As we have already mentioned, once you publish a piece of evergreen content, there is still more work to do.

The reason why so much content fails to drive success is because there is a missing piece of the puzzle … promotion.

You cannot just hit publish and expect people to find your content, share it, or link to it.

You need a solid promotion strategy.

And, in an ideal world, that should span different tactics, including:

We are not going to go into detail on the specifics here, they are guides in themselves, but you cannot ignore the importance of a solid promotion strategy if you want to drive success from your content. It is an integral part of the mix!

Why You Need to Review and Update Your Site’s Evergreen Content Regularly

We want to make one thing clear.

Just because your content is evergreen, that does not mean you don’t need to update it.

You should regularly be going into existing pieces of evergreen content that sit on your site and reviewing and updating them. Why? Because even though topics may be evergreen, the specifics of the content will likely change over time.

There is an evergreen interest in the cost of renovating a house, but that actual cost changes year on year. If you do not keep your posts up to date, they will quickly become outdated and lose their relevance.

Reviewing and updating content should be a recurring task that you run, and is something that sets apart top-performing content from that which never really gathers traction.

Evergreen Content On Its Own Is Rarely Enough…

We love evergreen content. And we are very much of the opinion that you should, too.

But we also strongly believe that, in most instances, evergreen content is rarely enough.

A successful content strategy should balance the different types of content that are available to meet a marketing campaign’s goals. Relying on a single kind is rarely going to deliver the same results as one that utilizes reactive and relevant topics. By having pieces of evergreen content along with staying up to date on your industry news and trends, you can develop a winning content strategy for continued organic growth.

Evergreen content can help you to create an SEO powerhouse when integrated into your overarching content strategy.

But for that to happen, you need first to identify what content is evergreen to your specific market. Then you need a scalable and repeatable process that you can use to drive compounding success piece after piece.

Find some pieces of evergreen content in your niche or industry and get working on answering some questions or searches that people are looking for in your market!

Evergreen Content A Beginner’s Guide

Evergreen Content | Beginner’s Guide | Content Creation | Company Services Agency Production