If you’ve done any marketing online you may have heard about evergreen content or evergreen niches. You may have also heard that this type of content is critical to online success for many businesses, and you’re probably eager to create some of your own. Today, we’ll look at what evergreen content is, how to go about creating it, and what part it should play in your overall marketing strategy.
What Is Evergreen Content?
Simply put, evergreen content is content that is always relevant. It’s content that you can put on your site that a year or two from now is still just as useful for your readers as the day it was published.
Some examples of evergreen content include
- -How Tos
- -Informational Pieces
- -Reviews
The key thing joining these is that each one can be useful long past it’s written. A review for example often won’t be out of date unless there’s some serious changes, and many how to style articles will always be relevant.
It can also help to look at some examples of non-evergreen content:
- -News Articles
- -Trends or Fads
- -Holiday or Seasonal articles
All of these are only likely to be relevant for a short period of time. If you’re writing about current events then you need to be sure to keep up with them or your content will quickly be out of date. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s important to keep in mind when creating your content strategy.
Why Is Evergreen Content Important?
The big win you get when producing evergreen content is the long term appeal it brings. You can write a piece of solid content, and then be confident it will receive traffic long into the future.
This helps it serve as a solid backbone for your site, and a good way to get your baseline traffic outside of fads and spikes. It’s also very important for newer sites that lack the power to rank for more short term content. If your content is going out of date before it’s able to rank and bring in traffic then it’s going to do you little good. By starting with a focus on evergreen content you’ll be able to see the benefits of your content even if it takes time for individual pages to begin to rank.
How Does Evergreen Content Play into an Overall Marketing Strategy?
While evergreen content is an important piece of any marketing strategy, there is still certainly a place for other types of content. Fads and trends can lead to huge spikes in traffic, so it’s important to make sure you’re also capturing any of these that are relevant to your niche.
A general rule of thumb is to focus on more evergreen content when your site is young, and then work in some more short term content later on. This gives you a solid foundation, while also potentially bringing in bursts if visitors at key times.
Keep in mind that not all niches lend themselves as well to evergreen content. News sites, for example, by their nature have a hard time producing evergreen content. That’s okay, but it’s still important to understand the inherent differences in that type of content.
3 Tips For Creating Evergreen Content
Use Google Trends To Avoid Fads, Declining, or Seasonal Topics
A great tool when doing any type of content research is Google Trends. Google Trends lays out search volume for a particular query, but does so by year and month. This can help you see if a keyword has long term, consistent potential or has spikes in its popularity.
It’s also a good tool to see the overall trend of a keyword. If the search is trending downwards that could mean problems in the future. You want to look for words which will remain steady in volume while also having that volume stay consistent into the future.
For a contrived example that illustrates this type "Christmas" in and check out the graph. This is a great example of a keyword that has seasonal demand.
Make The Content Good
It should go without saying, but make sure the content is 5 star great. If you want content to be relevant and rank for a long period of time it needs to be good. A good method is to look at your competition and look to outdo them. If they made a top 10 list try making yours a top 15. You want to make sure that you’ll be proud of the content you produced for the foreseeable future.
Evergreen Doesn’t Mean Don’t Improve
Lastly, evergreen content doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t update it. On the contrary, you should be looking to improve and update your content periodically.
Google loves recent content, so if your article becomes outdated it can suffer in the rankings even if the content is still relevant. You don’t have to go crazy, even simple things like adding a new image or link can be enough to provide more value to an old article.