If you’re like most website owners, you want your content to be seen by as many people as possible. You may have heard the term “evergreen content” before, and you may be wondering what it is and why it matters.
In this blog post, we will explain what evergreen content is and why it’s important for your website. We’ll also give you some tips on how to create evergreen content that will attract visitors and keep them coming back for more!
What is Evergreen Content?
Evergreen content is simply content that remains relevant and useful over time. It’s the kind of content that people will want to read, share, and come back to again and again. This can be contrasted with “time-sensitive” or “trending” content, which has a shorter shelf life and quickly becomes outdated.
Named for evergreen trees which consistently keep their colour all year round, the idea is that your content will stay fresh, and consistently bring traffic to your website without dropping off (see what we did there?).
Why Does Evergreen Content Matter?
Evergreen content is important because it can help you attract and retain visitors to your website. If you have time-sensitive or trending content, people may only visit your site once to read it and then never come back.
However, if you have evergreen content that is relevant and useful, people will keep coming back for more. Additionally, evergreen content is a great way to build trust with your audience. People are more likely to trust and engage with websites that have quality, evergreen content.
Evergreen content is also an excellent way of improving your effort over impact ratio. If you’re constantly churning out topical posts day after day or week after week, you’re going to be treading water when it comes to your engagement. If you create a solid bedrock of evergreen content, it will help provide a foundation of steady traffic, which you can then build on. From there, you can really look to start growing the outreach of your page!
How Can You Create Evergreen Content?
There are many kinds of evergreen content, so this is by no means an exhaustive list. Remember, creating content that is engaging and informative while standing the test of time is not straightforward, so evergreen content really can come in many different forms.
Here are 4 ideas to help you get the ball rolling:
1. How-To Guides
Good life advice is hard to come by! If the enduring success of Wikihow can teach us anything, it’s that people will always be looking for a place to turn when confronted by one of life’s many challenges.
Offer genuinely constructive and well formatted advice on something that people need help with. If you pull that off, then your post will become an authority on the subject which people will regularly come back to time and time again.
When you’re putting together your how-to guide, it can help to distinguish who the guide is for – is it for someone who is a beginner in the topic, or are you going to be covering more advanced content? Will they be able to action the guide immediately, or will it need to be completed over a certain time frame? Clarity on these kinds of issue makes it more likely for someone who is stressed out or confused to pick your article out from the crowd.
2. Top Tips
Sometimes we make discoveries that we didn’t know we could do without – small changes that make a big impact. The internet is brimming full of life hacks to make our busy days and cluttered lives even easier, and with good reason.
Much like how-to guides, top tips and life hacks can provide a great, reliable form of evergreen content. This is especially true if you focus on timeless issues like storage, cleaning, and other elements of everyday home life that people are likely to relate to.
Top tips can also be used in a professional capacity, for people who want to improve their skill or knowledge in a particular industry. If you make a great top tips page related to your own business, be sure to link it back to service specific pages from your site to increase commercial traffic too!
3. Listicles
At a time when virality was just getting started, Buzzfeed really took the idea of listicles and ran with it. Buzzfeed was set up in 2006 as a lab experiment in virality, and by 2014 had 130 million monthly users. Long story short, the experiment clearly worked!
This is because Buzzfeed was able to focus on shareable content to really maximise their outreach. By driving concise, interesting and relatable list articles, Buzzfeed made it more likely people would open their articles and then go on to share them on social media platforms.
Listicles are straightforward to make, meaning they can be quick to make and still pack a punch in generating website traffic. If you can tap into the kind of content your clients or customers are likely to share, they are then doing your marketing work for you!
4. Product Reviews
Product reviews can be harder to make into evergreen content, simply because of how quickly the consumer market is constantly updating and innovating. Remember when a DVD player felt like cutting edge technology?
However, if you focus on staples with a long-life value (think household appliances, cars, and furniture) you have more chance of creating a piece that people will come back to over a longer period.
Which? is a great example of this, as they managed to make the transition from established paper magazine to a highly successful product review website. By delivering comprehensive and trustworthy product and service reviews, they have become something of an authority figure and thought leader when it comes to assessing quality and integrity.
How Can You Keep Your Content Evergreen?
At this stage, we should point out that there is no sure-fire formula for creating evergreen content, and part of the success of your evergreen content will come down to trial and improvement.
Even good evergreen content can begin to decay over time, so you might want to think about ways you can actively boost and refresh those bedrock articles on your website:
1. Update or repurpose content
Product reviews are a prime example of good evergreen content that might need an update occasionally. Although you may not need to radically change the structure of the article, adding in some new, important additions to the market will help to show customers your article is still a relevant resource.
Alternatively, you may have a solid concept that needs to be more comprehensively repurposed. That’s ok too! It will still be more time effective for you than coming up with a whole new idea from scratch.
2. Link to a pillar page
This one cannot be stressed enough. If you want your evergreen content to be doing the heavy lifting for your website, it needs to be directing visitors inward to other pages that belong to you. That way, you can hopefully convert them to fully paid-up customers.
You can’t assume that because they landed on your article, they will take this step themselves. Make sure the content is related to a product or service that you offer, and spell out that connection with as many hyperlinks as you can.
3. Check on performance
Just because a piece of content was evergreen once, does not mean it is now. All sorts of factors can cause this to happen, but once a page starts to lose traffic, that should be your warning sign to address any problems you may find.
To do this, you can try using a position tracker to get updates on your page’s Google rankings. If it’s starting to drop, look at higher placing pages and see if you can spot any differences to get an idea of what you might need to change in your own content.
4. Improve your SEO
This may seem like an obvious one, but good SEO really is the backbone of how any content is going to perform online. In an already crowded market your content really needs to stand out!
A balance of both unique and popular keywords is great, but you might also want to think about using long-tail keywords as a way of drawing in clients who are further along in their online research and closer to making a decision or investment.
Final Thoughts
Hopefully this article has filled in some of the gaps when it comes to your understanding of evergreen content. Of course, if you want more comprehensive content support for your website, then you are already in the right place too.
At Content Jungle we can help take care of your blog from A to Z. Feel free to get in touch via carolina@gocontentjungle.com or book a free chat!
