Evergreen content, like most content placed on websites, seeks to inform readers. But information can go out of date so quickly! Offering outdated information to readers, and potential customers, can send them off in another direction.

To give your digital content staying power, make sure that it’s evergreen – or vibrant and alive.

Why is it called evergreen content? Evergreen trees stay green and fresh year round, and they are sustainable and lasting. Your content should be, too. Freshness is critical to information.  Outdated information is like a bare tree: no one’s particularly interested.

What makes evergreen content work?

Evergreen articles stay fresh because they offer in-depth information that’s relevant to a user’s search on core topics. Because that content stays meaningful and useful for years, it gives consistent content marketing results. As happy readers start sharing it and linking to it, the SERP results improve even more. You might say it puts down roots.

Evergreen marketing begins with keyword research designed to find out what searchers care about and want to know. By going deep on a well-focused topic, great content builds authority for your website and organization.

Articles tend to be long-form, because of the depth of coverage. Writers use formatting to make the copy easy to scan and comprehend. They take full advantage of on-page SEO optimization features, like meta descriptions, keyword placement, tags and links. Even the most well-written blog post can’t give long-lasting results if it’s not optimized for Google bots.

This content tends to be more generic (not aimed at the highest experts), informational (not transactional), non-seasonal and non-trendy. It is fact-based, not opinion-heavy. Content based on trends, the day’s news and emotion can bring a quick spike in search results, but it soon falls into the infamous Google graveyard, never to be searched for again.

This SEO tactic develops slowly, but gives a clear path to high organic traffic that can keep your organization top-of-mind for a long time while boosting click-throughs and conversions. It generates leads over a longer timeframe.

This article also will cover how evergreen content gives more bang for the buck than other types.

What are some examples of evergreen content?

Because certain formats help readers grasp information quickly and provide answers in ways that clearly match their searches, writers use them often to gain evergreen status.

• How-to guides and tutorials. A perfect format to reach someone typing, for example: “How do I remove wallpaper in my kitchen?”

• Glossaries of important-to-understand terms. A natural setup to answer a query like: “What is a bot?”

• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs). An entire series of keyword-rich answers to search queries.

• Posts offering the tools to help readers accomplish something. This connects you to people asking “How do I …” questions.

• Top tips about a specific subject. Answers “What’s the best way to …” questions.

• Product reviews. Answers another kind of “What’s the best …” question.

It might help to understand what evergreen content is if we look at non-evergreen content:

• Blog posts and videos about pop culture, fashion, innovation, or the latest trend.

• Articles and videos about immediate news events.

• Content that includes statistics that will change in the coming weeks and months.

• Announcements of new-to-the-market products. (They’ll be old products before long!)

• Content about the current season or about an upcoming holiday.

Key topics and content

Evergreen marketing, you’ll note, doesn’t explicitly promote a business or brand. Instead, it builds brand awareness by stimulating readers’ interest in a business’s products and/or services by using both evergreen topics and evergreen content.

Evergreen topics will always hold readers’ interest. They include subjects people have always talked and thought about:

• What to eat and what not to eat

• How to start a new business

• How to lose those pesky 10 pounds

Evergreen content, on the other hand, offers more specificity about an evergreen topic in an informational way:

• Ten foods to maximize fat burning

• The best way to use credit cards to start a new business

• Five ways to take off those 10 pounds

To write evergreen content, decide on your topic’s niche and then build quality content from it, keeping its voice fresh and relatable.  Once you have determined your niche, you can consider long-tail marketing to target a variety of niche markets with your message.

Why do we say that evergreen content lasts? Any article or blog, once posted, remains available and does not disappear.  That’s true, but does it still draw readers?  Evergreen content stays relevant long past its original publication.  It never goes out of style.

You might not realize it, but you have plenty of sources at hand for evergreen content ideas. Look at the questions you get from customers, whether in person or through email, customer service centers, and your website’s help desk. Ask your salespeople and customer service representatives what questions they get.

That alone can help you develop FAQ articles, how-to blog posts and glossaries of your lingo.

A look at evergreen examples

The best content is aware of its target audience. The audience for evergreen content is the everyday reader, not the pro or the CEO. Presumably, they already have the answers.

Good content marketing strategy involves forming your topics around the questions asked at different levels of the customer journey. If you are selling elegant bed sheets, you might want to answer questions about, say, thread-count and what it means for the softness of the sheet. Another blog post could cover how sheets affect the quality of a person’s sleep. For potential customers who are closer to making a decision, marketers will create an evergreen article about how to measure beds for the standard sizes for twin, full, queen, and king sets of sheets.

If you are marketing scarves, a video of the many ways to tie one of your scarves would provide valuable, timeless information. A piece describing the various fabrics used in scarves – cotton, rayon, silk – would be of general interest.

A garden center could help establish its authority and expertise by posting a list of, or “the ultimate guide” to, the plants that work in your climate across the season.

Do you remember your first trip to IKEA?  It can be an overwhelming place. The Spruce, a gardening, home decorating and home improvement site, created a Complete Guide to Shopping at IKEA helps first-timers to the store. But once you’ve shopped there and seen the standard IKEA furnishings, it’s fun to see how people have changed them. Many websites and social media posts explore these IKEA “hacks,” and The Spruce also published a blog post — The 17 Best Ikea Hacks of All Time — that’s an evergreen.

IKEA’s SEO strategy keeps pace through its Inspiration and Ideas blog, which is full of the same type of offerings. Helping people think of new ways to use your products makes both you and your site’s visitor feel creative.

Why is evergreen content important?

Evergreen pieces save you time and energy. You write it once and update it occasionally, and it gives you a strong, lasting return on your investment (ROI).

Evergreen marketing offers many benefits. It will:

• Show potential customers, competitors and others in your network that you’re a thought leader as you share your knowledge.

• Generate higher search engine ratings. It boosts traffic to your site in general, not only to the one article.

• Consistently generate leads.

• Help to build your backlinks (when other sites link to yours) in a lasting manner.

• Serve as a source for other content through repurposing in email marketing, social media and other platforms.

How do you make evergreen content?

Here’s a step-by-step, best practices guide to creating evergreen content:

1. Do your keyword research.  Look for keywords and search terms that support your topic.  There are a variety of keyword tools that use analytics to help you.  Make sure that you’re considering long-tail marketing and using tools like UberSuggest to choose the words that will offer you the best return.

2. Check each keyword.  Optimize your post for searchability.  How is each word’s search volume of late? You want to find keywords that are on a positive trend. A tool like Google Trends can help.

3. Consider search intent, the reason they’re searching.  Are they shopping or just looking for information? You’ll want to check the search engine results pages (SERPs) for a variety of searches to see which will work best for you.  Perhaps the best way to do this is to check each word’s ranking in the Keywords Explorer.

4. Consider the impact of the meta description, the short piece of information that appears below the blue link in a search result.  It should briefly describe the content that readers can find if they click that link.

5. Write a headline that works.  Some words that search engines like include “Best,” “Data,” and “Reasons.”

6. Next, create high-quality content that includes the strongest keywords. Be the blog editor who develops content that’s timeless, informative, and better than anything else on the topic. It helps to stay away from overly technical language and jargon, even though you want in-depth, authoritative content.

7. Be sure to keep your topic fresh; avoid dating it in any way.  (Note: phrases like “Last month,” “Yesterday,” or “In April” will keep it from being evergreen.)

8. Develop a marketing strategy. Create a schedule to share your content across a variety of platforms, so that you can reach different audiences.

9. Link your posts together.  For example, offer the reader of “How to Choose a Tire” links to other pieces you’ve written on “Tire Treads” and “Seasonal Tire Usage.”

10. Another alternative, hire a content marketer to do this work. Companies like rellify, the content performance platform, leverages AI to develop content that naturally ranks well in search engines.

We kind of glossed over number six there, didn’t we? It’s most important to know how to develop those high-quality evergreen blog posts. When you’re writing:

• Think of your audience, and write for the general reader, not the expert.

• Narrow your topic (It’s better to write about “how to choose a fountain pen” than about “how to choose a writing implement”)

• Make sure that your keywords and your content coordinate. Don’t use the word “mail” in the title if the piece is about email.

• Aim for high-intent keywords. They show a higher likelihood, on the part of the reader, to make a particular action – such as make a purchase.

• Make sure the writing is professional. It should be crisp, relatable and clear.

• Avoid using language that’s too technical, but be sure that you sound like a credible source of information.

• Keep the writing tight. When developing evergreen answers to FAQs, for example, be concise. This is absolutely not the place to deserve a tl;dr response.  (TLDR stands for “Too Long; Didn’t Read.”)

Update evergreen content regularly

The value of evergreen content is its potential to drive traffic to your site for months or years because of its continued relevance.

Once your content is posted, you should not merely hope that it will remain evergreen. Times change, don’t they?  A search for “face mask” prior to 2019 might have gotten you links to serums designed to soften your skin, or links to masks to shield your eyes (say, the kind you might use to sleep on an airplane flight).  After 2020, though, the words “face mask” took on a whole new meaning.

Check your evergreen content on a consistent schedule – say, every two months or so – to assure that it’s still evergreen.  You also should check after any search engine algorithm updates. Using this simple SEO strategy requires diligence more than technical abilities. Many companies offer this kind of service if you don’t want to take it on.

When you update, follow these easy steps:

• Check for outdated information and correct it.

• Check links from time to time to be sure that they’re still hot.

• Add new content.

• Create a new form of media, maybe an audio clip or a video or a slideshow.

• Add some interactivity; readers love to engage with polls and quizzes.

• Here’s another chance to repurpose your content. Use it in emails, on social media sites, in print and in e-books.

• And always, always check your grammar and spelling before re-posting!

Is it time to go green?

rellify, the content performance platform, specializes in creating evergreen content that naturally ranks high in search engine rankings. Contact rellify to learn what its content performance platform can do for you.