What Is Evergreen Content?
Are you interested in a type of content that can perpetually drive traffic and leads to your website with minimal investment?
We are sure you are.
Every well-written and SEO-optimized piece of content can contribute to your organic search growth, but eventually, most articles will become irrelevant and stop attracting readers.
Evergreen Content is different. It takes its name from evergreen trees because it is never out of date and is always relevant to readers. So, what is Evergreen Content?
Contents
What Is Evergreen Content?
It is well-written, search-optimized content that revolves around a topic that stays fresh and remains continually relevant to readers over a long period of time.
Evergreen content has no expiration date and will continue to drive traffic to your blog, provided you update it regularly.
To help you better understand what we mean by Evergreen Content, let’s look at examples of non-evergreen content.
An article about the “top 10 digital skills for the year 2020” will be very relevant in the year 2020, but in 2021, will anyone be asking that question?
Trendy articles, news articles, and statistical articles are not evergreen and will become obsolete when the information they provide is no longer relevant to your audience.
In contrast, an article about the “10 greatest Frank Sinatra songs” will remain relevant because people will always be interested in his songs and his existing music library will never change.
Websites like Wikipedia and ehow.com have perfected the formula for creating evergreen content. Pages from both websites consistently rank high on Google because they publish evergreen content and consistently improve and update them.
Why Evergreen Content Is Good for SEO?
Trendy topics will remain important to your content strategy because they capitalize on the prevailing interest of your target audience and help attract new readers to your blog.
However, this interest will wane, and if you want to keep attracting traffic, you need to maintain a rigorous publishing schedule. If you publish a few trendy articles and you stop, the traffic to your site will also flatline and decline.
Source: Ahrefs
This is why Evergreen Content is so important for SEO. It shifts your focus from trendy issues that people will no longer care about in a few weeks, to timeless content that will remain relevant for years.
Below are 3 solid reasons why Evergreen Content is good for SEO:
Google Loves Evergreen Content
Evergreen Content is typically an in-depth article that serves as an ultimate resource for searchers that are looking for information on a specific topic.
Since the article is such a valuable resource, the bounce rate will be minimal, and readers will take their time to get the information they need. Google will recognize the consistent traffic the article is getting and the impressive dwell time. Since Google loves content that searchers appreciate, it will rank the article high in search results.
A good example is this article by Social Media Examiner:
The article was originally published in 2016, and five years later, it is the article in Google’s Featured Snippets for the relevant search query and remains on the first page of search results.
Lasting Value
Your Evergreen Content can continue to generate backlinks over a long timeframe which will sustain your search engine rankings.
Backlinks are inbound links from other websites in your niche that are linking to your blog post as a valuable resource for their readers. The Google search engine places a lot of importance on the quality and quantity of backlinks when ranking your web page.
This is because Google sees backlinks as a “vote of confidence” from other websites in your niche that your content is useful and is of the highest quality.
Evergreen Content will continue to attract backlinks and ensure you stay relevant in the eyes of Google.
Valuable content is naturally shareable, and the more your readers share your Evergreen Content, the more traffic it will attract to your website. More traffic will lead to higher search engine rankings.
Google also uses social proof to evaluate the quality and authenticity of your content. Evergreen Content will continuously boost your social following, and this will positively impact your credibility in the eyes of Google.
Evergreen Content Examples
What are the best examples of Evergreen Content? You are now aware of the meaning and importance of Evergreen Content, but you are racking your brain for the types of Evergreen Content content that you can use on your blog.
So, what are the types of Evergreen Content?
Evergreen Content comes in different formats, and it’s important that you only adopt formats that are relevant to your audience. Below are some Evergreen Content ideas to get you started:
Comprehensive How-to Guides and Tutorials
A how-to guide or tutorial breaks down a complex topic into steps that readers can understand and follow. How-to guides are effective because they cover a specific topic in-depth and readers get all the information they need from a single source.
A good example is this article on weight loss by Health.com that was published in 2016 and still ranks on the first page of Google in 2021. The topic is evergreen since people will always be interested in weight loss and focuses on a narrow topic that is easy to rank for.
List Posts
List Posts remain one of the most successful article formats used by marketers, and they work well for evergreen content too. An evergreen list post can be about useful tips in your industry, the best books to read, free and paid tools, or any exhaustive list about a topic that will maintain its relevance over a long period.
This top-ranked ultimate copywriting resource article by thecopywriterclub.com is a good example of an Evergreen article about the best books to read.
Expert Interviews
Expert interviews can never go out of date and are another type of evergreen content you can create for your blog. Also, interviewing a major influencer in your niche will boost the profile of your blog if the influencer should link to the post.
This article by groovehq.com where they interviewed Neil Patel (a globally recognized SEO expert) is a good example.
Infographics
Since infographics are such compelling visual mediums, other relevant blogs will add them to their content and readers will share them with their friends. This makes Infographics visual powerhouses that can consistently generate traffic for your website.
Check out this infographic on typography by venngage.com that remains one of the top-ranked articles for the relevant keyword.
Original Research
Investing in original research will get you an evergreen piece that is unique and exclusive to your brand. Original research articles can be surveys or reviews, and a good example is this blogging statistics article by Orbit Media.
Original research content will often contain statistics, and you need to keep them up to date to ensure your content remains relevant.
Case Studies
Case studies never lose their relevance because they are original stories that can never be repeated. They not only help you generate consistent traffic, but they also put the spotlight on your customers.
This case study by nerdfitness.com is a very good example.
The History Of
People are always interested in historical facts, and since the history of your industry will never change, the content will always be relevant. A good example is this 2017 article by The Guardian on the history of Bitcoin.
Resource Center Content
A resource center is a web page that curates all the articles that a website has published in relation to a specific topic. This creates a valuable resource that provides all the information that readers need in one place.
A good example is this comprehensive article on business ideas by entrepreneur.com that remains firmly on the first page of google search results for the relevant keyword.
Checklist Posts
Checklist posts are amazing since they work readers through complex processes and are easy to consume. A good example is this 2014 article by CopyBlogger that still ranks number one on Google for the keyword.
A checklist on the steps to take to set up a product is not evergreen, since products evolve and the information can become outdated.
Evergreen Content Writing Tips
Here are some tips to help you write Evergreen Content that will rank high on Google and consistently generate traffic for many months and years.
Identify and Use Evergreen Keywords
Keyword research is the foundation of SEO content creation, and your research must focus on keywords with consistent traffic potential.
After you have done your keyword research and identified relevant keywords, enter each keyword into Google Trends to see if the interest in the keyword has been stable over the years.
For example, if you enter a keyword like “getting fit” into Google Trends and you adjust the range to the past 5 years, you will notice that search interest has remained consistent over the years.
Frame Your Topics Around the Questions Searchers Are Asking
Now that you have your evergreen keyword, the next step is to create a blog post topic with your keyword. The goal is to answer the relevant questions about your keyword.
First, get Longtail keyword forms of your basic evergreen keyword with a tool like Keyword.io, and then use the longtail keywords generated to search for relevant questions.
Enter your longtail keyword into tools like Answer The Public and Alsoasked.com, and you will get topic ideas and questions based on the search queries of users on Google.
Build Backlinks
We have already touched on how evergreen content can consistently attract backlinks, and their importance cannot be underestimated.
The more quality backlinks you obtain for your content, the higher it will rank and sustain its position on the first page of search results. Quality backlinks are links from authority sites in your niche, typically sites with a Domain Authority (DA) above 60.
To figure out the number of backlinks you will need to rank at the top for your keyword, enter the link for current the top-ranked article into a tool like the Ahrefs Keywords Explorer and check the number of referring domains.
Take Advantage of the Different Evergreen Content Formats
The previous section already covered the different types of evergreen content and you should adopt them in your blog.
The most successful formats are:
● How-to tutorials
● Lists
● Tips
● and, Industry resources
Update Your Content
Google has a huge preference for up-to-date content, and the majority of the top-ranked articles for most keywords were either published in the current year or updated with a date change.
Look at the top-ranked articles for the keyword “best SEO strategies”, and you will notice that most of the top-ranked articles were published in 2020.
To keep your article relevant, update your content and change the date to the current year to maintain your strong position on search engine results.
Just like how Backlinko.com updated the guide below:
When updating your content, focus on the following:
● Publishing date
● Statistics
● Processes
● Screenshots
● Broken links
Final Thoughts
This article has helped you understand the meaning of Evergreen Content, types of evergreen content, and how to produce it effectively. Now, it’s up to you to get started and publish some evergreen masterpieces.
What if you need help?
Creating SEO-optimized content that will rank on the front page of search results for years to come is no easy task, but here at Evergreen Growth Marketing, we can help.
We are a Raleigh, NC SEO & content marketing services company and we can help you develop and implement a winning Evergreen Content marketing strategy.
