Evergreen content has become a popular and prominent entry in content strategies and plans in recent years. Companies know it’s vital to balance the importance of engaging and valuable content sought-after by readers with relevant and search-optimised content that is key for search engines.
So, when it comes to evergreen content, you may be wondering:
- Why your website needs it?
- What is its purpose?
- How can it improve your website’s visibility and contribute to your search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts?
In this guide to evergreen content, we will answer all of these questions, delve into great examples and give you the lowdown on how you can create brilliant evergreen content for your industry, niche and target audiences.
What is Evergreen Content?
Evergreen content is content that is optimised for search engine purposes and stays relevant, fresh and valuable for your audience on an ongoing basis. Ultimately, its relevancy, value and interest from readers are not confined to a day, week, month or even a year of its publication date.
Interesting tidbit: The nature-inspired content name comes from the evergreen tree, which retains its leaves all year round rather than dropping them throughout this time.
Evergreen content is content that stays relevant after it has been published and has consistent traffic. For example, if you wrote an article on How to start a business, the article will have people searching for it no matter what time of year. It is evergreen content. Whereas an article about “Christmas present ideas” will only have significant traffic in the run-up to that season.
The opposite of evergreen content is timely content, such as breaking news or event-specific information. Let’s take the example of breaking news relating to your industry. The article traffic would be significant when you first publish it. However, it will quickly reduce once your audience has heard the news. The article’s appeal and longevity have a shorter time span. Maintaining the popularity, momentum and traffic to breaking news articles is a lot more work as you need to regularly report on the latest news to retain your search traffic.
Why is Evergreen Content Important?
When Should You Create Evergreen Content?
For most businesses, create evergreen content as often as possible. You may need to write something that is only relevant short term, like about an event you are attending. But the majority of your content should be on subjects that your audience is searching for regularly, as you will maximise your appearance in the search results and, therefore, increase your brand’s visibility and relevancy.
How to Plan Your Evergreen Content Strategy
Are you looking for that perfect evergreen content strategy?
You can create this using a keyword research tool like Moz, SEMRush, ahrefs or Ubersuggest to validate topic ideas and keyword suggestions. If you aren’t already paying for one of these and don’t need all their sophisticated features, we would recommend trying Ubersuggest as it offers the best value when getting started with producing your evergreen content strategy.
We will use Ubersuggest for our evergreen content creation example.
Let’s say your website is all about coffee trends, innovations and new product development (NPD). Try entering different coffee-related keywords into UberSuggests to ascertain a keyword ideas report.
Here’s the result of typing “simply best coffee” into the search bar:
Although an article about the “best coffee machine” would be a great basis for an evergreen article as it will get searched for all year round, it may be too competitive for your site to get ranked by Google.
You can fix this by turning on the filters at the top of the results to see the level of competition attached to each content idea:
You’ll then see this window to enter values that will hone and focus your search:
There are plenty of options here, but to keep things simple, we have set the maximum SEO difficulty to 34 (This will mean all the results are considered ‘green’ and are, therefore, easier to rank for.
Once you click apply, you’ll receive a report of leading keyword ideas that are easier to rank for:
You could write an article for “best coffee in London” or any other major city. Further down the same list, you can see the idea of “best coffee recipe”, or even “coffee cake recipe”. These would all be examples of great evergreen content.
Do I Need to Update Evergreen Content?
What is the opposite of evergreen content?
10 Examples of Evergreen Content Ideas
Here are 10 of the leading examples of how to brainstorm and formulate the title of a piece of evergreen content. These are great as they are universal and can be applied to most industries.
- How to do [Enter what your audience wants to know] for beginners
- How to [Enter what your audience wants to know] for advanced users
- Complete checklist for [Enter your audience]…
- Best [Enter solutions] for [Enter problems your target audience/s are looking to solve]
- Common mistakes in [Enter problems or niches your target audience is looking for solutions with]
- Everything you need to know about [Enter interesting ideas that are relevant to your target audience/s]
- Complete History of [Enter topic relevant to your brand, products or services]
- Tips for [Enter target audiences/s who are looking for solutions to a particular problem or concern]
- A guide to [Enter interesting ideas that are relevant to your target audience/s]
- Best Ideas in [Enter solutions to problems, needs and concerns your key audience/s are looking for solutions on]
Summary
You may have been creating evergreen content without knowing it! Or you may have been eager to create regular content, but are worrying about how you are going to develop the strategy and then find the time and talented team members to create the content.
The key to creating great evergreen content is to brainstorm interesting and must-read story ideas. These need to reflect what is important to your target audiences by answering their questions, solving their problems and meeting their needs. You also need to analyse the SEO-relevancy of these ideas before crafting the content. Once you’ve perfectly polished your evergreen content, it’s vital you review it regularly to implement updates.
If you need any help with your digital marketing, get in touch with us at Lion Spirit Media. We can work with you to create your evergreen content strategy, write your evergreen content and manage its SEO effectiveness.
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