If you’ve been researching content marketing or SEO long enough, you’ve likely come across the term “evergreen content” and, in turn, “evergreen marketing.” You’ve probably been told that your website needs it, but what is it and how do you go about identifying opportunities for evergreen marketing? Moreover, why is evergreen content important for content marketing and SEO?
Let’s dive right in and figure it out.
What is Evergreen Content?
Before we can figure out what evergreen marketing is, we should first turn our attention to evergreen content. While the topic’s interest peaked in early 2016, it’s overall interest is still really high.
The term “evergreen” stems from evergreen trees and the analogy only makes sense if you know that these trees always retain their leaves. For marketers, the point of having evergreen content is so that you never lose readers. It is sustainable and lasting. Evergreen content is essentially content which doesn’t lose interest amongst readers (leaves). The content is relevant the day it’s released and it continues to be relevant months or years after it was published.
Evergreen content also makes up most of SERP Features because it is well optimized and generates a lot of traffic. So, if you were ever interested in landing a Featured Snippet or any other type of feature, this is a great way of going about it.
What is Evergreen Marketing?
Evergreen marketing is more than just producing evergreen content. While having evergreen content is one key aspect to producing an evergreen marketing campaign, it’s not the only one. Having a complete marketing strategy means that you have a strong foundation (your website’s UX and UI), optimization, and a social presence.
You probably just read social presence and paused. Social media isn’t really known for being evergreen because it’s very nature goes against evergreen content. However, evergreen marketing campaigns rely on user shares to a certain degree. Think about it from this standpoint. You wrote a blog post a couple of years back and while it does well on the search engine result pages (SERPs), it’s only appearing in front of people searching for that particular type of content. If Reader X comes along and shares your post, it’s placed in front of scores of potential readers that may not have come across your post organically.
Meanwhile, you can’t produce an evergreen marketing campaign if you don’t have on-page optimization and a keyword strategy. How can you possibly know what types of content to make evergreen if you don’t already know what keywords to rank for? It’s not possible. So dig into some keyword research tools and find out what is most suitable for your business needs.
A strong foundation is the backbone of everything your website represents. If your user experience and interface doesn’t promote user engagement, you can pretty much guarantee you’ll have a high bounce rate (when a user lands on your site but doesn’t click on any other page or post). Make sure you have multiple points of navigation, a sitemap, and you’re linking to other relevant pages.
So with all of that being said, an evergreen marketing campaign is one that promotes your evergreen content, is optimized using keywords relevant to your business, and links to other resourceful pages on your site.
Identifying Evergreen Marketing Opportunities:
Look at your direct competitors to identify evergreen opportunities. Using tools like Ahrefs and BuzzSumo can show you where their search traffic is coming from. If a couple of posts or pages are getting a lot of hits, it means that users are searching for this information. How you can tell if it is evergreen or not is how old the page is. If it’s five or six years old and still getting hits, it means that it’s still relevant. So why let your competitors hog all of the traffic?
Just because the topic of their page is relevant, it doesn’t mean that the content of their page is up to date. This is the type of content that you want to end up creating.
Ideal content is that which people care about today and several years from now. While creating news related content can get you traffic, it’s likely to fall off pretty quickly. Instead, you want to focus on issues that are going to last into the future.
If you don’t want to use paid tools to find opportunities, Google Search Console is also a pretty good resource if you have it connected to Google Analytics. Check out which keywords are ranking and which ones are within reach if you optimized for it (generally found from the fifth term to 20th). Instead of writing completely new content for these keywords (which may be needed), simply update or rewrite portions of it that may be outdated or poorly written. This is a form of maintaining evergreen content and we recommend doing it at least once a year for all of your major pages / posts.
Final Tips For Evergreen Marketing:
Now that you have a better understanding of evergreen marketing, there’s some final things that need to be covered. Evergreen content and marketing is not:
- Shopping results
- Reports that are likely to change
- Posts based on current events
- Seasonal posts
Evergreen content tends to fall into one of the following templates:
- “How to” guides
- Lists
- Instructional tips
- Reviews for product’s that don’t change often
- Videos
Just because you avoid writing seasonal posts and instead focus on writing a meaningful product review, doesn’t mean you are automatically creating evergreen content. These structure types are meant to point you in the right direction. At the end of the day, if your post isn’t written well or optimized, it probably won’t see the light of day. Always remember that simply having content on your site won’t attract readers; creating meaningful content will.
Keep in mind that the content you write is based on who you are writing for. This post, for example, probably won’t offer an expert much but it will likely offer beginners tons of information. Likewise, you want to avoid insider jargon when you can. If you’re targeting beginners, it’s pretty safe to say overly technical language isn’t going to appeal to them.
Avoid writing broad topics and using fluff. For starters, when you write about a broad topic your post is likely to be much longer than one that is focused. For two, according to Time 55% of readers spend 15 seconds or less on a page. That means that you have a ridiculously small window to win over your reader. Don’t lose them because you’re writing nonsense. Lastly, broad topics and their associated keywords are mostly dominated by large companies and have the most competition. Find your niche and carve out some long-tail keyword success.
Evergreen content works best in conjunction with cornerstone content. In this exact post, we are linking back to our cornerstone pieces on content marketing, SEO, and other relevant blog posts that may interest you. This is a great way to keep your readers on your site longer. The longer they stay on your site, the easier it is to convert them into subscribers or customers.
