What type of content isn’t evergreen?
It is vital to effectively determine the type of content that you need to produce to drive relevant traffic to your site successfully. One of the quickest ways to “date” your content, and shorten its lifespan, is by mentioning current dates and trending events, as people may not search for these years down the line.
Evergreen content does not include:
- News articles and posts
- Statistics that will only be relevant for some time
- Seasonal content (Christmas, Black Friday, specific events)
- Press releases and product announcements
- Content relating to current trends and happenings
For a successful evergreen content marketing strategy, it doesn’t mean you should ignore these types of topics. Articles and posts on these are still important; they just serve a different purpose in attracting your target audience.
How can evergreen content benefit your SEO?
- It provides lasting value
You produce content that is useful for years to come with evergreen content. Unlike a blog post on a trending topic that has a traffic spike right after publishing, evergreen traffic continues to sustain over time.
- Drive search traffic
When you create authoritative content optimised for high-volume search terms, you increase your chance of ranking for those keywords and increasing website visitors. It can therefore be helpful to base your evergreen content strategy ideas around relevant keywords that you would like your website to rank for.
- It attracts backlinks
Informative and in-depth content is likely to be linked to by other websites. By creating an article or resource that is extremely valuable, you increase the likelihood of other online outlets linking back to it, which can increase your backlink profile and boost your Domain Authority.
Top tips for creating great evergreen content
1. Choose your topic wisely
When coming up with long-lasting content ideas, consider your business and the industry you are in. Think about the content your target audience will seek. You could do this by conducting industry research or using an SEO tool to research common phrases with informational search intent.
The SEMrush topic research tool helps identify your core business offering topics, and gives full insight into what content your audience may be looking for.
An example relevant to our website would be “a history of Google Algorithm updates”. Not only does this stay relevant as time goes on, but it is also of interest to many of our blog readers.
2. Perfect your content format
Producing content in these formats does not automatically make your piece of content evergreen, but these types tend to lend themselves to evergreen writing more than other formats:
- Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
- Tutorials and ‘how-tos’
- Glossaries for commonly used terms
- “History of” articles
- Checklists and listicles
- Tools and calculators
- Long-form guides
- Pillar pages
- Videos and infographics
3. Conduct and include thorough research
If your goal is to write evergreen content for SEO that is also valuable to your readers, you should conduct in-depth research for every content piece. Your expertise and trustworthiness can also be shown by ensuring your content contains great sources.
You need to ensure your content fits within Google’s E-A-T guidelines (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). The higher your E-A-T score, the more likely it is that you will secure a first-page ranking on Google.
Doing your research and coming up with unique findings will help your article stand out from the crowd and, at the same time, will attract citations and, therefore, backlinks from other websites.
4. Optimise for SEO purposes
To ensure your content ranks on search engines, it needs to be optimised for on-page SEO. Our team would recommend implementing the following:
- Structure your long-form content with smaller paragraphs and clear headings to keep your readers engaged
- Including your target keywords throughout (avoid keyword stuffing) and also within your title and H2 headings
- Include internal links back to your website, to relevant blog posts or other pages
- Include external links to sources used to help give your article depth
- Avoid using over-technical jargon, and use language your target audience would understand
5. Promote your content
Once your evergreen content has been published, you need to gain traction with your target audience to ensure the content gets found, linked to, and shared.
To ensure your content supports your marketing goals, you should use a variety of tactics to promote it (your retained digital marketing agency can help with all of these):
- Link building
- Paid promotional strategy
- Social media marketing
- Email campaign promotion
6. Plan to update
While evergreen content for SEO is written to be long lasting and relevant for a long time, there may come a time when the information could become outdated. To avoid the risk of irrelevant content, set yourself a schedule to review and update your content every six months to a year.
If any new relevant information to your content topic comes out, don’t be afraid to add this into your article to make it more exciting and relevant to your readers. You can also update it with new keywords or search terms to help boost your rankings.
Need help writing timeless website content?
Our expert in-house copywriting team create evergreen content that is relevant and compelling, designed to engage with your target audience and encourage positive interaction. Our content writing includes in-depth industry research and SEO optimisation to ensure your content is an effective contributor to your marketing efforts. Get in touch with our team to start your project today.
