4 Tips for Creating Evergreen Content

Evergreen content is content, as you may have guessed, that stays relevant long after it has been published. Like with any seasonal or on-trend blog, evergreen content is also SEO optimized. It may be difficult to understand exactly what I mean when I say relevant, because many blogs may be relevant for a while after you have published them. But ever-green content is created intentionally for the purpose of staying relevant for the longest amount of time. This means using language that will sound engaging in years to come. Now, this is easier said than done. But a general rule is to avoid jumping on trends and to choose topics that you know will be continually relevant.  

What type of content is evergreen content? Here are some examples 

There is more than one way for content to be “evergreen.” The secondary goal, besides remaining helpful and relevant years after initially publishing, is to remain search engine optimized as well. So choosing a topic that people will continue to search for, and having a title that is searchable contributes heavily to remaining evergreen.  

The type of content that is evergreen tends to be assets such as guidebooks, how-to guides, and answers to questions. Here are some examples of each: 

Guides: 

Small Business Owner Beginner Guide to Digital Marketing 

What is Grassroots Marketing? A Beginner's Guide

The Ultimate Guide for Social Media Marketing  

How-to Guides  

How to Create Engaging and Delightful Content for the Consideration Stage

How to Run a Pricing Experiment and Why They're Necessary

5 Tips: How to Hire Employees for Small Business Owners

Answers Questions 

What to do if You Didn’t Hit Your Goals

What Drives Hispanic Marketing Trends

How to Develop Marketing Qualified Leads

Here is an example of an Evergreen Social Media post 

Instagram

Twitter 

Evergreen social media posts, much like content, should be relevant long after posted. They do not rely on current events or current trends to remain relevant. You can pin evergreen social media posts to the top on your page on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

Here are some examples of topical blogs that are NOT evergreen: 

Marketing Online Learning 

In the Age of COVID-19, Quarantine Marketing is Necessary

How Often Businesses Should Publish Evergreen Content

Businesses should publish evergreen content. So how often should you publish?  To be honest, there's no right or wrong answer.The truth is that there is no one size-fits-all answer. Some businesses will benefit from having a large pool of evergreen content, while other businesses will benefit from having a few pieces of evergreen content. But here are some signs that you need to publish more evergreen content: 

• Your blogs’ readership sharply drops a few months after publishing. 
• You have gaps in your blog publishing history. Evergreen content will drive traffic when you don’t have the time to write. 
• You need a way to improve your search engine rankings. 

While evergreen content is great for improving search engine optimization, there is no need to make every piece of content evergreen. Instead, make a few pieces of evergreen content and highlight them on your website. It would be useless to create evergreen content that gets buried in your blog. Since this content has a longer shelf life than most other blogs, make these posts continually visible on your website long after publishing.  

Tips for Making a Blog Evergreen 

While it may seem difficult to make content that will be relevant for the long term, there are some practical steps you can take while writing to make it simpler. Making evergreen content is not much different from writing a regular blog. By using the right key words and adding the right SEO, you can make evergreen content out of any blog! You can even repurpose old blogs into evergreen content with these easy tricks.  

1. Use the right Keywords: Use keywords that lots of people search for over a longer period of time. What I mean by this is to use words that have a history of consistently being searched for over a length of time. This is opposed to using key words that have spiked in popularity then have died off in searches. 
1. If you need an example of this, during the COVID-19 pandemic, popular buzzwords such as “essential workers” or “essential goods” were high in searches. Later, these words died off in search trends because the dynamic of the pandemic changed.  
2. Focus on beginners: The most successful evergreen content is usually not only understood by beginners, but is written specifically for beginners. Content written for beginners makes great evergreen content because the process for beginning a task, hobby, or profession remains the same over an extended period of time.  
3. Use approachable language: This ties into the last tip. Use language that is not ladden with industry jargon. Not only does this language change frequently, this language could ward off beginners who are looking for a solution to their problem. If they can’t understand what you are talking about in your blog, they will look elsewhere. 
4. Don’t lean on current events: Like I mentioned with the COVID-19 pandemic, current event terms will eventually phase out in less than a year or two. If you can avoid this language your evergreen content will sound a lot less dated and will be more search engine optimized over a longer period of time. 

In conclusion, evergreen content is a great way to build traffic to your website over a long period of time. And making evergreen content is relatively simple, making it an easy way to gain an audience. By targeting beginners with evergreen content, you potentially could gain leads, because they will be familiar with your content from the beginning of their adventure into your industry.  

Keywords and SEO can make or break your evergreen content, so make sure you do your research.If you think you need more help with evergreen content, or if you need a professional evaluation of your website’s evergreen content, fill out our form for a portal audit! We can take a look at your evergreen content to see if it truly brings in the right audience and if it is living up to its potential.