What is evergreen content & why is it important for your brand?

17 Oct

Contrary to the name, evergreen content actually has nothing to do with sustainability or the environment. (Except of course in the context of content topics.) Confused? We’ve broken down the details for you in this article.

So, what is evergreen content?

Evergreen content is content that continues to be relevant and interesting for your audience over a long period of time. Evergreen campaigns are a long-term strategy that can run repeatedly as the concept isn’t restricted to a timeframe. This type of content has the potential to gain consistent levels of traffic as the topics never get old.

Evergreen content formats might be listicles, tips or how-to’s, they might be product reviews or recipes, or they might be PDF’s and infographics.

What are the benefits of creating evergreen content?

Well, evergreen content plays an important part in most digi PR campaigns as it remains relevant long after it’s created.

You can chop up lots of different angles and stories from a offsite media perspective and from a Findability perspective. And the best bit… it provides the opportunity to drive consistent organic search traffic.

And the fun doesn’t stop there…

It can have a growing impact over time, supporting your long-term strategy: your evergreen content will always be of interest to your audience (and so relevant journos too), which means the ROI should in theory be higher and more consistent than topical content.
Greater and more effective SEO performance: did you know evergreen topics are searched for more often than trending topics which come in and out of fashion or even those short-term TikTok-style fads? And therefore, evergreen content is more likely to rank quickly in organic search.
Increase in website traffic: evergreen content provides a better opportunity to drive consistent traffic to your site.
Offers great value for your audience: content that is continuously relevant to your audience, provides a great opportunity to answer the burning questions that they’re asking the most.
Consistent opportunities to promote it over and over again: with evergreen content, you can constantly re-share it with editors, just by wrapping it up with irresistible new angles.
Ultimately, it requires less work: it’s like decorating prep, the upfront content ideation and planning can be very time consuming. Evergreen content requires less maintenance compared to topical content, perhaps needing a few touch-ups after a period, making your life easier when it comes to workload.

5 tips for rolling out an evergreen content strategy

Ready to work on producing evergreen content that drives organic traffic? Good. Follow these top five tips to get started on your long-term content strategy.

1. Identify which evergreen topics have high search demand

Before you jump ahead and choose your content formats and topics, you need to know what your audience is searching to understand what will best serve them.

Using keyword research tools, such as Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz, Google Search Console, or even a combination of these, you can find the queries and questions people are asking in relation to your broad topic.

When pulling together your keyword list, you’ll want to review the SERPs and make a note of what content types are already ranking. It might be images, videos, infographics, or how-to style content.

Based on the common themes, feed this into your plan to make sure your content aligns with what Google (and your audience) wants to see.

2. Check search trends and seasonality

Most keyword research tools will show you the search trend over a 12-month period. But, if you want to do some further digging to understand whether a topic is evergreen or not, use the Google Trends tool to find a look back at search demand over a five year period.

Stating the obvious here but if it’s a topic that is declining in demand, has one off spikes, move on. Ideally you want to see strong seasonal peaks.

3. Don’t forget to optimise your on-site content for organic search

The key to getting the most out of your evergreen content is to make sure it can be found in organic search results.

Your content may look shit-hot, but what good is it if no-one can actually find it? That’s why you need to make sure it’s optimised for Google.

Here are some quick on-page SEO tips to help your content rank higher:

Make sure your copy is clear, concise, and easy to understand
Include your keyword in the page title and H1
Sprinkle your secondary keywords into subheadings
Break your copy into readable sections
Make sure your content is internally inked to from other pages on your website

4. Incorporate small updates and copy amends to your content plan

Evergreen content should always be relevant. Which in theory means that you should only have to make a few amends each year to keep it up to date.

To keep on top of these updates, we recommend making a 6- to 12-month plan and adding a note to review and update (if needed) each piece of content to factor any changes.

5. Monitor the performance of your content

So, you’ve created your content and pushed it live. What’s next? Sit back and watch the traffic begin to build. Yeah right! The work doesn’t end there. Along with your outreach activity, you’ll also want to keep track of the content’s performance.

With shiny new webpages, Google can take a while to crawl and index the content, meaning you might not see any organic search traffic for a few months. But as they say, patience is a virtue. Make a note to check on the rank positions for your target keywords on a monthly basis.

When your content starts to rank (which can take anything from a few days to a few months) you can then begin to monitor the impressions and clicks in Google Search Console.

And for our final thought: your content strategy should be tailored to your brand goals. Evergreen topics can be very useful for achieving your Findability goals, whereas topical and seasonal content will be more effective in supporting your Fame campaigns.

Guest User