Using evergreen content as part of your content marketing strategy is essential to gaining viewers, providing value to your readers, and building a strong brand.
A quality piece of content is as valuable as gold.
Effective content gets shared, provokes engagement, and drives traffic to your website. Naturally, you want to have as much of it as you can. The inherent problem with online content is that it has a shelf life—according to research by Skyword, the expiration date of your typical blog content is about 37 days. By that point, the traffic for your content has peaked, it’s been passed around, and it’s started to gather dust.
Wouldn’t it be great to develop content that didn’t lose its value over time, but actually gained viewers?
An Evergreen Impact
“Evergreen” content is widely regarded as material that never goes out of date, but this simple definition doesn’t do justice to the concept. Evergreen content should, more accurately, be characterized as content that remains relevant to your audience over time.
The real value of evergreen material is its ability to provide stable content benchmarks that offer sustainable and dependable value for beginners and experts alike. These workhorses of your content marketing strategy are perfect for increasing the impact of your SEO, creating audiences of qualified readers, and building ongoing interest in your material.
Start With the Basics
It’s natural to assume that you would target the experts in your field when creating your evergreen content. After all, experts will be the ones searching for and reading your material, right?
Many members of your readership will be industry novices and beginners. Most users who rely on organic search for answers to their questions won’t be experts in the area they’re searching. Even if someone is an expert in their field, they may be a beginner in the particular niche. This is why it’s in your best interest to write for beginners when creating evergreen content.
Targeting industry beginners provides more stable traffic growth, and ensures that your content remains accessible over time. To make sure your content caters to the everyman in your industry, keep the following tips in mind:
- Narrow your topics down in a focused way to avoid broad issues that offer little room for specifics.
- Use laymen’s terms and avoid jargon that may alienate readers.
- When dealing with subjects that require more in-depth knowledge, make a habit of cross-linking to other posts you’ve written on the subject. This saves you the trouble of having to re-explain concepts in each post while generating some good SEO value in the process.
Now that we’ve identified your target audience and covered a few tips on catering to this market, let’s review how to actually write your evergreen content.
Leave No Stone Unturned
Unlike ephemeral social media posts or highly-specialized content that fades in popularity after its publication, your evergreen material needs to stand the test of time. Forget brevity—if you want your content to be a definitive resource that others refer to for years to come, you’ll have to dig deeper.
This is best done by packing in as much information as you can find, while still keeping it accessible for new readers. Creating long-form articles instead of 400-word blog snippets can benefit you in several ways:
- Better SEO: Due to its length and keyword density, evergreen content usually ranks well in organic search and offers many opportunities for cross-linking.
- Evergreen content is also a magnet for backlinks, as its in-depth nature makes it an excellent reference.
- More Traffic: A better page ranking means that more people will see it, plain and simple. Optimized evergreen content is great for drawing steady traffic over time.
- Lead Generation: Hubs of educational value (like well-designed evergreen content) are perfect candidates to be optimized for lead generation. These posts draw continual traffic and can supply a constant stream of users for your sales funnel.
- Priority Placement: In-depth articles with high word counts and dense keywords are now being given priority by Google, appearing independently of organic search.
The final step of your evergreen strategy is to make this information easily accessible. Create a landing page for your evergreen content that makes navigation intuitive and simple—without easy ways to access your material, those qualified viewers may not stick around for long.
Start Creating Value
Building evergreen content into your website is as simple as writing in-depth articles that are easily accessible for your audience. Remember—you’re writing for the new players in your field, so don’t try and overcomplicate the process. Keep your articles straightforward, accessible, and optimized for SEO to see the performance value that evergreen content can bring.
