Developing a marketing strategy around “evergreen content” ensures that your content remains relevant throughout the year, just as evergreen trees keep their green color no matter what the season. While holiday campaigns and targeted advertising can certainly yield impressive investment returns (ROI), you need to benefit from evergreen content 365 days a year – at a minimum, if implemented well. For example, suppose you want to position your brand as a leader within your industry.
What is Evergreen Content?
As the name indicates, evergreen blog content is valuable year after year with little or no maintenance. It can be referenced long after it was published initially, and even then, it’s still helpful to the reader.
Characteristics of Evergreen Content
For content to be considered “evergreen,” it must have the following characteristics:
It’s not time-sensitive: It is not associated with a specific time, but it’s relevant whenever you read it.
It is unique and original: It is not an exact duplicate of what has already been published on the Internet.
It’s Useful: Not all unique content is applicable. For example, when you read an article marked as ‘evergreen content,’ you should learn something from it.
It is optimized: published on a website that follows some basic page SEO optimization rules.
It is detailed and informative: Although there is no word limit, the ‘evergreen content’ is usually comprehensive and informative.
Which Type of Content is Not An Evergreen Content And Why?
‘News articles’: This type of article does not contain evergreen content because even though they meet 4 out of 5 rules (unique, detailed, helpful, SEO optimized), they fail in relevance. A ‘news’ article is only applicable for a specific period.
‘Fashion and technology articles’: they stop being relevant in no time. For example, I write a great review of the iPhone 12, but after a few years, no one would read it because technology evolves rapidly.
‘Time-Based Statistical Data and Case Studies: People don’t like reading articles about what happened on Twitter in 2015. Make sure you write only about those topics that have a mass appeal.
Examples of Evergreen Sites
These websites are the leading producers of evergreen content:
about com
wikipedia.com
answers.com
imdb.com
ehow.com
These websites publish many evergreen articles on a wide variety of topics. Wikipedia, for example, ranks on the first page for almost half of all Google searches! Unfortunately, however, some of these evergreen sites eventually produce lower-quality articles to churn out the pieces. Nevertheless, it is good to visit these websites to see good examples of evergreens and examine the shortcomings of some of these websites and what you can write to improve them.
7 Reasons to Invest In Evergreen Content
1. Get Higher Search Engine Rankings
Evergreen blog entries are good write-ups having a good word count that consistently ranks well on Google (SERP). The content is informative, relevant, and timeless, thus helping to reduce your bounce rate. Google places user experience (UEX) first, and a low bounce rate indicates that your content is valuable and meets user search requests.
2. Earn More Website Traffic
Studies show that 95% of web traffic goes to the SERP first, with only 5% of users scrolling to additional search results pages. So it means that if your evergreen content ranks high on Google and is easy for users to find, your chances of getting traffic are pretty high.
3. Generate More Leads Over Time
More traffic equals more leads. You win a business opportunity with each new (or repeat) visitor to your website. You can use many strategies to convert leads into loyal customers, but it starts with generating online traffic. These high-status evergreen posts provide a steady flow of oncoming traffic that you can use to fuel business growth.
4. It helps you build E-A-T.
EAT stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. These three factors play a huge role in Google’s ranking. By publishing evergreen content, you can establish your website as an authoritative resource on topics related to your business.
5. Building Brand Authority
Since evergreen content is valuable and informative, it naturally gets more social shares than trending topics. Whether shared with peers or linked as a reference, a strong backlink portfolio will boost your online presence and position your brand as an authority figure in the industry. The more credible your audience seems the more likely they are to filter through your sales funnel and become paying customers.
6. Scale/Efficiency
Evergreen content always continues to benefit businesses in the long run. Typically when an author posts their content online, the trajectory of views is relatively standard.
Content that is topical or time-sensitive tends to experience a slight increase in traffic followed by a significant drop in views. On the other hand, evergreen content consistently produces ideas and can even increase views as it climbs the ranks to become a powerful search engine result.
7. Less Work for You
Unlike seasonal or time-sensitive content, evergreen content doesn’t require regular updates. Ever since you get into publishing, evergreen content picks up the pace and continues to work hard for itself – making it a significant investment of your time and resources. If you want to grow your business through evergreen content, contact us. Our experts are here to help you for free. Call now!