Exploring Evergreen Content in Depth

Within your content strategy, you’ll want to explore a mix of evergreen and topical content to maintain the longevity of your blog content. Firstly we’ll be exploring the ins and outs of evergreen content, its benefits and how you can use it to your businesses advantages.

What is evergreen content?

Evergreen content is the type of content that will date much more slowly and therefore be relevant to your audience for a longer period of time, as opposed to topical which is more newsworthy, in the moment content.

An easy way to remember this term is by thinking about evergreen trees. They keep their leaves all year round and aren’t seasonal like many other trees. This can be applied in the same way to content – evergreen content is there to stay year on year and should form the basis of your content output.

What are the benefits of evergreen content?

The best thing about evergreen content is that it’s an on-going strategy, which will allow you to produce a wealth of content around a particular subject area or industry and become opinion leaders in it.

Over time, your audience will know you are the go-to outlet for content around that particular subject area, alongside search engines beginning to rank you higher for the relevant, interesting and fresh content you’re producing on an on-going basis. You shouldn’t need to update this content due to it being written with longevity in mind, however, from time to time you may want to revisit popular posts to ensure they are the best they possibly can be to continue driving traffic to your website.

How can I use evergreen content for my business?

Firstly you want to ensure you really know your audience and segment into audience profiles. Each segment should have some clear pain points and they’ll be using search or social media to find answers to these.

For your business, you need to know inside out what your audience’s search intent is, and then serve helpful content back to them that’s of high quality and will perform better than your competitors content.

How do I find the topics to produce my evergreen content?

Once you know your audience’s pain points, you can use a variety of tactics to find search intent. Firstly keyword research is always recommended to outline the short and long tail queries, questions and opportunities.

Next use tools like ‘Answer the Public’ or ‘BuzzSumo’ which will go into greater depth for some of the long tail questions people want to be answered and ensure you understand which is the most popular content out there around that subject area so you can look to out-do and build upon popular topics.

What are the best types of evergreen content to produce?

There are some really easy tactics to help form a great piece of evergreen content. Here are just a few types to get you started:

• Answer readers FAQs and common questions

• Provide helpful how-to guides and articles

• Explain common concepts or topics in your industry

Is there a limit to how many pieces of evergreen content I should be producing each month?

Ultimately this comes down to your content strategy as a business, which will be heavily dictated by your resources and budgets overall. Your strategy should be realistic, detailing the number of pieces you’ll be creating in any given month.

Ideally, for search engines you want to be creating a stream of fresh content week on week, so producing a minimum of 1 per week would be recommended. However, this can be a mix of evergreen and topical topics.

But remember… whatever content you go on to produce, make sure it is of high quality and super-relevant to your audience. Don’t create content for the sake of it. Make sure your evergreen content will be useful, shared and won’t outdate for years to come.