If you sell products or services to your customers through a website, content marketing should be one of the most heavily emphasized parts of your digital marketing strategy. Content marketing is all about creating and sharing online materials, including videos, articles and social media posts, that educate prospective customers about your industry and position your company as an authority in your niche. To maximize the impact and ROI of your content marketing efforts, it is crucial that you strategically develop high-quality evergreen content.
Evergreen content is content for your website that retains its value and relevance for your target audience as time goes on. The concept of evergreen content comes from our knowledge of tree species.
There are two types of trees: deciduous trees and evergreen trees. While deciduous trees lose their leaves each year and must replace them with new ones, evergreen trees keep their leaves (or needles) year-round. In the same way, evergreen content maintains its relevance and value over time while content that is not evergreen must be revised or refreshed before it becomes useful again.
To determine whether a piece of content is evergreen, ask yourself “How long past the publication date will this piece remain relevant and valuable to readers?”
Organizations that develop a digital marketing strategy with high-quality evergreen content gain a significant competitive advantage over those that put out high volumes of lower-quality material. These are five of the most important areas where high-quality evergreen content wins out over run-of-the-mill content production.
A piece of truly evergreen content that your organization releases today should remain relevant three, four, or five years into the future without requiring significant updates. The trade-off here is that you’ll typically need to invest more up-front time in designing and crafting an article that can deliver value while remaining relevant for the long term.
As with all SEO content, keyword research and optimization is an important aspect of creating evergreen content. Evergreen content is intentionally optimized for keywords and search terms that are stable over time, not ones that spike in popularity for a month or two and then disappear.
Search engines use algorithms that can identify pages that present out-of-date information and bury them in the search results. Evergreen content that stays relevant can be searched over and over again and is more likely to appear near the top of the results page.
If your website publishes articles that are oriented around the latest industry news, each posting goes out of date relatively quickly. In contrast, evergreen content never goes out-of-date and is a more reliable way of generating organic traffic over the long term.
A Google search for “best lasagna recipe” reveals that the top article was created nearly two decades ago – it has comments dating back to 2002. This is a great example of evergreen content that drives long-term organic traffic.
Articles that provide value to readers over a longer time frame are also more likely to generate more leads for your business. An article that focuses on a trendy news piece might generate a lot of visitors for a day or two, but after that, it’s mostly irrelevant. Producing evergreen content ensures that your investment in content creation will yield more leads and drive more revenue over a much longer article life cycle.
The defining quality of evergreen content is that it stays relevant for a long time after it is published. To achieve this, the information contained in the article should be stable and relevant over time. We’ve already highlighted one type of evergreen content where this is the case, but there are many others. Once you’ve defined a niche or subject for your article, here are three tips for turning your idea into evergreen content.
If you’ve got an idea for a great how-to guide or list piece, you might want to start by investigating the competition. Choose what keywords you want to rank for and see what websites are at the time of the search pages for your target keywords.
Look at their article length, keyword density, the information they offer, how it’s formatted, and the use of graphics. Benchmark your article against theirs and produce the “definitive guide” or list in your niche.
How-to guides and tutorials, along with FAQ pages are fantastic examples of evergreen content, especially if they cater specifically to commonly asked questions in your industry or niche.
People commonly search for tutorials or long-form guides before taking on a new project or trying something for the first time. Think about problems that people in your target market face – problems that are never going away. Think about their most common questions about your industry or niche.
If your organization generates research, metrics or case studies related to your field, you may be able to turn that into high-quality evergreen content to promote your brand. Designing and carrying out a research study that sheds light on an important question in your industry can help position you as an authority.
If you publish your results along with a transparent description of your process of inquiry, you may appear as the leading credible authority on the subject area. Consider how you might leverage your existing data into industry insights that generate buzz around your organization.
Directive Consulting delivers customized, research-driven content strategy that includes the development of evergreen content assets for your organization. With careful keyword analysis and top-to-bottom optimization of each content piece, our content is purpose-built to dominate the search engine results and help our customers realize long-term organic traffic growth.
We’ve helped our partners attract more leads, close more opportunities and generate more revenue than ever before with evergreen content strategy. Request a proposal and find out how Directive Consulting can help you execute with evergreen content.
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