No matter the industry, evergreen content is a must-have for your website and blog. In fact, marketers go as far as to say that the more evergreen content you have, the better! You may have even created evergreen content without knowing it was. Just like the pine trees that remain green throughout every season, evergreen content holds the same purpose. It is content that is essentially timeless since it is useful both now and for a long time to come. By creating and maintaining evergreen content, your business will keep flourishing.
What is Evergreen?
Although it may sound intimidating at first, generating evergreen content is not as complicated as one might think. First, let’s break down exactly what type of content is or isn’t considered evergreen.
Evergreen content is primarily:
- Useful tips
- How-to’s or tutorials
- Videos
- Product or service reviews
- Testimonials
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
- Glossary or encyclopedia format content
Keep in mind that these are the basic frameworks of evergreen content that need to be applied to specific topics in accordance with your brand.
Evergreen content is not:
- News
- Statistics or numerical data
- Popular culture related articles
- Latest Trends
- Seasonal content
When creating evergreen content, you should avoid any phrases that put the content in a specific time context. Such as, “this month”, “in the past year”, “recently” and so on. Using words like these points to the fact that your content is time-sensitive and may not be relevant to readers just a few months later.
Digi-Tip: Digilite’s content marketers can assure you that both evergreen and non-evergreen content is essential for your business.
How to Create It
Now that we’ve narrowed down the types of content that are considered evergreen, the creation process will become much easier. The important step here is to determine how to apply these content frameworks to make them industry-specific for your business. A great place to start is to look at what questions or concerns does your target audience has about your business that will always be relevant.
- To start, think of and collect the 10 most common questions you receive from your consumers.
- By taking the answers to these questions, generate a set of guidelines or tutorials for using a specific product or service the questions are centered around.
- Expand this to an entire series of informative articles and blog posts by including more general examples that can apply to other products besides your own.
- Ensure this content is posted on a visible and easily accessible location on your website so it is the first thing you’re viewers see when they have questions.
Are you still feeling lost? Let’s break down the fourth wall and look at another case. Take this blog post for example. Yes, this very one that you’re reading. The definition of evergreen content along with how to create it is a question that interests users both now and in the future. Hence, anyone who wants to know information about evergreen content will find this article helpful since the concept remains static. Your aim is to create content that passes the test of time for the longest duration possible.
So how much evergreen content should you incorporate in your content marketing strategy exactly? There actually isn’t a single correct answer for this. Some marketers may advise you to do 80% evergreen and 20% trendy content while others may tell you to do 50/50. The best fit for your business depends on a few factors:
- Evergreen content is less time-consuming since one effective article will serve you for the long run, but at the same time, you may not notice an immediate flow of views.
- It also depends on the type of content of your niche and if it is more dependent on short-term information or not. For example, if you’re in the news or popular culture industry, timely posts have more value to your business.
Maintenance is Paramount
Maintaining your evergreen content is just as valuable as creating it. This involves regularly reviewing your content (at least annually) to look for broken links or visual content. Along with this, you may want to refresh parts of the content itself to add, remove, or adjust information that is no longer valid. A key part of maintenance is also not letting your evergreen content get lost in the ocean of your other articles. This is inevitable at times because you’re constantly adding more content to your website as time goes on. The best way to highlight your evergreen content is to re-share it on your social media channels from time to time, along with adding it as internal links to your newer content or pillar pages.
Digi-Tip: Content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) go hand in hand. To ensure the best results, make sure they compliment each other in your marketing strategy.
It’s Value for You
Besides being timeless content that is constantly relevant to refer to, you might be wondering what value evergreen content has for your business.
- Evergreen content done right can work wonders for your company’s ranking on search engines. If your content is enticing, informative, and SEO optimized you will notice consistent traffic over the years, which in its turn will secure your page a generous ranking on search engines.
- Securing a high ranking with evergreen content is a ticket to link building to other – more timely – pages on your website and boosting your online presence.
- Additionally, content like tutorials or FAQs makes it much easier for your regular visitors and clients to navigate through the questions that concern them the most. This will save time and resources spent on providing solutions to easily-manageable questions.
Concluding Thoughts
Chances are that you’ve made evergreen content without realizing it, but it’s never too late to go back and optimize it further or create bigger and better content. Evergreen content is an asset for your website to collect traffic over a prolonged period of time that can ultimately boost your search engine rankings and online visibility. The more evergreen content you have, the better! But also don’t forget about creating relevant timely content that may be more short-lived, but nonetheless catches up on more current news and trends.
Digilite can help you have the best of both worlds by creating both evergreen and timely content for your business.
