Evergreen Content:
What is it and Why Does it Matter?
Content marketing is undoubtedly one of the best long-term investments when it comes to marketing a business. In fact, research suggests it’s three times more efficient than outbound marketing and costs 62% less.
But it’s not all doom and gloom. The good news is that you already know the value of content marketing and are committed to improving your strategy. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here!
It’s just a matter of modifying your strategy to incorporate more evergreen content creation. If you do this effectively, you can enhance your brand’s reputation, save time by adjusting existing content, bolster long-term organic traffic and even establish yourself as an industry thought leader.
What is Evergreen Content? A Definition
Evergreen content focuses on subjects that are forever topical and always valuable to your target audience. There’s no expiry date. With an odd tweak or two, a reader could see the content five years later and still find it insightful.
Evergreen content can be anything from ‘deep dive’ blogs and e-guides to videos and infographics. The main thing is that it’s perpetually engaging, educational and entertaining. It’s like a fine wine – it may get older but its quality never ages. It improves.
In comparison, seasonal content is centred around subjects or information that’s relevant right now, but don’t offer any long-term value. It’s the kind of content you’re hoping will go viral and generate some quick wins. Some prime examples include new articles covering Covid-19 or statistical infographics that will go out-of-date within a year.
Sure, it’s worth creating this type of content to ensure your business remains relevant. However, if you only focus on this type of content, you’ll find yourself in a “content void” six months down the line when it becomes yesterday’s news.
“Evergreen content is often a core element of those foundational “always-on” communications that a business needs to function. Things like education, explanations of how things work, product and service features.
Many of my clients are in the financial services sector, and several evergreen concepts need continuous promotion. For example, asset allocation and diversification, investing early so that time is on your side, participating in a retirement saving plan up to an employer match. Those concepts stay the same year in and year out.”
Meg Sullivan Staknis, IMPRINT
Key Reasons Why Evergreen Content Rocks
- Your target audience is always looking for answers and trying to learn – come rain or shine, evergreen content will always be there to serve these people.
- Evergreen content provides a higher ROI – seasonal content generates a quick burst of traffic and leads. But it’s not sustainable. Once you create a piece of evergreen content and position it correctly, it’s always going to attract your target audience without needing to spend a penny.
- People will quickly shun seasonal content – the sell-by date on seasonal content is quick. Heck, a whisper of ‘Brexit’ or ‘Covid’ is enough to make anyone roll their eyes. Evergreen content is impervious of time and immune to ad blockers.
One of the main reasons why evergreen content is so important is due to its role in SEO. By publishing more timeless, SEO-friendly pieces, you can:
Boost organic site traffic
With the right keywords, your copy will remain relevant in search engines for a particular subject or term.
Improve brand authority
Turning valuable evergreen topics into how-to guides and thought-provoking articles will showcase your knowledge on a subject. You’ll be recognised as the go-to person for unique industry insights, naturally leading to more backlinks and social shares to your piece of content to help improve your website’s ranking.
Create shareable content
If you’re answering common questions and crafting it in a way that resonates with your target audience, industry peers will be more inclined to share your content.
How to Identify SEO-Friendly Evergreen Content Ideas
Before you write any new content, take a step back and analyse your previous content marketing efforts – starting with Google Analytics.
With seasonal content, you’ll notice that your key metrics will usually spike and quickly flatline, whereas SEO-friendly evergreen content will continually attract visitors, engagement and downloads
If your previous content isn’t generating a lot of organic traffic from search engines, yet the topic remains evergreen, turn your attention to engagement stats on social and direct website visitor behaviour.
Did it generate many likes, comments and shares? Do unique website visitors favour one piece of content over another? If so, the content might just need optimising.
Using a heatmap tool on your website will give you further insights into the types of content your audience engages with the most. While doing some long-tail keyword research using AnswerThePublic.com will help you gain a better understanding of how people search around topics.
Once you establish behaviours, you’ll be able to reshare or transform old pieces into SEO-friendly evergreen content.
Evergreen Content Ideas You Can Swipe and Deploy
#1 Develop a Pillar Page
Instead of seeing your educational or service/product-led evergreen content, they’ll be greeted with newer blogs and will miss the juicy insights they want to see. Talk about a missed opportunity.
To make these valuable pieces of information constantly accessible, pin it to the top of your blog feed and create a pillar page. If you’re new to the concept, a pillar page covers a broad topic and links to more granular, in-depth topic clusters. In exchange, the topic clusters will link back to the pillar page.
It’s about finding a broad evergreen subject in your industry that your target audience will constantly want to learn more about and breaking it down into digestible, informative evergreen pieces of content. Again, this is where analysing user behaviour on your old content will come in handy.
By building a pillar page, you’re creating a single source of truth where new visitors can find the answers and guidance on important topics.
Interlinking between the pillar page and evergreen content can also benefit your SEO, as it gives your content more page authority according to Google crawlers.
#2 Company Videos
Evergreen content doesn’t always have to be a blog post or an e-guide. One of the best ways to drive traffic and make a great first impression on new visitors is to develop a suite of tutorial videos covering:
- How to use a product or platform
- How to solve common problems in your industry
Video marketing is also a fantastic way to sell your brand and its DNA through the power of storytelling.
“The most successful companies always know who they are and what they stand for. Telling those brand stories is an opportunity to reinforce the ideas of who the brand has always been in creative ways. That is one of the more exciting elements of evergreen content.”
Meg Sullivan Staknis, IMPRINT
Storytelling is timeless. A video success story or introduction on how and why you formed your business will always be deemed as useful pieces of content to help drive sales and set the scene. Similarly, discussing your personal struggles and offering business advice can open all kinds of doors.
As an evergreen piece of content, a video feels personal. Suddenly, your business isn’t a faceless entity. It feels and believes in something. Now, that’s a powerful piece of content.
#3 Turn Email Content into Top Tips and Life Lessons
When people think of evergreen content, email doesn’t always spring to mind. Yet, there are ways of turning your funnel into a constant drip of information that takes new subscribers on the same journey.
An integral part of developing a successful content marketing strategy is knowing how to create a complete nurturing funnel nurturing feed – turning cold prospects into qualified leads or customers.
You might be good at developing automated follow-up emails for paying customers or answering initial website enquiries, but what about the colder prospects?
Not all email subscribers will be qualified.
A powerful way of keeping your business top of mind with your target audience is to write an evergreen email to go out every week – sharing life lessons, including checklists, telling stories.
There’s no selling involved here. It’s just pure value.
When you get a new subscriber, they don’t get the latest email. They come in at week one and go through the same sequence as your existing subscribers.
Even if your prospects eventually buy something from you, there’s no need to remove them from your mailouts. As long as you avoid selling, they won’t mind. And providing you don’t discuss seasonal subjects, it’ll be evergreen!
#4 Infographics for Social
Achieving social media success isn’t always about reinventing the wheel. It’s a case of listening to your followers, identifying what they want to hear about and creating a new spin on interesting topics.
You could even summarise sections from existing evergreen blog content or e-guides into infographics and link back to them.
Evergreen content within evergreen content! Eat your heart out Inception.
If you’re keen to learn more about evergreen content and developing your content marketing strategy, join us for our virtual event, Content Breakfast: Evergreen Content. You can watch live or catch it back on demand.
Or take a look at our CMA Learning portal. It’s packed full of webinars on various content topics with interesting insights.
