While you’re probably excited about capturing your share of traffic related to trending or newfangled developments, there’s a lot to be said for evergreen content. Pieces that hold up well over time will keep drawing readers to your site long after your more timely posts and pages have fallen into obscurity.
Evergreen Content Explanation
Unlike texts focused around the events of the day, evergreen pages are intended to remain relevant for years to come. Instead of showing a rapid spike in views followed by a decline to almost zero traffic, these resources tend to have a more steady pattern of visits with their popularity growing slowly as time passes. The types of content that lend themselves to an evergreen strategy include:
- How-to guides
- Case studies
- FAQs
- Articles on historical events
- Glossaries and dictionaries of industry terms
These forms of information don’t change rapidly, so covering them on your website should produce a boost to traffic that will be permanent rather than temporary.
Advantages of Evergreen Techniques
Assuming you know enough about your subject that you can create in-depth articles with real value to them, you’ll be building your brand as a trustworthy resource in the field. You’ll start to get backlinks and social shares that will increase your audience. Because evergreen assets cost very little to maintain, you may able able to stretch your content marketing dollars further and achieve an enviable ROI.
Your search rankings may also improve because Google has implemented sophisticated algorithms to determine when searchers want fresh content and when a page that’s a couple of years old will suffice. Because you’ll be creating authoritative resources that are timeless, Google will direct search traffic your way whenever appropriate.
Tips for Evergreen Success
Rather than taking a scattershot or random approach to evergreening your material, you can follow a few easy rules to make sure you’re not wasting your time or energy:
1. Focus on Specific Niches
Information on broad topics is easy to come by, and it’s hard to do it better than it has already been done. By targeting your efforts towards more specialized areas, you’ll have a better chance of standing out among a crowd.
2. Consider Long-Form Content
While you might not have a lot of time to delve into newsworthy or time-sensitive items in great detail, this isn’t the case with evergreen content. SEO firm Backlinko recently found that the average length of Google’s first page results was 1,890 words. You can harness the full possibilities of long-form writing and thorough keyword research in a way that might not be practical when reacting to the immediate issues of the day.
3. Update Your Pages When Necessary
Although one of the features of evergreen content is its longevity, you’ll still need to update it from time to time. Whether this means twice a week or a couple of times per year will depend on the nature of the info it contains. Moz shows how a new page was able to grow from fewer than 100 visits per month to more than 7,000 in less than a year simply by updating it about once a week.
Incorporating evergreen content can improve the performance and popularity of virtually any website. You don’t need to eschew punctual, up-to-the-minute posts; you can simply add evergreen documents to your overall mix.
