Why Your Business Needs Evergreen Content

But, sometimes content can fall flat in one or all of these departments. 

Luckily, however, there are surefire ways to ensure that your business’ content is nothing short of impactful, relevant, and engaging - regardless of when it is read.

Intrigued? Perhaps our introduction to evergreen content can help improve your business’ content strategy.

What is Evergreen Content?

Evergreen often evokes imagery of ferns and conifers and so forth. However, evergreen content borrows from the ‘all-year-round lifespan of these plants - instead applying this to content.

Essentially, evergreen content is search-optimised content that stays relevant regardless of when it is written and who is reading it, ensuring it is fresh and innovative all year round. Sure, all content that is published online may have some sense of sustainability, as a blog post or article doesn’t dissipate after publishing, however, these posts often age relatively quickly. Some dusty old content becomes old news, containing elements that are no longer relevant or up to date. And guess, what, Google recognises this. In fact, they tend to actually reward sites where they know old content has had a facelift. In a nutshell, Google loves fresh content. 

Evergreen content has the sustainability and immortalisation of online publishing, but it doesn’t age or become irrelevant - instead, it continues to accrue search traffic and views for prolonged periods of time following publishing.

Your interest may be piqued, but you may also be questioning how you can create evergreen content when there is an excess of content in every aspect of our lives. Well, there are various typical formats, themes, and optimization tools used in evergreen content to ensure that it stays relevant and accurate for an extended period of time.

Evergreen vs Timely 

To help prompt a better understanding of what evergreen content is, perhaps looking at the opposite of evergreen content will provide a sturdy basis. The opposite of evergreen content is referred to as ‘timely content’, simply due to the way in which the content has a limited shelf life as the nature of the content will lose accuracy, validity, or relevance as time goes on.

Examples of timely content include: 

• Statistical reports.
• News articles.
• Content focusing on trends or current pop culture.

As statistics, news, and trends all evolve and develop over time, pieces of content focusing specifically on them will quickly become outdated.

However, evergreen content doesn’t focus on these factors, instead looking towards topics and themes that retain relevance for an extended duration of time.

Examples of evergreen content include:

• How-to lists
• The best…of type posts.
• The history of…X, Y, Z
• Everything you need to know about... 

There are several various types of evergreen content often following a similar format to the above due to the way in which these content briefs often encapsulate a specific set of information that won’t lose relevance or accuracy as time goes on.

How to Create Evergreen Content

If your business is looking towards evergreen content implementation, then often this process can be daunting. Simply because there may be an additional level of scrutiny as you review old content that can only be described as ‘outdated’.

However, by introducing evergreen content into your content strategy, your older content doesn’t have to date or be buried amongst repetitive new posts that aim to pique the interest of viewers simply in the moment. But you may be wondering, how do I do this? Well, we’re here to help ease your worries and guide you through evergreen content creation.

Essentially, there are five primary reasons why your business needs evergreen content. By assessing these reasons in relation to your business targets, it’s easy to begin the evergreen content creation process. The reasons are:

• To drive regular traffic to your website.
• To improve your search engine rankings.
• To drive prospects to your sales process.
• To position your brand at the forefront of the industry.
• To connect with your clients, customers, and stakeholders.

Drawing upon the above reasons, there isn’t a business who doesn’t want to improve the mentioned factors. So, creating a blueprint for evergreen content is essential.

Targeting

Evergreen content doesn’t have to be overly complicated, entirely original, or completely groundbreaking - instead, it has to be targeted to the right audience. By conducting some simple market research, it can be relatively easy to locate key phrases and words relating to your business or it’s respective industry. 

By finding these phrases and keywords, it's easy to begin SEO optimizing your content. By identifying relevant and highly searched phrases and words, you can begin to regularly integrate these into the content. This can help boost on-page optimization and (with additional support from SEO specialists) help improve your search rankings, helping to drive more traffic to your website.

Keep it Simple

Often people think in order to attract the interest of potential customers, they need to sound extremely formal and complicated. But this isn’t the case.

Sometimes, toning down the technical language and loosening up a bit, can be exactly what your evergreen content needs to thrive and continue attracting more viewers and traffic in the long run.

Being relatable and friendly always goes far!

Repurpose

Don’t be afraid to repurpose your excellent evergreen content! Sometimes rewording, rewriting, publishing in different formats, and ‘spinning’ your content can help regularly drive traffic to your website. Also repurposing your content can help increase the exposure of your content due to the way in which it is remodelled and published in different formats.

The Take Home

Now that you know exactly what evergreen content is, how it can help your business, and how to create it - what’s stopping you?

Evergreen content can unlock the full potential of your content strategy, whilst improving the amount of traffic, exposure, and SEO rankings of your website. 

If you’re ready to take the plunge and start creating more evergreen content to improve your business, then set yourself ongoing goals and targets to ensure this transition is sustainable and as effective as possible.