When it’s done right, evergreen content can bring major SEO benefits. This is down to the way that SEO evergreen content stays relevant and earns traffic over time.
This article explores evergreen content and explains why businesses of all sizes use it as part of effective content marketing strategies.
After giving some practical examples, we explain how to come up with evergreen content ideas and give best practices for covering evergreen topics in a blog.
Jump to
- What is SEO evergreen content?
- What are the SEO benefits of evergreen content?
- Examples of evergreen content
- What isn’t evergreen content?
- How to come up with evergreen content ideas
- Best practices for covering evergreen topics on your blog
What is SEO evergreen content?
SEO evergreen content is search-optimised content that’s designed to maintain its relevance over time. In other words, evergreen content remains valuable to readers over time.
Where some SEO content is written in a way that makes it relevant to current or short-term search intent; evergreen content targets topics that will be continually searched for over the long term.
Just as an evergreen tree holds onto its leaves or pines over time, evergreen content holds onto its SEO value.
What are the SEO benefits of evergreen content?
Our article on why you should have a company blog explained the SEO benefits of creating written content. Evergreen content has these fundamental benefits and more.
If you consider the time you put into your content marketing strategy as an investment, evergreen content offers a much greater Return on Investment (ROI) than non-evergreen content.
It’s this continued or long-term ROI that makes evergreen content worthwhile.
As well as maintaining its relevance over the long term, the SEO benefits of evergreen content include:
- Steady traffic to your websiteover the long term
- Potential to gain backlinks to your evergreen content and improve your domain authority score
- By publishing evergreen content that readers find useful, you build the credibility and recognition of your brand within your industry
Before we get into how you can come up with evergreen content ideas, see the following examples to further understand what is and what isn’t evergreen content.
Examples of what is evergreen content
SEO evergreen content is optimised for search and is written in a way that makes it relevant over time.
- Tutorials and ‘how-to’ articles —content that explains how to perform a task can stay useful for a long period of time. For example, this article on SEO for lead generation explains how to get more enquiries from your website.
- In-depth guides —educational content that goes into detail to explain a skill or concept can stay relevant and in demand for many years. This beginner’s guide to SEO from Moz is a great example of the long-term value of evergreen content.
- FAQs —the commonly asked questions about a product, service, or industry tend to stay the same over time. Providing detailed answers can be good for your SEO and overall UX.
- Best Practices and Tips —content that gives tips or best practices can be evergreen. If the content is high quality and is based on your own professional experience and learnings, Google may score the content along their E-E-A-T guidelines.
- Product reviews and comparisons —detailed comparisons of products relevant to your audience offer good value and can remain relevant for a long time. See our comparison of 6 of the best CMS for SEO.
- A digital tool —a tool that your customers will find useful is an excellent piece of evergreen content. Examples of digital tools include calculators and quote generators.
Examples of what isn’t evergreen content
Content that is time-sensitive and includes information tied to a specific event or trend isn’t evergreen content.
- News and current events —content about current news and current events loses its relevance as new information emerges and the public’s interest shifts.
- Events coverage —this type of content can be useful from a branding perspective, but recapping events, such as industry conferences or trade shows loses relevance and does not have much SEO value.
- Reports based on specific statistics —the interest in this type of content falls as new reports that are based on more up to date information are published.
- Predictions and forecasts —the interest in predictions and forecasts of future events falls significantly after the fact.
- Limited-time offers —content created to promote limited-time offers, discounts, or promotions is relevant for the stated period of time.
How to come up with evergreen content ideas
Creating valuable evergreen content requires strategic, long-term thinking.
One way you can tap into this type of strategic thinking is by strengthening your understanding of your target audience. The best evergreen content ideas provide solutions to common problems.
Essentially, you’re making life easier for your audience by providing an explanation or solution to a common problem they face.
1. Market research
Asking questions is the traditional approach, but focus groups or surveys aren’t a practical method for most businesses.
The internet provides plenty of opportunities for market research. Online communities such as forums and groups on social media platforms are a great way to identify common queries within your industry. Facebook groups, subreddits and knowledge sharing platforms like Quora can all be mined for market research.
Look for topics that come up often, commonly asked questions that might be worded slightly differently but are essentially about the same problem. Also look for discussions that have a lot of engagement. These are all indications of a topic that has the potential to become a powerful piece of evergreen content.
2. Keyword research
Keyword research is an integral part of search engine marketing that can be used to come up with evergreen content ideas.
Keyword research is a process that involves identifying:
- The keyword phrases that users are searching for;
- The volume of users searching for those keyword phrases;
- How competitive each keyword phrase is – the more competitive a search term is, the harder it is to rank for.
Now, take the collated list of issues and topics that you identified in your market research and boil them down into keywords.
Input your selected keywords into a keyword research tool, such as KWFinder, Moz and Ahrefs to generate some keyword reports. When analysing the reports, focus on the volume first. Most tools will show the volume over a certain time frame. Keep in mind that successful evergreen content is based on keywords that are searched for consistently, over time.
Next, take a look at the competition. Keywords that have a high volume of searches and lower competition are the preferred target. You’ll notice, however, that the simple keywords that have high search volumes also have high competition scores. These high volume/high competition keywords tend to be the ‘short tail’ keywords that are made up of one or a few words.
Target the ‘long tail’ rather than the short tail keywords
Unless you’ve got damn good SEO in place, it is difficult to rank for short keywords that have high competition. The trick is to identify and target ‘long-tail’ keywords.
Long tail keywords are more niche keyword phrases that consist of multiple words. What makes long-tail keywords attractive is that, although they are lower in search volume, they have less competition. You have a much greater chance of ranking higher up the SERPs when you target long-tail keywords in your evergreen content.
Best practices for covering evergreen topics on your blog
Once you’ve decided on some evergreen topics for your blog, follow these best practices to get the most value out of your evergreen pieces of content.
On-page SEO essentials
As well as optimising your title and headings with your target keyword, ensure you hit the other on-page SEO essentials. Focus on a good page structure that breaks up large chunks of content into sections.
If you add images to your evergreen content, be sure to use alt-text and internal links, provided they are related and of use to the user. See the next best practice for more on internal linking.
Evergreen content pillars and clusters
Content pillars are used to break down large topics into a series of interconnected pillars that together form a content cluster. A content cluster is an excellent way to increase the effective search volume of the keywords you’re targeting.
By lining multiple blog posts together, you can drive users to web pages, even if they didn’t find the page in the SERPs. Content clusters are sometimes referred to as series or chapters and offer a great way to break down complex topics whilst gaining SEO value.
Tailor your evergreen content to its intended audience
Write for the end user. If you’re writing on a technical topic, consider what level of experience your readers have. The language used in a guide for beginners will differ markedly from the language used in a guide for experts.
You can draw on your market research here and include any common phrases you noticed. It can also be useful to use questions as headings or even as part of a supplementary FAQ section that summarises the content.
Revisit and update your evergreen content
To get the most out of your evergreen content, you’ll need to revisit it and update it over time. This isn’t just checking that all of the links are still working. It’s also about checking for out-of-date information or areas that could be improved based on new developments within your industry.
As well as offering more value to users, updating your content provides the opportunity to reshare it.
Monitor the performance of your evergreen content
Monitor the traffic your pieces of SEO evergreen content are getting. Drops in traffic are a sign that your evergreen content is becoming less relevant. This is a good time to revisit the content to update and improve.
As well as the traffic, keep track of where your evergreen content ranks for its target keyword.
Getting your content marketing strategy just right
Different types of content serve different purposes within your content marketing strategy. We’ve discussed how topical content can be used on social media to position your brand and improve your relationship with existing customers.
Evergreen content, especially when it’s optimised for search engines, offers value to both new and existing customers over the long term. When you take a strategic approach to your content creation, a single piece of content can continue to drive traffic for years.
And therein lies the challenge: taking a strategic approach to your content marketing and SEO.
At WebHummel, we design bespoke content marketing strategies for ambitious businesses. Send us a message or give us a ‘buzz’ to get started.
