Evergreen content: how to create high-quality content that lasts

A Content Marketing strategy requires, as you know, the constant production of diverse materials, in different formats, and appropriate to the buyer persona.

It’s up to the digital marketer to identify the most relevant topics and keywords to attract the audience and, more importantly, keep it engaged.

Therefore, it’s common that most of the content produced in a strategy, whether to feed a blog or a social media profile, becomes less relevant.

After all, everything changes very fast on the internet, so what’s important today may be insignificant tomorrow.

However, it’s possible — and necessary — to produce content that remains relevant and fresh for the audience, regardless of the moment it’s consumed.

That’s what we call evergreen content. Want to know more? In this post, we will cover:

• What is evergreen content?
• Why is it important to create high-quality content that lasts?
• What are the best tips to create excellent evergreen content?

What is evergreen content?

Evergreen is the name used to refer to a group of plants whose leaves remain green throughout all the seasons. Therefore, evergreen content is material that stays fresh or “green” for readers despite its publication date.

Evergreen content ensures that the information will be helpful to readers for a long while post-publication.

Types of evergreen and not evergreen content

The concept of quality evergreen content is that its structure allows edits without changing the material’s purpose. So, you don’t have to write it, assuming you’ll never have to edit it.

Some of the most common examples of evergreen content are:

• top tips on a subject
• original research
• tutorials or how-to guides
• checklists
• product reviews
• lists
• resource lists
• ultimate guides
• best and worst practices
• FAQs
• case studies

With the examples above, the information they provide is likely still relevant and helpful, accessed on the day of publication or a year later.

For example, if you own a pet supply company, you may want to write an evergreen article on “How to care for a new puppy” or “Top 10 Tips for Housebreaking Your Dog.” Both pieces are relevant on the day of publication but also for months (hopefully years).

Examples of non-evergreen content

Here are some types of articles that are not considered evergreen:

• news articles
• posts on pop culture like TV shows, celebrities, or movies
• current trends or fads
• statistics that are likely to change in a short period
• articles with current clothing trends and fashion tips
• articles about a specific holiday

Another prime example of non-evergreen content would be news of the everchanging pandemic. While it may be relevant for a few days or even a few months, the information constantly evolves, and any post referring to it is now obsolete.

You need to have a strategic eye to identify topics that have evergreen potential. In addition, producing quality evergreen content involves a series of best practices. Before we go into these details, let’s understand why evergreen content is vital to your digital strategy.

Why is it important to create high-quality content that lasts?

Providing high-quality evergreen content is extremely valuable for your marketing strategy.

Evergreen content can:

• increase the chance of websites linking back to your content
• lower website bounce rate
• save your marketing team time (less content needed)
• improve SEO performance (short term and long term) and SERP results
• increase organic traffic to your site

Imagine that your portal is the first to talk about an extremely relevant subject, like urgent and unexpected news. 

If you have enough reach, your website will go through a sudden increase in the number of visits, until it reaches its peak.

After a while, as the information becomes less hot and more diffused on other channels, the traffic rate will decrease. This movement can be easily observed in the image below.

What does that imply? For starters, it signals that you have a lot of work ahead of you. To create more spikes of hope, you need to create more content, and you’ll probably face a hard time repeating great results.

That’s one of the most important reasons for you to produce evergreen content: it saves time and work.

While you will probably need to make occasional changes in the content, the fact remains relevant and removes the need to create more material on the subject.

Saving time is great, but the main benefit of evergreen content has a much more strategic focus. This type of material is a key element for the success of your SEO strategy.

The algorithm used to rank pages in search results takes into account, among many factors, the content’s relevance. Therefore, if the material is not up-to-date, it will hardly be offered as an option to search engine users.

By putting your post on Google’s first results and maintaining the volume of traffic for a longer period, you open a box of advantages.

A good ranking helps your company become a reference in the market, facilitating communication with the buyer persona.

Also, the strategy reflects on your other channels. With the right tactics, you can direct the traffic generated by evergreen content to your social networks, making the public even more familiar with your brand.

From then on, you already know: landing pages and other elements can be used to turn visitors into leads, leads into customers, and customers into brand advocates.

Thus, evergreen content proves to be the cornerstone of a successful Content Marketing strategy.

What are the best tips to create excellent evergreen content?

Now that you know the benefits of this strategy, you may be considering ways to apply it.

With that in mind, we’ll give you some of the best tips for producing high-quality content that stays relevant for a longer period. Keep reading!

Find evergreen topics

What will your content cover? To decide this, you need to look for evergreen topics, whose relevance is consistent. Focus on subjects that may bring continuous traffic to your website.

How to do that? To start with, you should consider the characteristics of your company and your persona.

With that in mind, make keywords research in a specialized tool and look for terms with a high volume of searches over an extended period. Next, you can define the topic of your material.

To ensure that you are dealing with a potential evergreen topic, it’s interesting to use a tool such as Google Trends, which analyzes the popularity’s variation of a topic over time.

For example, the Super Bowl is one of the world’s most popular events and certainly attracts a lot of searches. 

However, it only happens once a year, so it’s not a suitable topic for evergreen content. See its search volume graph:

If you back up a little and look for something more general, like “sports”, you will notice that the volume of searches is much more consistent:

Optimize for SEO

Once you know the keywords you want to use, you’ll need to factor in on-page optimization. However, whatever you do, don’t stuff your keywords as it will seem unnatural to the readers, and they will leave your site quickly if your content is not genuine. Best practices for on-page SEO optimization include:

• Adding alt text to any images
• Using the keyword in the title
• Utilizing the keyword organically throughout the body
• Linking to other related evergreen articles

Avoid using language with a short lifespan

Pay close attention to the language you use in your evergreen content. Details such as mentioning a specific date can quickly make your material obsolete. Therefore, avoid writing things like:

• last year;
• yesterday;
• earlier this month.

Ideally, use a language that doesn’t mention, even indirectly, the time when the content was produced.

Be careful with the references you use

Besides paying attention to language, you should avoid using references that may not make sense after a while.

Many blogs produce content based on series, films, events, and other things that attract the public’s attention. There’s no problem with that. But you have to know that the hype won’t last forever.

So, as much as the most recent episode of your favorite series has everything to do with the topic you want to address, resist the temptation and don’t include any references that might become outdated.

Avoid overly technical language

Once you find the evergreen topics and your keywords, you want to ensure that you avoid overly technical language. In addition, it must be able to attract visitors, especially those unfamiliar with your company. In other words, the material should be friendly and accessible to everyone.

Your evergreen content, if well-developed, has an excellent chance of ranking among the first Search Engine Results Page (SERP) results. Therefore, it’s essential to avoid using overly technical language not to drive away the visitor.

Keep your evergreen content up-to-date

Some topics can maintain their evergreen status for months, years, and even decades. But that is not always the case. That’s why you need to monitor your content and make the necessary changes to keep it classified as evergreen.

To identify the need to do that, track your rankings. If you see a slow but consistent drop, it could mean that your content needs to be updated.

Then, it’s up to you to check the material and find out what can be optimized. Broken links, dates, and statistics are among the most frequent causes.

Repurpose content

You don’t have to limit yourself to using your evergreen content in one format. Instead, use the same high-quality content in other forms, such as infographics or videos.

Repurposing successful content can make your life easier!

Explore different formats

As with any Content Marketing approach, varying the format you use is critical. 

As we have already mentioned some of the most common alternatives, let’s talk about a format that is unfairly not always remembered: live blogging.

Inserting a live blogging session on your website is a way to enrich the visitor experience and multiply the engagement rates.

Even if the coverage is on a specific topic, which will eventually become obsolete, the live experience is kept on the portal and becomes an evergreen piece.

By producing evergreen content, you not only reduce the need to produce extra materials on a certain subject.

More than that, you create content with a high ranking potential, making your marketing strategy much more effective. Just remember: it’s essential always to use creative and innovative formats.

Therefore, learn more about live blogging and see how you can include it in your content strategy!