Of the articles you read on Google, how many of those were written today? This week? This month? Even this year? A lot of them were probably published over a year ago, yet are still relevant to your search today. This is evergreen content — content that is relevant and has no expiration date. Evergreen content is recommended for blogs, articles, marketing campaigns, and the like.
Going evergreen is one strategy that will help improve a website’s SEO. It’s also a strategy to keep viewers interested in your content, even past publishing. Ideally, traffic for this content grows over time — meaning, the content gets more views, leading to more shares, and, ultimately, the website gets more page visits. This is where SEO comes into play.
Evergreen content should use keywords that will, theoretically, never cease to trend. The idea is to write for the reader, while optimizing for the search engine. For example, 10 Pound Gorilla published an article covering “Googles’ SEO Best Practices,” for readers to better understand how to increase the chance of their site getting found through a Google search. This article will be relevant to readers for as long as people are making their own websites, which will be a very, very long time. Of course, as Google makes changes to their SEO algorithms, updates will be made to the article. (A tip, it’s unlikely evergreen content will remain timeless forever, so it’s important to update content as what it informs is updated). The article’s keywords include “SEO” and “Google”, both of which are frequently typed into search queries, and for years to come. Not only will the content have a long shelf life, but it will also help increase the website’s rankings in search engines.
Evergreen content is not the most difficult content to create, but there are some helpful guidelines that will keep anybody creating such content on the right track!
Opposite of Evergreen
Evergreen content does not relate to news, updates, seasonal content, trends, dated reports, or anything else with a date for that matter. As a rule of thumb, exclude any words resembling: “today”, “Monday”, and “next week”. Even though these words do not signify a time stamp, they do date an article, video, or graphic, potentially hurting SEO. Easy ways to incorporate evergreen content into your site are lists, tips, recipes, and guides. An example is an article or video that shares interview tips. However, non-evergreen content can still be a valuable tool and should still be implemented in your marketing and SEO strategies.
Find your Niche
Content marketers say the difficulty with evergreen content is original content can be hard to come by. How many helpful pages already exist about successful interview skills anyway? Since the idea of evergreen content is to create content without an expiration date, it might feel like what you create is the 100th rendition of the same thing. With some innovation, you can make your content stand out from the rest by tweaking its perspective, or filming a video rather than writing an article. This also gives viewers a reason to share your work because it’s unique.
Keep Evergreen Alive
If you have a lot of news and updates consistently added to your page, make evergreen content the “featured” content. This ensures it will reach an audience for a longer period of time. Another way to keep evergreen at the top of peoples’ feed is to insert a link to the article, image, video, or whatever it may be, in the latest posting, redirecting viewers in case they missed it the first time. Or, run it again on “slow news days” a while after the initial posting. We say news days, because news stations do actually have evergreen story files to pull from if the world turns out to be a bit duller one day.
Did I Mention Relevant?
Combine relevance with the content. For example, instead of only updating viewers on the most recent wildfire, a news website could write content about how to prevent wildfires, and what emergency procedures need to be followed if a wildfire is near. This tactic will not only attract attention because it is timely to what is occurring in the news, but in areas like Colorado or California, wildfires do not necessarily have one season.
We all put time into the projects we share with people, and we want our work to remain impactful, while bring awareness to our websites, for as long as possible. For those who have not already, it’s time to include evergreen content into your business strategy. Like the content it creates, evergreen is not going anywhere any time soon.