What is Evergreen Content? And why you should care.

Do you want blog content that readers eat up year after year? Content that’s useful and brings traffic to your site today, tomorrow and years from now? If you want to continually grow your blog, then of course you do!

This type of content that can actually send you traffic for years to come is called evergreen content. Today’s post will dive into what evergreen content is, and why you should care.

What is Evergreen Content?

Evergreen content is content that is useful and interesting to your readers months and years after its initial publish date. In a nutshell, evergreen content represents the posts and articles on your blog that will always be relevant to your audience vs. topics that may change over time.

For example, if I write a blog post titled “What is SEO? this would be considered an example of evergreen content because the definition of SEO won’t be changing and is going to be of interest to my audience for many years to come.  On the other hand, if I write a blog post titled “What are Google’s Best SEO Practices?” this would not be considered an evergreen topic because Google changes their algorithms all the time, so their best practices today will quickly become outdated.

Why You Should Care.

Evergreen content can drive traffic to your site and build awareness over a longer period of time.

Evergreen content is also a great marketing strategy for improving search rankings.  Google (and all search engines) gives higher ranking to posts that attract links, shares and engagement. And with higher rankings comes more visits/traffic, which leads to more links, more engagement and so on.

THE KEY: content that garners a longer shelf life is THE BEST type of content for your site… and is a way to gain the greatest return from your content (time + energy) investment.

How To Develop An Evergreen Content Strategy

Planning. Think about what topics and keyword terms you would like to be known for and plan around these.

Collect Data. Take information you collect from your Google Analytics, readers’ comments, top sharing topics on your social media platforms and blog forum/groups to help you learn what types of content will become evergreen.

Identify your Top Posts.  In Google Analytics, I can see my top posts with the most recurring traffic. (In a previous post, How To Use Google Analytics: The Basics I showed you how an old blog post was still driving a lot traffic to my website (and still sitting in my top 10 list even though it was written almost two years ago).

Ask yourself…  What is it about these blog posts? Why do they keep delivering visitors? Normally it’s because they are well written evergreen content that have earned plenty of links and social shares. You can learn a lot from understanding why these posts continue to do well! AND if they are working well, replicate these formats in other topic areas!!!

3 Evergreen Content Formats and Ideas.

Here’s three evergreen blog formats and ideas that have worked well for me:

1. Answer questions and provide valuable information. I write most of my blog posts based on questions from readers’ emails, Facebook blogger groups and clients. I’ve found this to be the most useful and productive way to create long-standing evergreen content (plus it saves me time from having to answer the same question over and over and over again… now I just supply people with the relevant blog post link).
2. How To posts. How To posts are very useful, instructive and time saving (as stated in #1 above). Not sure what this is or how to do it? Read my 9 Steps To Creating A How To Blog Post.
3. Compiling examples and resources. This is a great way to curate a single idea and provide a number of examples and resources. For instance, my Inspiration, When Needed post.

 Now that you know what is evergreen content and why you should care, plus how to create some for your own blog, I hope that you produce some amazing content that brings value to your readers (and your blog) for many years to come!