Tips And Tactics To Create Great Evergreen Content
Creating Evergreen content is an essential part of your content marketing strategy. Evergreen content is content that is timeless. In other words, it attracts and educates your target audience readers for extended periods of time without needing to constantly update and refresh. Becoming good at creating Evergreen content will bring higher returns and help you grow faster.
In this article, I’ll show you why evergreen content should be part of your content strategy, and how you can make the most out of it.
What is Evergreen Content?
Evergreen content is “timeless” content that’s optimised for the purpose of driving traffic and sales to your business for months and possibly, years. A content piece that’s “evergreen” doesn’t have an expiration date. It normally revolves around a topic that people will be talking about for years to come. Hence, the name “ever” “green” 😉
Here are some examples of evergreen topics:
- How to invest in stocks
- How to become more attractive
- How to cook healthy food
- How to improve public speaking skills
Compare these to a topic like “2020 U.S elections”. It’s going to fade over time.
Regardless of what’s going on in the world, people will always be searching for evergreen topics such as these.
As a marketer and business owners, finding and creating evergreen content is relatively easy. The key objective is to create high-value evergreen content that resonates and educates your target audience.
If you’re in a niche business and think that people might not be interested or searching for your content in the future, this should raise a flag around your business itself. If that’s the case, you should consider expanding your product portfolio to cover niches and areas that people will be interested in, the long term.
So, Why Is Evergreen Content Important?
Now that you know what evergreen content is, let’s talk about why it’s important for your content marketing strategy. There are two main reasons evergreen content is very important.
- Evergreen content establishes you as a thought leader
When it comes to selling, trust is one of the important factors. And nothing builds more trust than being perceived as a leader and subject matter expert in your industry. Creating evergreen content helps you build your leadership profile and as a result, people’s trust.
- Evergreen Content Boosts Organic Traffic
75% to 90% of people ignore search results beyond the first page. If you’re not on the first page, it’s less likely your target audience will find your content and learn about your business. So, how does that relate to evergreen content? Well, evergreen content helps your rankings on the search results because it’s content that builds expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, which are 3 key categories Google considers when ranking your website and content.
So, how do you create effective evergreen content?
Tips for Creating Evergreen Content
First of all, not all your content has to be evergreen. Not only is not practical, but it’s also not ideal. Your content should be a healthy mix of evergreen content, news, entertaining, educational and other forms of content that engage your target audience.
With that said, here 5 main important tips when creating evergreen content.
- Research and decide on the right topics
You might already know and have a handful of evergreen topics. But it’s important to learn about all the other topics you might not be aware of. The first step is to research and find topics with a steady and substantial search volume. There are many tools that can show search volume for keywords and topics over time but a good place to start is Google Ads Keyword Planner tools and Google Trends. They will give you explore evergreen topics, and they are also free to use. You can also use paid keyword search tools on platforms like SEM Rush, Ahrefs and Moz.
It’s important to distinguish between a trending topic and an evergreen topic. A trending topic will have high fluctuations or will decline over time. For example, if you search “Kanye West” on Google Trends, you’ll find that it’s a trending topic, typically trends high when Kanye releases an album or a new product.
On the other hand, if you search “cook a steak”, you’ll see that it’s a lot steadier overtime.
- Create content around the topic and its subtopics
Now you’ve found and shortlisted your evergreen topics, it’s important to structure and create the right content around them. To do that, you should use a keyword search tool that will tell you the search volume of the associated keywords including buyer keywords and long-tail keywords. A good rule of thumb is don’t try to create a content piece or a blog article that covers everything related to the topic. For example, if you are a fitness coach and you’ve identified that “healthy diet” is a key evergreen topic, you can’t and shouldn’t create one content piece on this mega topic. Instead, look at how you can segment it into subtopics based on your keyword research. My favourite tool to find subtopics keywords is the Keyword Magic Tool by SEM Rush. Here are the results of a “healthy diet” using that tool. You’ll see a bunch of subtopics like “healthy diet plans”, “healthy diet liver”, “heart healthy diet”, etc. You’ll also see on the left-hand side, the tool categorises the topics to make it easier for you to explore the subtopics.
- Avoid events-based topics
Using the previous example, an event-based topic could be “Spartan diet”. When the spartan movie came out in 2004, it was massive. Blogging about a spartan diet could have been a great idea back then. But now, it’s significantly less relevant, now that the movie is quite old. People stop searching for trending or event-related topics over time and your content would more likely be suppressed by the search engines.
- Update Your Content Regularly
No matter how much effort you put into your evergreen content, you’ll need to update it whenever appropriate to keep it fresh, relevant and accurate. Using the same diet example, perhaps there’s new research that provides evidence that the keto diet helps people with a certain digestive disorder, it’s important to cover that in your content. This will ensure that you continue to be seen as a subject matter expert. Just because evergreen content is ‘timeless’, it doesn’t mean it will continue to be accurate and informative.
At the same time, updating your content means that the search engine will likely boost its ranking. Old content is more likely to go down the rankings over time because search engines are always looking for new and more relevant content.
Here are some ideas on how to update your content:
- Include new statistics on the topic
- Remove outdated information
- Add new visuals
- Update the title and subtitles.
- Leverage your content
Last but not least, you should always look for ways to get the most juice out of your content. Writing a blog piece is just the start. You can turn this blog piece into a short video for Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, or a longer version on YouTube. You can also create a few emails for your email marketing funnel. You can also create a short e-book, case study or even a webinar around the topic.
Key takeaway
Evergreen content is ageless. It doesn’t go out of trend. You should integrate evergreen content in your content marketing strategy and leverage it to drive more organic traffic and position yourself as a leader in your industry. TO create great evergreen content, you need to start by researching timeless topics and categorise them into subtopics. Then, you should create engaging and educational content for these topics and ensure you update them when applicable.
