What is Evergreen Content? We Explain It All
What is evergreen content?
Put simply, it’s piece of content (a blog post for example) that stays useful and relevant over a long period of time.
The best examples of successful evergreen content are the ones that help remedy problems and answer extremely popular questions that people ask time and time again. It can also come in the form of “How to” guides, or lists, or reviews.
When making your own evergreen content, those are the kinds of things you should keep in mind.
What questions can you answer for users? What problems can you solve?
What is the opposite of evergreen content?
Anything time sensitive (news) or fad-based are good examples of non-evergreen content. Their relevance wanes as time moves on or trends have changed. There’s nothing wrong with that of course, these types of content have their place - they’re just not ‘evergreen’.
Why should I write evergreen content?
These pieces of evergreen content will be long standing pillars of knowledge containing useful information that people will continuously seek out and find. They will be extra sources of traffic to your site that last.
You’ll see in analytics that a good bit of evergreen content will have a nice consistent steady flow of traffic that hopefully grows as time goes on. Conversely, going back to non-evergreen content, you’d likely see larger traffic spike initially that fades quickly.
If you’re really clever, you’ll be able to finely craft your content to lead users on to other parts of your site with relevant internal links. Hopefully from there they might end up filling out a contact form for example, or whatever your site goals may be.
Bonus Side Effects
You’ll probably have a good idea of the questions to answer, but it would be a very good idea indeed to base it on keyword research to gain a real understanding on what people wanting to know.
Creating content that answer these questions directly could give you the added bonus of being selected by Google for a featured snippet.
Maintaining Your Content
It’s likely that as time goes on, some information within your evergreen work may well need updating. It’s always good practice to do a yearly review on your content as you may need to update certain facts or add new relevant information to it. It’s a good habit to get in to, and search engines love fresh stuff.
Resting on your laurels or just outright neglecting some well performing content could be subject to a slip down the rankings as something more up-to-date, shiny and new passes it by. Make sure you keep on top of it.
When you’re next planning your content output for the future, consider planning for some evergreen content. Plant those seeds now and reap the rewards in the future - just remember to water them now and then.