Creating up-to-date, timely content has its perks. It allows brands to boost audience engagement, maintain relevance in their industry, increase customer satisfaction and it even has the ability to influence conversion rates. However, capitalising on trends alone when creating content is a risky marketing strategy, as trends can come and go in an instant – along with the value of your content. Chasing trends may work for instantaneous engagement and fast clicks, but if you want to build brand loyalty and sustain a consistent online presence, evergreen content provides ongoing value for both new audiences and existing customers, long after the piece has been published. Many industry experts see evergreen content as the backbone of their marketing strategy – and we agree. So, join Wordsmith as we share our go-to guide for creating evergreen content.
What is Evergreen Content?
Evergreen content is organic content that remains relevant and fresh regardless of when it was published. Personally, we love creating evergreen blogs on our Wordwise platform that our audiences can continue to reap benefits from time and time again. Some of our favourites that have stood the test of time include, How Asking Questions Can Elevate Your Storytelling, 5 Reasons Why Geekspeak and Jargon May Be Harming Your Brand and How to Make Writing An Article a Day Possible. These pieces are the epitome of evergreen, as they’re packed with valuable advice and insight that won’t change with the passing of time. Outside of blogs, other examples of evergreen content can be how-to guides, listicles, FAQs, expert interviews and infographics.
Some businesses, however, can make the mistake of wasting resources by focusing all their efforts on creating content about the latest trends or dated subjects like politics, new technology, the latest Google SEO updates, holiday-specific content, timely competitor research and consumer studies in emerging markets. This kind of content, although useful at the time, may be considered irrelevant, unhelpful or even incorrect in a couple of weeks, which in the long run, gives your content team of writers the difficult task of constantly chasing new stories. And while there is definitely a need for fresh news, the best approach for both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) brands, is to invest a larger amount of your marketing budget in evergreen content, as it will pay off in the long term and drive consistent traffic to your website thanks to its ongoing relevance for readers.
The Benefits of Evergreen Content
Before we begin telling you how to create evergreen content, it’s good to have a sound understanding of why you should be creating this type of content in the first place.
It builds brand authority and thought leadership
By focusing all of your energy on content based on fleeting trending topics alone, you will always be chasing the next big story, instead of cultivating relationships with your audiences by building an archive of relevant topics, they can come back to at any time. Making this archive of useful information readily accessible, is a fantastic way of building your brand's authority and proving that you can be a thought leader in your industry. Udi Ledergor, Chief Marketing Officer at Gong explains that aside from building brand authority and thought leadership, “Evergreen content can be used for nurturing campaigns too. Remember: What’s obvious to you isn’t (yet) obvious to a novice or first-time buyer. Help educate them and they will come back to you when they’re ready to buy.”
It helps you rank for keywords and build backlinks
A study from Parse.ly, claims that over half of the internet's top 100 websites receive more than 5% of their page views solely from evergreen content, so it’s a big contributor to site traffic. Thanks to the nature of evergreen topics, this type of content typically has a longer shelf life. This means it will continue to build backlinks and drive more site traffic throughout its lifetime than trending topics would, which will ultimately boost brand awareness and potential sales.
It Can Be Multi-purpose and Used across campaigns and different channels.
When it comes to content that focuses on trending topics, you can only promote it across your channels for a specific period of time before it becomes outdated. Whereas evergreen content doesn’t have this limitation and can be used again and again across different marketing strategies, campaigns and even company communications.
For those with smaller or over-stretched content teams, evergreen content can also help you fill the content gaps between time-specific trending campaigns, so your audiences receive a consistent flow of truly great content. If you have initially published your evergreen content as a blog, there’s no harm in tweaking the content and repurposing it for a video series, email campaign, helpful infographic or social media campaign, as the topic is already aligned with your brand’s content strategy.
It Can Provide Solutions To Customer Problems
Evergreen content should be the go-to way to introduce educational content to your audiences. You can create evergreen content for prospects who are looking to learn about how your product/services can be the solution to their problems and needs. It’s also great for invested consumers who are looking to engage even further with your brand and make repeat purchases. When creating evergreen content, Rekha Thomas, CEO at Path Forward Marketing LLC, urges marketers to avoid “focusing on your specific product or service but more on the category, industry and customer challenges.” Customers are no longer interested in the hard sell, they want relatable, useful content with a human touch.
How to Create Evergreen Content
Choose a Topic
When creating evergreen content, the first thing you need to do is select a topic that is both relevant and timeless to your audience. Ask yourself: “Is this something buyers will be interested in several years from now?” If the answer is yes, then the topic is evergreen. Whatever your topic is, make sure it’s solution-driven and informative for key audiences you’re looking to attract. Asad Kausar, CEO of Chicago-based SEO agency, Dabaran, notes, “Evergreen content should be free from trends. It should not be a response to a current event, but rather a solution to an ongoing problem. For our clients, this can be low rankings, unoptimised web pages and unengaging content. Our evergreen content can help guide our target audience in finding solutions and building their trust in our services.”
Another great way of creating evergreen content is by highlighting your industry expertise and insight, Kristin Russel, Chief Marketing Officer of symplr explains, “Evergreen content allows us to stay connected to our customers in a meaningful way, even during market lulls. We develop and share evergreen content related to workforce management, provider data management, healthcare compliance and more. This type of content provides valuable insights into the healthcare industry's omnipresent challenges that remain relevant, no matter the market forces at play.”
Conduct Keyword Research
The next step after choosing a topic area to focus on is doing your own keyword research, so you can interject these keywords into the content you write so it can rank higher in Google’s search results, allowing your piece to get more traction. Keyword research provides invaluable insights into what key phrases, questions and words your buyer persona is currently searching for on Google.
So, if you're still unsure if a topic is evergreen, we’d recommend doing a quick search on Google Trends or Ahrefs’ keywords explorer for the keyword. If the “interest over time” chart is displaying a downward slope or is indicating that the word is “highly seasonal” (i.e., spiking only during short bursts in the year), then these topic areas are likely trending and aren't evergreen. If you use these tools to inform you about each evergreen topic you’re thinking of writing about, you will see that the best topics have higher monthly search volumes, which is a great indicator that your audiences are more interested in this particular topic.
Choose Your Content Format
As we mentioned before, some of the best kinds of formats for evergreen content include; beginner’s guides, tutorials, industry overviews, case studies and long-form brand storytelling pieces. However, when you’re looking to pick the right format for your exact audience, you may need to look into the analytics behind your current content strategy to see which format is performing the best and why. According to research from Backlinko, content types with the highest proportion of evergreen content include “best of” lists, guides, data-driven research and industry reports, but you could find that the most effective way of distributing your evergreen content is through video tutorials or social media. At the end of the day, it’s all about what works best for your brand.
Sowmya Moni, Vice President of Marketing & Alliances at Incture, believes "how-to" guides, glossaries, FAQs and case studies remain the most “valuable and relevant to readers over time because they’re useful for establishing thought leadership, improving search engine rankings and driving traffic to a company's website”. While Larry Beaman, Chief Growth Officer for gen.video says, “YouTube is a terrific place for evergreen content because it is a search-based platform. Consumers head to the platform when they are ready to learn more about a product or category. Having dozens of indexed videos about your product will help teach consumers.” When you conduct research into your buyer persona and gather insights from what is performing well currently online, you will have a great grasp of what keywords you should put into your next evergreen content piece.
Write and Publish Your Content
Once you’ve found a topic area and conducted keyword research to ensure your piece will be optimised for SEO, the final step (and arguably the hardest one) is to sit down, write it and publish it. If you need help with this, our expert writers here at Wordsmith not only have a way of making words dance, on any platform, but we’re also well-versed at crafting evergreen content that stands the test of time.