Evergreen content is content that continues to be relevant long after its initial publication. This means that the information it provides does not lose accuracy over time due to outside factors like seasonality or the news cycle.
Just like an evergreen tree always has its pines no matter the condition of the world around it, evergreen content is able to remain visible no matter the time of year because the topic it covers isn’t subject to major changes, making the content a near-permanent resource.
Imagine content that covers how to tie a tie, or how to fry an egg. Those processes won’t change for the foreseeable future, which makes the content always relevant — no matter when you publish.
Because of its longevity, it becomes more than a piece of content — it becomes an investment that constantly generates traffic to your site.
Creating content around the right topic of choice and pairing it with SEO content best practices allows you to use the “set it and forget it” strategy.
Some content types are better suited for covering evergreen posts because of their presentation of the information.
Because the information tends to be explanatory and nearly unchangeable, the below list of content types tends to make for good evergreen content:
To get a further sense of what content is or is not evergreen, let’s take a look at some specific examples.
(This content saw a surge of clicks upon publication, but the interest went away with time.)
Now that you know what evergreen content is, you probably have an idea of why it’s so crucial to a content strategy: evergreen content allows you to minimize your workload by creating content that is always going to perform.
You can of course (and should) create content that isn’t evergreen — we do, after all, cover major Google algorithm updates — but having evergreen content is a great defensive strategy to always ensure traffic.
Evergreen content has more benefits besides the traffic, too. It’s cheap, long-lasting, and what you get back is ten fold.
Plus, these content types can really lend themselves to Answer Box opportunities, which guarantees search visibility for your content at the top of the SERPs, and an evergreen piece of content is great for generating backlinks since it’s used as a helpful resource.
There are two main steps to creating evergreen content: finding an appropriate evergreen topic, and then creating the content itself. Let’s discuss each in turn.
A large part of creating evergreen content is understanding your vertical and your audience so you can be aware of different topics and perspectives to cover.
Also remember to check competitor websites with the skyscraping. That is, make a query for your target keyword to see how others cover the topic, and then cover the topic even better.
What questions are they answering?
But just like other content creation, you need to conduct keyword research to understand what users search for, and how they search for it, in a data-driven way.
Evergreen content is all about writing about an evergreen topic.
Begin your keyword research journey by looking at broad topics to cover, and narrow in your scope from there.
Remember: when it comes to evergreen content, the first goal is to answer a question. (One that has an answer that will stay consistent!)
This should be the most top of mind element when creating the content.
Let’s take a look at an example of this using seoClarity’s Topic Explorer.
If you work in the apparel industry (i.e. manage a fashion blog or clothing store), users may be interested in different ways to wear items of clothing.
With Topic Explorer, you use a seed keyword to uncover related keywords and topics. Plus, you can specify your industry to focus on topics that are relevant to you.
Here, I’ve entered “tie a tie” as the main keyword. Then, I can see a list of related topics.
(Keyword list in Topic Explorer.)
Scrolling through the list I can see a variety of content ideas from the word cloud:
Topic Explorer also reveals 24 months worth of search volume data for the terms. This can help inform your content strategy to capture demand at the right time.
You can also dive into your site analytics to find the keywords that drive traffic to your site. This allows you to see the questions that users search for. Then, you can create content to answer those questions and drive traffic to your site.
To find this performance data, use Google Search Console.
The seoClarity platform integrates with GSC to pull in these data points, so I’ll demonstrate this approach with Search Analytics within the platform.
Filter with a qualifier like “who,” “what,” “why,” or “how” to find keywords that ask direct questions.
(Filtering GSC in seoClarity's Search Analytics.)
Collect these questions that your users are searching for. Evergreen content is created by finding out a way to timelessly answer those questions.
Looking at a demo account of H&M, this approach generated the following questions:
These are the questions that users are asking, so they should be answered on your site. Since the process of tracking, canceling, etc. should most likely be consistent answers, these topics would make for great evergreen content.
You’ll have to use your industry knowledge to gauge whether the keywords you come across are good starting points for evergreen content, but one thing is for sure: these queries are all great targets for the Answer Box.
Familiarize yourself with your vertical and find as many perspectives as you can to present the information through. This can be done with experience, but also the data!
Remember the skyscraping method: check in on the competition to see what they're covering in terms of their evergreen content strategy.
When you do browse other content, be sure to look at the actual spirit of the content. What does it cover? Looking at something like the publish date to gauge topic ideas is too much of a case by case basis.
Just because something was published long ago and still ranks doesn’t make it evergreen.
The content creation process itself is just like creating any other piece of content; the challenge lies in finding the right topic to cover.
The good news is that now you know how to do that!
After you find your question, approve it for longevity, and pick the packaging for it (i.e. listicle, etc.) then you tackle the SEO presentation of it.
For example, you still want to make your content authoritative, and that’s something that Content Fusion, our AI content writer, can help you with.
We have a lot of other resources published too that can help make your content engaging for your users.
Evergreen content is a low risk, high reward approach to content creation. Since it targets an interest area/topic that will have demand for the foreseeable future, it can be a surefire way to guarantee traffic.
Updates to the content can still be made over time, but the heart of the piece stays the same.
If you’re looking to get started with evergreen content to boost your content marketing strategy, request a demo of our platform to learn how it can better inform your strategy.