Are you looking for ways to drive incremental organic traffic to your website that doesn’t fluctuate due to seasonality or reliance on social trends?
You’ll want to focus on crafting evergreen content to improve your website’s keyword rankings and generate positive, consistent traffic over long periods of time.
Read our latest guide, which will walk you through how to find and write evergreen content.
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Evergreen content is consistently important, search-optimized content that remains relevant for months or years - well past its publication date, it continues to be relevant, with search traffic rising or remaining stable over spans of time.
Wondering what types of formats evergreen content are served as? Below are a few examples:
Here are some examples of topics that are evergreen:
Here are more examples of what kinds of evergreen content you could create, using the above topics:
In contrast, timely content usually involves trending topics that experience spikes / declines in a short period of time.
Timely content can include:
Evergreen content is great for generating consistent, incremental organic traffic for your website that’s relevant year-round.
When covering news or trending content, a website may experience a short burst of traffic as it’s widely shared, but the piece becomes irrelevant / dies off once that topic is no longer relevant.
Having a mix of timely and evergreen topics in your content mix is important, but most of your long-term gains will come from evergreen content.
Next, we’ll cover how to find evergreen topics and ensure they’ll drive organic traffic to your website through SEO.
First, you’ll want to identify what keyword ideas actually have search volume. You can do this with several keyword research tools, including RankIQ, Ahrefs, SEMRush, or Keysearch.
You can also read our latest guide on how to identify long-tail and short-tail keywords for your SEO strategy.
You’ll also want to check your keywords for positive trends over time that are safeguarded against seasonality.
Google Trends is a great tool for this - it will show you search interest over time for your desired keyword/content that you want to write about.
As you craft your content, you want to ensure that it has the right type of intent associated with it.
If a keyword or topic has unclear intent that’s likely to change, such as “mortgage”, then it’s probably not a good topic to target as evergreen, because the results on Google are likely to change as intent from users shifts over time.
Now that we’ve reviewed how to find evergreen content, we’ll now walk through best practices for creating it.
The job of Google is to provide the best answers for queries that are searched by users.
Part of that is ensuring that you create high-quality content to rank at the top of the SERPs, which is what we call “10X content” in the marketing world.
Someone will come along and contend with you quite quickly if the material is exactly like everyone else's (1X).
By crafting the best, most informative piece of content on the web for a given search query, you the chances of sustaining long-term rankings are higher.
Below are some considerations regarding things you should be asking as you craft quality content:
You’ll want to avoid what’s known as “newsjacking” when crafting evergreen content. Injecting your ideas or crafting a spin on an emerging or trending story has its benefits, notably when it comes to linkbuilding, but it’s not ideal to focus the bulk of your site’s content on timely trends.
Also avoid language with a short lifespan, such as “earlier this year”, “last month” or “201X”, which will date your content and not only deter users from reading your resources, but also harm your organic rankings in the form of Google’s “freshness factor.”
Below are more tips to consider when creating evergreen content.
Longtail keywords are typically the best to target when crafting evergreen content. The search intent is more obvious and you have a higher chance of ranking, compared to more highly competitive head terms.
As you craft your piece, don’t forget to perform on-page SEO best practices, such as including your target keywords within your subheads, content, and meta tags.
Don’t appeal to experts - evergreen should be digestible for users who are looking to learn more about a given topic, or expand their knowledge. This includes avoiding overly-technical jargon.
You must also ensure that it remains up-to-date. Although you shouldn't have to do anything to upgrade evergreen material, new results, new papers to which you can hyperlink and other new technologies may be available.
Moreover, with SEO rankings, reviewing content and its publication dates will help.
There are several case studies on how SEO rankings will soar by updating your content regularly and you can promote it as if it's a new piece after you've changed your content.
Keep the following in mind:
Backlinks are one of the most vital parts for ranking well in Google’s algorithm.
In order to safeguard your evergreen content rankings, you’ll want to generate backlinks from authoritative / relevant websites to your articles to avoid competitors usurping your keyword ranking positions, or even boosting your rankings up in the SERPs to drive more organic traffic to your website.