What is Evergreen Content and Why is it Important for Your Blog?

September 3, 2015 by Christine

When you create content for your blogs, the kind of content you create can basically be split up into two categories: newsworthy/timely and evergreen. Newsworthy or timely blogs are blog posts that apply to a certain piece of news or cultural trend, while evergreen blogs are valuable forever, keeping their “leaves” all year long.

The main purpose of evergreen content is to drive consistent traffic to your website. Because the value of an evergreen blog never expires, people will continue to search for its information and (hopefully) land on your website. Examples include “how-to” or instructional posts, industry tips and insights, frequently asked questions, lists, “best practice” posts and more.

One of the biggest benefits of evergreen content is that the more you create for your website, the more the benefits start to compound. Let’s say you find a topic that brings 500 unique visitors to your website each month. If you keep finding different topics that bring in a lot of unique visitors, you’re creating a significant amount of organic search traffic that likely won’t go away, because the value of the content will not decrease.

Please let us clarify some terminology first and put some things into context:

Copywriting services. Beyond our regular sales and marketing services, we also offer full-scale copy-writing services to develop content for your website, blog, featured articles, emails or any other types of written content that you need. All you need to do is let us know your content needs and we will provide you with a quote. Our copywriters take care of the rest, delivering professional, high-quality content straight to you.

What do we mean by organic traffic? Organic traffic means the content you put on your website today will drive traffic tomorrow, next month, next year, and probably even several years from now. That's why it's worth the effort. You don't see that kind of ROI from paid traffic.

What is evergreen content? Evergreen content is content that is perpetually relevant. The word evergreen is most often used by editors to describe certain kinds of stories, stories that, because of their topic, are always of interest to readers. They are always fresh, forever green. “Evergreen content is usually the canonical, or definitive, piece of content your business has on that given topic. It's in-depth, detailed, and it likely took you a lot longer to create than some of your other, non-evergreen blog content.” ~ HubSpot

How can a small business benefit from evergreen content? A great tweet tends to peak at about 18 minutes. An evergreen blog post will last for years. The difference between two pieces can be disparaging. However, it is reassuring when your posts continue to draw site traffic for a long time. Long lasting content on your blog and in your archives is a boon to traffic, social sharing and more. At Viral Solutions we have written nearly 500 original blog articles. Our organic traffic averages thousands of hits per month.

For this reason, a lot of content marketing experts suggest you follow an 80/20 rule for blog writing. Under this philosophy, 80 percent of your content should be traffic-driving evergreen content, while the other 20 percent should be timely, relevant pieces.

Creating effective evergreen content.

So how do you develop evergreen content that actually helps your business to gain online attention? Here are a few ideas:

• Choose quality long-tail keywords. Let’s say you’re in the clothing retail industry and you’re starting a new blog post. Rather than using keywords like “suits,” you should instead choose more specific topics that people are likely to search for, such as “how should a suit fit.” Finding the right long-tail keywords can be a big help to drawing traffic to your site.
• Build long-form content. Because evergreen content is written with the intent to make it last for years to come, you can feel free to go a little longer with your posts. Search engines favor quality long-form content, and you can include even more valuable information in each post.
• Promote. Promote your posts on social media, both when you originally publish the post and down the road.
• Keep writing. Again, the benefits of evergreen posts compound after a while, so you’re only helping yourself by continuing to create quality content.

What are the 5 keys to evergreen content?

1. Be consistent and persistent – for years! When you get to 300 unique articles you are where you need to be – keep going.
2. Be the trusted and definitive source.
3. Keep you writing at a 5th grade level.
4. Stay topical and on point.
5. Write content that will be interesting a year or more after publishing.

The results? Well written evergreen content will, over time, rank very high and continue to draw search traffic. When tied to your associated lead generation offer, quality evergreen content will almost forever generate leads. Conversely, your blog can become outdated when you only write breaking news articles. Evergreen content is great for SEO, traffic and lead generation as it accumulates over time. Evergreen blog articles become evergreen funnels because they are passive ways for your business to collect revenue.

Need assistance with developing blog content for your company? Get in touch with us at Viral Solutions today and we’ll get you started!

Learn More Here: “An Evergreen Content Case Study”

Copyright 2015 Viral Solutions LLC

by Thomas von Ahn | Chief Elephant Slayer

We help overwhelmed small business owners duplicate themselves – so business can be fun again.

Viral Solutions LLC is a Digital Marketer Certified Partner, an Infusionsoft Certified Consultant, a Google Partner – Certified in AdWords and a Mobit Certified Partner.

Filed Under: Analytics Tagged With: attract traffic, blog posting, content marketing, drive traffic, evergreen content, organic, seo, viral content