Approximately 70 percent of all marketers are investing in content marketing this year.
Are you one of them? Are you looking to improve your content marketing strategy to drive more traffic to your website?
If you want to see better results from content marketing, you need to make evergreen content creation a priority.
Read on to learn more about evergreen content marketing and how it can improve your business’s SEO (search engine optimization) strategy. You’ll also find some tips on creating this type of content.
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What Is Evergreen Content?
Evergreen content is website content that is always relevant. It’s not focused on a fleeting trend or the latest news. It’s helpful to your audience now, and it will still be helpful to them for years to come.
This content gets its name from evergreen trees, which are green year-round. Like an evergreen tree, your evergreen content will never “lose its leaves” and stop being valuable to your audience.
Evergreen content lets you avoid cycles of boom and bust, and instead find consistent leads:
Source: Carrot.com’s Evergreen Content for Real Estate Investors
Examples of Evergreen Content
Evergreen content can come in many different forms. The following are some popular options:
- Listicles
- Top X Tips
- “How To” Articles
- Encyclopedia-style Articles
- Product Reviews
- Videos
Not every piece of content that falls under one of these categories is automatically evergreen. However, the formats work very well for creating content that is relevant to your audience now and will continue to be relevant in the future.
How Does Evergreen Content Help SEO?
Evergreen content marketing is one of the best practices you can implement to improve your business’s search engine ranking.
Evergreen content offers lots of benefits from an SEO standpoint, including the following:
- Increases website traffic
- Increases backlinks
- Improves on-page SEO
- Lowers bounce rate
- Can be repurposed
Increases Website Traffic
Remember, evergreen content is always relevant to your target audience. This means people will consistently be searching for the kind of information you’re providing.
For example, let’s say you run a personal training business and you write an article explaining how to create an effective workout plan. That’s information that people will always want to know, regardless of what’s going on in the world or what’s trending.
When you publish a piece of high-quality and informative evergreen content like this, you’ll find that people can regularly visit and sharing that article or video.
This in turn sends positive signals to search engines and can give your content a boost on search engine results pages. The higher up your article is positioned, the more people are going to find and click on it, and the virtuous cycle continues.
For more on clicks and how they affect search rankings, this is a great article on Moz.
Increases Backlinks
When you write an article or create a video that’s not evergreen, you might see a temporary spike in the number of people who are citing that piece of content and linking back to it on their websites. After a few days or weeks, though, you’ll likely see a steep drop-off in backlinks.
Because evergreen content is always useful and relevant, people will continue to link back to it long after it was first published. They’ll always find it helpful and will want to share it with their audiences.
Improves On-Page SEO
Evergreen content also improves on-page SEO. On-page SEO involves optimizing individual pages on your website so they rank higher and bring in more traffic from search engines.
When you create evergreen content, you have more opportunities to incorporate your target keywords naturally into your articles, video titles, and video descriptions.
Lowers Bounce Rate
Evergreen content can help you to lower your bounce rate, too. Because this type of content is usually longer and is full of useful, relevant information, people will be more inclined to stick around rather than clicking away from your page after skimming for a few seconds.
The average time spent on a webpage is just 62 seconds. The longer you can keep people around, the better.
Can Be Repurposed for More Content
We all know how hard it can be to come up with new, creative content ideas. When you prioritize evergreen content, though, it becomes easier for you to regularly publish new content without having to start from scratch each time.
Once you’ve created a great piece of evergreen content, you can repurpose it to create other types of content.
For example, let’s say you’ve written a massive guide that teaches your target audience what they should look for in a personal trainer. Once you’ve written that guide, you can extract some key points and use them to write a script for a video.
Now, you’ve got another piece of high-quality content that will help you reach a wider audience. You were probably able to get it made faster, too, since you didn’t have to start from zero.
How to Get Started with Evergreen Content Marketing
Clearly, there are a lot of benefits that evergreen content has to offer, especially when it comes to your business’s search engine optimization. If you’re not sure how to get started, here are some tips that can help:
Review Topics
Start by brainstorming topics that you want to cover in your evergreen content. Remember, the goal is to make sure this content is perpetually relevant to your audience.
Here are some ideas to help with your brainstorming:
- Consider frequently asked questions you receive from website visitors, clients, and prospective clients
- Consider tips and tricks that every beginner needs to know about your industry or the specific products or services your business offers
- Think about topics that could be turned into a comprehensive guide or a series of tutorials
When coming up with topics for evergreen content, start broad. From there, you can narrow things down until you have a large collection of topics to choose from.
Some tools you can use to find trending topics are Exploding Topics, Answer The Public, and Google Trends.
Research Keywords
Your next job is to do keyword research. Using the right keywords will help you to optimize your content and ensure it shows up in people’s search engine results.
There are lots of free and inexpensive tools you can use online to conduct research. They’ll help you figure out what kinds of terms your audience is using to search for the information you want to share with them.
Your research can also help you learn alternative phrasing and figure out which keywords and phrases have the least amount of competition. The less competition, the better your chance will be of ranking for that word or phrase.
Make Content Readable
When creating written evergreen content (articles, guides, etc.), make sure it’s easy to read. Every piece of content should check the following boxes:
- Short words, sentences, and paragraphs
- Lots of white space
- Lots of headings for easy skimming
- Limited jargon and industry-specific language
- Speak directly to the reader so the information feels more personalized
Writing this way helps your audience. It’s also considered to be “SEO-friendly” and boosts your search engine ranking.
Optimize for Search Engines
Speaking of search engine ranking, here are other steps you can take to optimize your evergreen content (written and video) for search engines:
- Incorporate target keyword throughout (in a natural way, of course)
- Create an optimized URL with your target keyword
- Include the keyword in the title, meta description, at least one subheading, and image alt-text
- Add relevant inbound and outbound links
It also helps to look for related keywords (also known as secondary keywords). Incorporate those throughout your written content or in your video description naturally, too.
Learn more about optimizing content for SEO here.
Need Content Marketing Assistance?
Are you ready to start creating evergreen content? Follow the steps outlined above and you’ll have no trouble putting together high-quality content that takes your search engine ranking to the next level.
Need help putting together a content marketing strategy or hiring a content marketing agency for your business?
