There are many different types of content marketing available, and blogging is one of the simplest to master. All you need is something to write about that people – in particular, your target market – will want to read.
The challenge is often around choosing the topics for your blogs. Some will resonate with your audience more than others, and these will depend on whether the information is considered relevant to people at the time of publication.
There is one style of content can actually send you traffic for years to come, and it’s called Evergreen.
What Is Evergreen Content?
Evergreen content is content that is useful to your audience long-term. It’s not based around trends, or news. It tackles a core issue that your audience faces, and is likely to remain relevant, potentially for years to come. Depending on your industry, even a content piece that’s valuable for a year or two can still be considered evergreen. It all depends on the speed at which your industry moves.
Why Evergreen Content is good for business
- Produces good search engine rankings
Evergreen content that has a high word count and is rich in quality content relevant to your audience tends to rank very highly in the search engines. Some believe that longer blogs or articles are actually valued by the search engines, but this is more to do with the quality of the content and how long people spend reading it – if it’s a load of drivel then nobody will stick around to read it all and the length won’t count for anything. For best results, ensure this content focuses around a few high traffic key search terms for your business or industry. - Generates high traffic volumes
Since evergreen content tends to rank higher in the search engines, this means these posts can generate more traffic to your website. This type of natural high ranking is a lot more sustainable as it tends to self-perpetuate more traffic through its high placement. If your post is seen by more people as among the definitive pieces of content on the topic, then it will continue to send more visitors to your site long after you first published the post. - A tool for Lead Generation
If your content is truly evergreen, and these posts are ranking highly and receiving a large amount of traffic, it is important that you are leveraging this to your best advantage. This means making sure you have a clear pathway for readers of your post that is designed to collect leads.
It is worth spending time and effort on this, as well-written evergreen content can bring you a steady stream of leads for a long time without you having to do any additional work beyond the initial publishing and promotion.
How to create good evergreen content
The value of Evergreen Content is in its timelessness. Once created, it has the potential to keep attracting readers and generating visitors to your website for as long as you want it to. The challenge lies in what to write about. These are the top factors to good evergreen content.
Quality: It has to be interesting to read and useful for readers. Often an Evergreen post is a piece of content styled to be seen as the definitive guide on a particular subject. This can even make it valuable enough to bookmark and come back to again and again.
SEO: Posts should be written with an eye on what your potential audience might be searching for online. Apply the SEO basics when producing and formatting articles, through judicious use of relevant keywords and phrases, tagging, and internal linking.
Shareable: Pay attention to what gets people’s attention. A well-written post helps, but it is the appeal of the headlines and tweets that hook readers and can optimise the chances of posts being shared widely.
Relevant to YOUR audience: Consider how a piece of content can appeal to your target market. Does it help them to solve a problem or find valuable information? Think about the kind of content that could convert a visitor into an enquiry.
No sell-by date: The whole point of evergreen is making it timeless. Ensure your posts are relevant for at least a year after publishing. You may have to update these posts as new information becomes available, but, if written right, they should stand the test of time with few, if any, changes.
Align content to goals: If you are paying attention to your site’s visitor behaviour, then you probably have set up page goals for your site. This means that any of the content that brings in traffic from searchers interested in the topic, should also be used to serve the goals of your website.
Sell it: When you first publish a post of this nature you should do what you can to create attention around it. The more initial attention it receives the more likely you will cement its evergreen status.
For more information on optimising your blog posts for the search engines or if you’d like some help coming up with an Evergreen Content Strategy, contact Web Tonic and we can discuss what would work best for your business.