Create Content That Lasts Forever – Evergreen Content

What if I tell you that you do not have to worry about each and every post of yours doing wonders? You need that one piece of content that keeps you on top on the days when your trending content does not.

Speaking of, how many times have you retained audiences through trending content?

If you want something that keeps giving your website traffic, then read this blog! It has magical information on evergreen content!

What is evergreen content?

So what is evergreen content?

According to Green Geeks, evergreen content is pieces of content that simply stay relevant all year round and for years to come. This is one of the reasons why evergreen content from years back performs highly to date.

But is it only about staying relevant? Not really! Let’s take for example New Year’s resolutions. Technically they are supposed to be relevant all year long. However, the search intent seems to shuffle throughout the year.

 

To understand evergreen content, we need to take a look at some of the features. Keep reading as we compare evergreen content to ‘trending’ content later in the blog.

For a content piece to be evergreen it has to have all, if not more, features.

1. No time sensitivity

The base for creating evergreen content comes from timelessness. In fact, in journalism, Evergreen news is specially created and kept in the back pocket so that on slower news days, there is something to publish and stay relevant. These pieces have to be relevant at all times, or there is no use keeping them in the inventory.

An evergreen piece on your website follows the same rule of thumb. If you run a barber shop and you write on summer haircuts for 2023, it may give you plenty of traffic at first. But as the season passes and the year moves ahead, it becomes outdated.

However, if you choose to write about how to take care of your hair after a haircut, you may be looking at something timeless here. Think practically; people take haircuts all the time, and they may need assistance, too.

Keeping this in mind, your timelessness also comes from being searchable. Evergreen content is easy to reach out to!

But everyone writes on basic topics like this! Right? If this thought crosses your mind, then the next ‘best’ answers it.

2. Uniqueness

Yes! For topics such as how to guide, uniqueness may be different. However, to make your content fruitful when it is evergreen, there needs to be an added factor of uniqueness. Everybody will tell you tips on how to lose weight. Evergreen articles on the topic may provide you with a diet that everybody can follow all the time. Or maybe even added pieces of authentication like research or doctors’ opinions may give you an oomph on the topic.

3. Useful

Being useful is not only a requirement for evergreen content. In fact with the new Google Helpful Content Update, you are required to make pieces that are useful rather than being SEO optimized only.

When a piece of evergreen content is rolled out, it gets a bigger organic reach. The reach is usually because of satisfying user search intent. So if your piece is timeless but not useful, you might find yourself in a pickle.

Along with being useful, these pieces need to be informative. Evergreen pieces generally do not have a word limit. They are usually more comprehensive and have all the information!

4. Optimized

A timeless piece needs to be optimized! Period! Expecting a piece to rank on top without making it – let’s say, mobile-friendly, will shed a greater part of your audience.

Some basic on-page and technical SEO practices boost your piece to make it rank at the top of the SERPs.

Does it actually work?

In theory, there is so much information on evergreen content. However, is there a way to prove that this type of blog actually works? To study it further, we have found two blogs that might have properties that are trending and evergreen. Let us thoroughly check where they stand and if evergreen content actually works – on the quantitative end.

The first blog is How to Accomplish Your New Year’s Resolutions from WikiHow. This topic is perhaps one of the most recurring trends that we see every year. But what do AHREFs say?

 

This topic is a recurring one every year. This is why there are currently 280 backlinks with a history of 1.8k backlinks. An organic 145 keywords with three of them as the top three are currently. Showing. However, the traffic stands at only 9 right now. Perhaps the best-referring domain this blog has gotten is from Latin Times, which has a traffic of 77.9k. On the top is FluentU which is an English-educating website with 2.6M traffic.

As far as the performance of this blog is concerned. You can see the chart below.

 

This blog was originally posted on December 27^th, 2021. The performance for organic traffic clearly shows the rise and extreme fall seasonally.

These graphs prove to us that our speculation that this blog is not evergreen is correct.

However, before counting all our chickens, let us look at what an evergreen blog supposedly shows.

We picked another blog from WikiHow. This time, the blog was How to Play UNO. In our understanding, the blog is very rich in information that does not die seasonally. To prove our hypothesis, we once again went to AHREFs.

The backlink profile shows that this blog currently has 283 backlinks. However, there are 3.8k all-time backlinks. Moreover, there are 1.6k organic keywords and out of them, 43 are ranked in the top 3 of the SERPs. Remember the current traffic of nine in the former blog? Well, this one has an organic traffic of 11.4k currently.

What about the overall performance?

 

 

While there are plenty of ups and downs for this blog, you can see that it never went out of trend. Somebody was always interested in learning how to play UNO and that got this blog traffic all the time. While this blog was updated in December 2022, it was first published in 2007. With the traffic, we can see that even 16 years later, this blog stays relevant and drives a bunch of traffic.

Notice that another feature of this blog being evergreen is that 15 years later, the blog could be updated and still make sense and become one of the most relevant ones out there.

So yes, we can classify this blog as an evergreen piece that keeps on giving traffic and benefits to the website.

Let’s create evergreen content

So now that you know that evergreen content exists and it is a thing, it is time to learn to create it. Don’t worry; we won’t be telling you every word that you should be putting out to make evergreen content. You will, however, see a lot of tips to create a piece to make it evergreen.

Begin by finding your topic

Before you begin, you need to have a topic in mind. Do not ever take topics for granted and go after the technicalities. At this stage, stay away from trendy topics that have a short life.

So, how do you find a relevant topic? Check these techniques out.

1. Keywords are the key

For content pieces to have relevance and – for lack of a better word – popularity all the time, there needs to be an epic SEO research team that finds keywords.

Now, I’m sure everyone knows all about keywords. But let’s clear the air a little here. First of all, the keywords should be super relatable. Using unreliable keywords is not an option! Lowers the quality of content greatly!

The next question should be the kind of keyword. Well, the criteria for selecting keywords is to ensure that it has at least – if not more – 1000 unique searches every month.

Take, for instance, ‘10 Easy Dinner Recipes’ – Yes, it is always relevant because no one has the answer to ‘what to cook’, right?

Google Trends shows the fluctuating reach of the keyword. Notice how it goes through ups and downs, but it isn’t dead yet!

 

Or take this Dog walking guide, As long as there are dogs, this stays important.

Did you notice something about both of these topics? Let me break it down

Each of them has so much information that they seem to be new pieces whenever anybody attempts to write on them

Both of these topics or let’s call them queries, have answers that can change every day! Be it because of new ideas or even the world evolving

2. Find positive trends

Remember our best friend – Ahrefs? Under keyword explorer, check out if the targeted keyword has risen in popularity over the years.

For better authenticity, check out Google Trends, too!

3. SEO

Why write content when nobody can see it and find it? Does it even matter if your content has all the qualities for being evergreen, but nobody can see it? Of course, building backlinks is essential. However, there are a few things you can do to make your content a little more articulate for SEO.

1. The first and most important thing to do is to ensure that your keywords are used in the title and H2 subheadings
2. The readability of your page should be super easy. Lower than grade 5 is the aim. One way to add more readability is to write short sentences and paragraphs.
3. Do not forget to add outbound and inbound links to your content
4. Cite data where you think you can add to the authenticity
5. And most importantly, avoid information that the reader does not need

 

4. Update

Remember when we talked about evergreen content being anything but time-sensitive? This is the tricky part! Imagine having a blog on how many people use the internet. In 2019, it was 56.7% of the world. In 2022, it rose to 63.1% of the population.

Data facts, numbers, stats, and information that update universally need to be updated in your evergreen content piece, too. This helps the content to have authenticity any time it is read. One way to achieve this is to add a section of an update!

5. Share away

Since evergreen content is content that is relevant all the time, sharing it on your social media every once in a while can help keep it relevant all the time. This helps your piece spark interest all the time.

You have done everything to perfection! Now it is time to tell you what you will get out of evergreen content. Check out just a few benefits of many to know them.

Benefits of evergreen content

The answer to the benefits of evergreen content lies in the features of evergreen content. Content that has characteristics that are mostly positive will for sure have a huge chunk of benefits!

So, if you are still not convinced, let us talk about some of the benefits that you will surely enjoy when you produce this type of content.

1. Always relevant

Evergreen content, because it is relevant all the time, is like your mother! It will never stop benefiting you! It will always be there for you and give you everything that comes with unconditional love!

2. Quicker SEO

Remember the timelessness that comes with evergreen content? The audience will always search for it, always come back to it, and always make use of it. Better yet, a newer audience will always come to you and be your retaining audience.

3. Brings more people in

Evergreen content can work as bait as well! Once people are on your website for your evergreen content, they are more likely to trust your authenticity and eventually toggle through the entire website. This also helps you bring more leads for your product or services.

4. You can be laxer!

When you have evergreen content, do not pressurize each piece of your content to work magically and rank on the top! Some quality and important pieces will always work out in your favor!

5. Easy backlinks

Backlinks are one of the most important things for SEO! And with evergreen content, gaining high-quality, long-lasting, and relevant backlinks is a piece of cake – almost! It is easier than trendy content, though!

Let us look at the How to Play UNO article and its backlinks. We have already shown you that it has an all-time backlink profile of over 3000. But now we look at the quality of the backlinks. It has backlinks from websites such as steemit.com, fixya.com, and even games.thefuntimesguide.com/

What’s more, is that the best domain traffic it gets is over 44 million.

In contrast, How to Accomplish Your New Year’s Resolutions does have some special backlinks. Fluentu.com, theodysseyonline.com, and latintimes.com. However, the highest traffic is only 2 million and the others, they are not even in the millions. Just a few thousand.

So, while you may get some great backlinks, they will never benefit you as much as they will if you create an everlasting piece.

Types of Evergreen Content

Now you know everything about evergreen content, including ideas on how to create it! To get you started. Here are the top four kinds of evergreen content

1. Step-by-step guides
2. Case studies
3. Scientific investigations 
4. How-tos

 

Wrap up!

Now you know what is green about evergreen! Remember, foundationally, evergreen content is picking the right topic with the right information so that it can last a lifetime!

Check out our YouTube Video for more insights on evergreen content.