Marketing tips

Evergreen Content 101: How to Win Every Time

In the content marketing world, you can kick up your site’s performance by using evergreen content to its full potential.

Before discussing how to use evergreen content as a traffic-driving weapon, let’s explain what it is—and no, it doesn’t have to do with trees.

Evergreen content produced for your site remains relevant for an extended period and reflects your audience’s interests. For instance, content about why a vehicle’s transmission is leaking would be considered evergreen because this topic is often explored in search engines and can be useful to your targeted audience regardless of the time of year. Evergreen content is low maintenance—it doesn’t need to be updated often and is always useful.

Evergreen Content Should Reflect Your Brand

Now that we’ve had a crash course on what evergreen content is, let’s discuss how to utilize it properly to win big.

Here are a few helpful tips for creating and maintaining evergreen content:

Let’s stick with the automotive example. If you have a car dealership site, you want to produce evergreen content that’s relative to cars, such as pieces on vehicle leaks and dashboard lights.

It’s important to not only supply your site visitors with solutions to such concerns but also to offer opportunities to further those solutions. To do this, place calls to action on these pages so readers can schedule a service appointment at your dealership or link to more information on each topic. This will not only create opportunity for leads but also will keep visitors engaged in your site.

Content Should Appear Timeless and Simple

The beauty of evergreen content is that it never ages and rarely needs to be updated—so maybe evergreen content and actual evergreen trees have more in common than we thought. Both stay consistent throughout the year, whether the trees are maintaining their greenery or the content continues to hold its value.

It’s also important to make sure that your evergreen content remains somewhat generic. If not, it will need to be frequently updated and many times can be forgotten, leading to higher bounce rates when users land on the page, discover that the content is outdated and exit the site without venturing any further. The best way to avoid this is to steer clear of mentioning dates, holidays, current specials, or incentives on your site and only focus on the core facts of each topic.

Also, it’s not a good idea to give your readers fancy, dressed-up words to decode. You want to spell out information for them plainly and simply so they can learn.

Be the Expert in Every Topic

Evergreen content comes in many shapes and sizes but will always provide useful information to your readers. Your site should be the ultimate encyclopedia for each evergreen topic. It’s important to appear as an expert about each of these topics so your readers don’t have to look for information elsewhere.

A few helpful sources of evergreen content are:

  • FAQs
  • Tutorials
  • DIY guides
  • How-to guides

Keep Your Evergreen Content in the Open

Many sites fill their blogs with content that eventually gets buried. To make sure that people continue to see your evergreen content, link to older evergreen posts that are relevant to some of your newer posts or create a section on the sidebar of your blog for top posts and store topics there.

For example, let’s say we have a new piece of content on your automotive site about standard oil changes. You’ll want to link to an older piece of evergreen content that you may already have that’s relevant to the new topic, such as “When Do I Need an Oil Change?” This way your evergreen content will be reused no matter where it is.

There you have it. You now have the tools to create evergreen content on your site like a pro. Remember, your evergreen content should reflect your audience’s interest, be simple, and always remain visible and easily accessible.

Tina DeSerafino is an SEO Content Strategist at Stream Companies.

 

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