Evergreen content is a marketing and SEO marketing strategy, focusing on creating content to stand the test of time. Needless to say, it’s something many content creators and SEO enthusiasts are constantly talking about. Evergreen trees, such as pine or spruce, maintain their needles through all seasons. Put another way, they stay fresh year-round. This is the same premise for evergreen content. At its core, this is classic content that will remain
relevant and fresh in one year, three years, and in some cases, beyond. Evergreen content becomes particularly important while building content mass on your site. If a company is investing in developing content for SEO purposes, they shouldn’t waste time removing content and replacing it with something modern. For this reason, Evergreen content is at the heart of every serious, SEO content marketing strategy.
Alternately, topical or seasonal content is a strategy focusing on the latest news, current events, or trends. These pieces of content are also immensely powerful, typically driving more traffic, in the short term. Unfortunately, seasonal content fizzles out much faster as it loses relevance. This type of content showcases that you are on top of changes in the market, building trust that your company isn’t antiquated. You are familiar and current with the changing markets.
It is important to have a mixture of both forms of content, ensuring you are on the upside of traffic spikes from topical content, as well as, the long-term, exponential effects of evergreen content. A good target is about 80% evergreen and 20% topical content generated.
Here, we will discuss a few considerations for generating Evergreen content:
What types of content?
Many different forms of content will work as evergreen, ultimately dependent on your company and how it prefers to present itself.
Here are a few we feel work for almost any industry or company in a professional setting:
Educational /instructional
Top # lists
Case studies
White papers
Define the industry terms
Industrial concepts
Research reports
Build content around keywords
One of the many benefits of evergreen content creation is extensively durable SEO. Content that doesn’t date itself or lose relevance quickly, is a long-term traffic builder. For this reason, it’s important to consider which keywords to build your content around. Keywords define the types of traffic you want coming to your site. Once you pick your topic, ensure your target keyword is in the title, the URL, the headers, the metatags, and the ALT text. Stay fairly focused on one or two key words per document and be conscious about how you utilize them. Don't spam them throughout the document, weave them in naturally. Search engines penalize you for spamming keywords. Instead, focus on being informative, relevant, and tasteful.
Avoid short life span topics
This gets back to the divide between topical and evergreen content. Avoid referencing current events, situational, or controversial topics. These have their place, but not in evergreen content. Instead focus on the burning questions that a typical person in the industry faces every day, "Why does this happen?" For instance, a topic could be an answer to, "Why does my CNC keep crashing?" Provide the steps a user could take to a) check for common problems or B) prevent the problem from continuing. The goal is to build up useful resources that can be used by a variety of people in your industry. Always be the resource.
Language is important
Using language that dates a piece, is one of the fastest ways to end the lifespan of that piece. Referencing dates or times can severely impact the effectiveness of your content. Using certain phrases can have these effects too. Avoid writing words or phrases, such as: yesterday, today, earlier this month, last year, next year, etc. Focus on staying timeless.
(This strategy is reversed when writing topical content, as it needs to be seen as current.)
Periodically update your content
You can dramatically extend the lifespan of your content with a little content maintenance. Once or twice a year, review your content. Look for broken links, outdated terminology or processes discussed, add depth, and update photos. Overall, this helps search engine rankings, allowing pieces of content to grow over time. As you lengthen the content, you gain additional read time from a customer, as well as, an SEO boost, relevant (natural) keyword density. Minor tweaks go a long way when building positive SEO traffic.
When considering where to invest time or money into your marketing strategy, producing evergreen content is one of the best ROI-intensive marketing strategies available. It provides companies with many valuable resources, such as, SEO, sharable content, content mass, keyword strengthening, and most importantly, sustainable web traffic. Evergreen content is a long game, however, if published and distributed frequently, you will see compounding positive effects.
If you need evergreen content for your site, or questions about content focused marketing, contact Nesbit Marketing: www.nesbitmarketing.com/contact
Or call us at 231-360-0179
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