How to Create Evergreen Content (And Keep It That Way)

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How to Create Evergreen Content (And Keep It That Way)
March 4, 2021
Here’s a quick content marketing secret: if you want to rank well and earn backlinks, then you should include evergreen content in your content marketing strategy . Crafting this type of content isn’t easy for enterprise teams. It should be high-quality, well-optimized, and of course, remain evergreen.
In this post, we’ll discuss what it is, why it’s essential, how to create it, and finally, how to make sure its evergreen-ness (totally not a word) never fades.
What Is Evergreen Content?
First, the basics—what is evergreen content? Simply put, it describes content that doesn’t go out of date. The topics will always be relevant to your target audience, no matter the time of year or next big trend in your industry. It takes its name from the evergreen plant, one that keeps its bright green leaves all year. For a quick explainer, watch the video below.
What Make the Best Evergreen Topics?
Your evergreen topics are going to be specific to your business offerings, target verticals and ideal buyers. They are different from content assets/articles that are seasonal or focus on particular events. Evergreen formats tend to be things like:
How-to guides
Brand books
Industry terms glossary
These are some general examples. Now if we look at a specific industry, say the healthcare technology space, the topics get much more specific to that vertical.
Evergreen topics:
Interoperability challenges: This topic will always be top of mind in health IT.
HIPAA compliance: While HIPAA may change, the need to comply does not.
Improving patient care: Practitioners that use healthcare software will continue to have this concern.
Non-evergreen topics:
Industry-event blog posts for shows like HIMSS (the largest healthcare technology event).
Reports on specific cybersecurity incidents: While cybersecurity is a constant concern, writing about a single event doesn’t fall into the timeless category.
Trend pieces because those change rapidly.
Why Is Evergreen Content Important?
Evergreen content should play a priority role in your content strategy and ongoing content planning. They offer you an opportunity for consistent traffic and relevance. When you develop time-based content, you’ll likely see a spike in traffic, but it’s short-lived. That content is very impactful in the moment, and you should cover it because your audience cares about it. It’s just not going to be a meaningful contributor to website traffic long term.
You can easily distinguish the performance of different kinds of posts with content analytics . For non-evergreen content, you may see a rush in the 30 to 60 days after publication. Then it begins to flatline.
Evergreen content is a steady stream. The keywords you use in these pieces are always in queries. What this type of content does is it provides you with constant returns. Content marketing is a long game for any brand. It can continue to deliver traffic and conversions years after publication.
However, just because the topic was evergreen at one point, it doesn’t mean it will stay that way. You’ll likely need to revisit these posts and update them. You should certainly include that in your content calendar .
How to Write Evergreen Content
Next, we’ll go into the steps of developing evergreen content and how to ensure it stays this way.
Define Your Topics
Generating evergreen topic ideas is not unlike other brainstorming sessions. The difference is you want to stay within the parameters of what will always be important to your audience. The tactics you’ll want to follow for topic ideation are:
Identify keywords that have significant volume and low competition.
Examine the top-ranking pages for possible keywords to ensure they are still receiving consistent traffic.
Look for positive trends on the keyword through a keyword tool or Google Trends .
Develop ideas based on what you learn and the topic’s importance to your audience.
Create the Content
When crafting evergreen content, you should focus on best practices. This is not a short post, nor does it contain a lot of fluff. It’s usually long-form with deep insights, solutions, and credibility. It follows many of the principles of 10X content.
10X content is 10 times better than what is currently ranking on the first page of Google for a keyword. For more on 10X content, check out the video below.
In a nutshell, it offers knowledge, solutions, and critical takeaways. It’s also up to date and includes research, visuals, and examples. The pillars of 10X are quality, uniqueness, and authority. It can’t be like everything else on the topic. You have to elevate it to a class of its own.
Take a Wider Angle
While some topics are evergreen, not all angles are. For example, earlier, we discussed how HIPAA compliance is always a concern for healthcare technology. However, certain angles are not, such as posts about specific compliance breaches or incidents. While you could use these stories as examples of non-compliance, a piece devoted to a one-time incident would not be evergreen.
Avoid Phrases with Short Lifespans
You will immediately date your content by saying, “last year” or “in 2015.” It does make sense to use those words when writing blogs about trends and year-in-review posts, but you should avoid them in evergreen content.
Maintaining Evergreen Content
As noted, evergreen content doesn’t stay that way without a bit of care (maintenance) now and then. Here are some key indicators that your content needs a refresh.
Ranking drops: If you see that your evergreen posts are sliding down in ranking, it indicates that the topic may be losing relevancy. It could also mean that a competitor published a “better” piece of content.
Refreshing specifics: Most likely, you’ll need to update content regularly with new statistics, processes, screenshots, or other variables.
Broken links: Broken links or broken images in your evergreen content can obviously cause adverse results. Use a broken link tool to crawl your content and then replace any that are no longer active.
Republish and distribute: Once you make updates, republish your post and redistribute it on social media. Doing so can cause a bump in traffic and secure higher rankings.
Managing Evergreen Content
One of the best tools you can use to ideate, create, and maintain all your content, including evergreen, is a content marketing platform . It has the features and tools to streamline production for large content teams. See how ours works today for free .
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