What is Evergreen Content, and how can it Benefit your Website?

By Sarah McInerney
| July 17th 2015

Sarah McInerney

Head of Content

Sarah has almost three decades of experience in crafting compelling, engaging content specifically designed to boost sales and enhance brand loyalty. She’s also an expert in developing unique tone of voice that helps brands connect with their audiences. Her marketing and client service background has given Sarah a natural understanding of how to write content that makes readers take action. Whether it’s signing up to a mailing list, making an enquiry or donation or clicking the buy button, Sarah knows precisely how to convert with words. Pen down, Sarah is a proud member of the Essex Wildlife Trust and spends most of her free time enjoying inspiring walks through her local woodland and nature reserves, admiring everything that flaps, flutters and flowers.

The challenge of producing interesting content is one many marketers lament. Many opt to pick up on topical news stories. Theoretically it’s a good move: you’ll draw traffic to your site for a couple of days or so whilst the story is making the headlines. But that’s just about as long as the interest will last: once the fuss has subsided, your post will be relegated to the archives, and certainly won’t be sitting pretty at the top of the search engine listings.

Are you doing all you should to keep your website brimming with fresh and attention-grabbing content?

Content for all Seasons

What you really need to be producing is content that maintains interest: content that consistently draws traffic to your website, whatever the time of year, whatever is happening in the media.

This type of material is known as ‘evergreen content’, and it’s right at the other end of the spectrum in comparison to topical news-style posts. Evergreen content doesn’t run the risk of becoming outdated or factually inaccurate within a short timeframe. What it does do is keep on ranking well in the search engines, and continues to attract visitors to a website ongoing, often for months or even years into the future.

So what constitutes evergreen content? Here are some examples.

How-to Guides & Top Tips

How-to guides are a very popular form of evergreen content.

Instruction based articles tend to prove extremely popular. How many times have you taken to the web to ask a question? Whether it’s how to peel a kiwi fruit, or top tips on producing blog posts that people really want to read (here’s one we wrote earlier), content that helps someone do or achieve something is always going to give you brownie points, and will have that all-important longevity.

Of course if you are writing a how-to guide on something technology or law related, for examples, your post is going to have a limited lifespan. So try to focus on a lifelong skill, or something that isn’t likely to change in the near future.

Jargon-Busters

How many times have you come across terminology that you can’t quite get a handle on? Say for example you’re searching for a new mattress, or a laptop. What does hand-tufted mean? What about biometric access? Whatever it is you are promoting or selling, chances are there will be some sort of industry lingo involved.

So why not set about explaining it? Not only will it help potential customers better understand what you’re selling, it will provide relevant keyword rich content that will stand the test of time.

FAQs

Frequently asked questions make for great content and the FAQs section of a website is often well-visited.

Frequently asked questions make for great content. The FAQs section of a website is often well-visited, and if you base it on genuine, popular questions your customers ask you, you can bet a whole host of others are going to be seeking out the same information. So they’ll appreciate the fact you took the time to compile a Q&A section ‘just for them’.

Frequently asked questions don’t tend to date and so make the perfect evergreen content. They also offer you the opportunity to answer questions ahead of having to field them directly via other channels, so it really could save you time and resources.

How to Make Content Evergreen

So there you have some ideas for content that will serve you well for months and hopefully years to come. But how to clinch those long term search engine rankings?

Keep to the basics: interestingly there is greater demand for posts that stick to the fundamentals than articles that cover the finer detail of a topic.

Be strategic in choosing your topic: think about whether what you’re writing about will still be current in a year or two. If not, it’s unlikely the content will prove evergreen.

Revisit posts: updating content with new developments or comments will keep it relevant if it has started to lose its search positions.

Well Worth the Effort

Granted coming up with ideas for interesting, long-lasting content for your website can prove challenging. But the effort is well worth it. Hopefully you’ve drawn some good starting points from this post. But if you’re really stuck, why not get in touch and ask us about our blog and article writing service?