Tips for Making More Evergreen Content

Evergreen content is content that has the potential to stay relevant indefinitely, in contrast to content that is going to be rendered obsolete in a matter of months or years.

But why is evergreen content considered so valuable in the content marketing and SEO worlds? And what steps can you take to make your content even more evergreen?

The Basics of Evergreen Content

There are many good reasons for wanting to start a blog – and thanks to online guides on the topic, like those from The Blog Starter, it’s easier than ever to do it. With a blog strongly anchored with good content, your website has a much higher likelihood of finding success. Good blog content helps you rank higher in search engines, attracts more traffic to your website, improves brand loyalty, results in higher conversion rates, and even boosts your reputation as a thought leader.

Evergreen content should be the true foundation of your blog. If the content is genuinely evergreen, it should have the potential to remain relevant indefinitely, even after years have passed. It’s equally valuable to people reading it now and people reading it 10 years from now.

This is in stark contrast to temporal content, or content written about current events. As a simple example, a blog post about how to take better care of your CDs isn’t going to be relevant to many people anymore.

Why Is It Valuable

•       Long-term relevance. First, this type of indefinitely relevant content has the potential to continue serving your blog for years, or even decades to come. It’s going to continue adding value to your site on an almost permanent basis, increasing your search rankings, attracting more traffic, and improving the perceptions of people who read it. You can generate one asset and continue milking it for value hypothetically forever.
•       Authority establishment. Evergreen content is also a reliable way to establish yourself as an authority. As you accumulate more evergreen posts, your body of work will grow, people will trust you more, and even new people discovering your brand will have a full archive of legitimately valuable posts to explore.
•       Time and money savings. When you create ephemerally valuable content, you’ll need to keep the revolving door moving, continually generating new blog posts covering the latest topics. But when you produce evergreen content, you’ll need to produce fewer posts and produce them less frequently. Accordingly, you stand to save time and money.

Is Non-Evergreen Content Worth Producing?

None of this is to say that non-evergreen content is never worth producing. Obviously, many news websites and brands have built excellent positions for themselves by covering current events and offering insights. But even if you plan on writing this type of transiently valuable content, you should have a strong foundation in evergreen content.

How to Create More Evergreen Content

•       Study your top competitors. Competitive research is one of your best tools in pursuit of better content marketing results. The better you understand the content your competitors are producing, the better you’ll be able to replicate it – or even improve it. Closely study your top competitors so you can improve upon their best evergreen posts.
•       Choose topics with long-term relevance potential. When searching through potential topics to cover, disproportionately value topics that have the propensity to remain indefinitely relevant. In other words, you can ask yourself – is this topic still going to matter in 5 years? What about 10 years?
•       Be mindful of your references. When making references or citations, practice attentive mindfulness. Joking about a movie that just came out or making reference to a recent event might work well for contemporary audiences, but these types of references aren’t going to hold up over time. If you do make references to current events, make sure you do it in a way that’s understandable to future readers.
•       Cover news events wisely. If you plan on covering news events, do so with caution. Try to frame your content with timelessness in mind; in other words, cover the current event both for contemporary audiences and for future audiences.
•       Pave the way for future updates. Statistics can be valuable, but they’re not inherently valuable – and more importantly, they’re subject to change. Be prepared to revisit your best evergreen content pieces so you can update the data and keep them relevant.
•       Be ready to repurpose and/or transform. You should also be prepared to repurpose and/or transform your evergreen content posts to make them better suited to your rapidly evolving content strategy.

Evergreen content is highly valuable, highly reliable, and the perfect way to construct the foundation of your content marketing strategy. As long as you’re willing to update and reformat this content occasionally, it can continue serving you well for years to come.