Evergreen Content For SEO: What is it and why do you need it?

There is a great deal of emphasis placed on creating new content to help boost your SEO - and rightly so. Fresh content will often gain an edge in Google rankings.

However, one way to boost the SEO on your site is to include so-called evergreen content, which also proves very valuable when improving your websites visibility.

Much like the tree that has leaves all year round, evergreen content has sustained value in the sense that its content should always remain relevant.

It tends to relate to core topics which are associated with your industry which receive healthy levels of search volume every month. It answers common questions on ideas people are consistently curious about.

These are distinct from topics that could go quickly out of date, including news updates and current trends content.

The Importance of Evergreen Content

• It provides lasting traffic: The more people engage with your content, the more valuable it is. Unlike your everyday blog post where there will be an immediate increase in traffic that will gradually fall off, evergreen traffic will continue long after a piece of content is published.
• Establishing authority: Effective keyword research can be a great way to optimise your evergreen content pages for SEO, in the hope of driving more traffic towards the website.  In doing so, this will help improve your overall domain authority. Increasing your domain authority helps establish a trust amongst your audience as they will begin to acknowledge you as industry experts.
• Educating new & potential customers: It’s important to create content that helps readers understand the basics within your industry as well as addressing any FAQ’s.
• Attracts Backlinks: If you are able to create informative & useful content, you improve the likelihood that other websites will link to it.
• Creating a hierarchy within your website: Your evergreen pages will act as the pillars of your website. You can then build content around these pages to create a clear site structure.

How To Create Evergreen Content

• Research popular topics: Consider the type of themes your audience will be interested in reading about. Once you have established your evergreen topics, you will then be able to build your knowledge around these areas.
• Perform Keyword Research: Once you have established a topic that you wish to cover, you should then undertake some keyword research to see the words and phrases that will help drive the most traffic to your website. Answer the Public can be a useful tool in help building up an idea of the type of questions that are being asked in relation to a particular topic. SEMRush and Ahrefs also have great keyword research tools.
• Make your content user friendly: You don’t want to overwhelm readers when they first click on your site, so it’s important to create content that is easy to read & digest. Use short, succinct sentences & paragraphs as well as plenty of white space to break up content. Structure your content correctly, using heading tags effectively as well as text formatting to identify key elements within the content. Including some personality is also important. You shouldn’t be afraid to stray from perfect diction, in order to hone in on a particular point. This can be used effectively to help make certain elements of your content more memorable. However use this sparingly, in order to keep your content professional. 
• Optimise For Search Engines: Not only is it important to engage your readers, you need to make your content search engine friendly. This can be done by effectively implementing keywords throughout your content & meta data. As well as establishing relevant inbound & outbound links.
• Update content to keep it relevant: The world is ever evolving. Although evergreen content is less likely to go out of date than your everyday blog post, it still needs reviewed in order to update relevant sections. In doing so, you are ensuring your content has sustained value.

Highlighting Your Evergreen Content

• Make it prominent on your website: You want this content to be easily accessible within your website, whether that be through the navigational menu or a side bar within your site.
• On-site linking: As touched on before, linking to your content within other pages of your site, helps guide users to these pages.
• Attracting interest Off-site: Creating highly engaging content will encourage other websites to link back to your website. It may be worth reaching out to websites associated with your own in order to let them know about your content & potentially establish a relationship in order to begin guest posting on each other’s site.
• Share on Social Media: The various social media platforms are a great way to gain a larger audience through referrals, and with evergreen content in particular this content can be shared for months & years to come.
• Set up PPC Campaigns: Set up paid search campaigns in order to audiences interested in your content as well as your business as a whole & what it offers.

By following the above points, you will be able to create some great evergreen content. However should you want any additional help with your businesses digital strategy, we have experts that will be able to help you out with your Organic, Search & Display traffic. So don’t hesitate to get in touch!