Ever wonder why certain blogs get continuous traffic from different sources even after months and years of publishing?
These blogs are focused on creating evergreen content.
WHAT IS EVERGREEN CONTENT
Evergreen content is content that never gets out of date and never relies on current trends.
Its effect is always relevant to its readers, making it more attractive for publishers to reference in their own content pieces of work.
WHY IS EVERGREEN CONTENT IMPORTANT?
There are many benefits pushing out evergreen content on a massive scale can provide for your brand, such as:
A. Scalable link acquisition
Content on a trending subject can receive massive spike in link performance, especially if it’s timely and emotionally-appealing.
Meanwhile, evergreen content allows a continuous flow of links directly pointing to your content. It’s not a one-time off burst of links, but you can expect if monthly acquisition of editorial links to your web asset.
B. Hitting conversion goals
You may only consider creating content assets for links, but it will drive subscribers, social followers, and brand advocates down the road. As long as the content draws traffic, the growth in numbers can be met.
C. Social sharing
More than ever, continuous social sharing can help strengthen the brand in its core. The more visible the content is to its audiences, the longer it stays in their mind – creating a strong brand in the market.
D. Doors of networks, partnerships, and brand coverage
The aftermath of producing evergreen content is that it opens opportunities for partnership for content, and product engagement. It stems from the idea that your content assets have provided value.
Evergreen content serves as entry points to growth of networks — even media coverage from A-list content creators.
E. Increase in organic visibility
Given the comprehensiveness and high utility of evergreen content which normally covers every topic of a subject, the online asset gets its deserved visibility on search.
When evergreen content ranks for its target keywords, it creates another opportunity for it to be discovered, besides direct, social and referral traffic.
F. Supports other important pages
Evergreen pages with constant traffic can support other important pages through internal linking. By pointing to relevant pages that need some boosting in visibility, evergreen content can be a reinforcing system for support pages.
EVERGREEN CONTENT CREATION PROCESS
ON DISCOVERING EVERGREEN TOPICS
Find evergreen topics that get consistent traffic and have the potential to earn links over time.
You can start this content ideation process by entering a few topics for your blog in Ahrefs Keyword Explorer.
The tool is handy in giving you the parent topics of keyphrases — which is suggested by the tool (see an example below).
Parent topics are general topics that cover relevant subtopics underneath it. By pursuing parent topics for your evergreen content, you can target interconnected topics all under one big content piece.
Identify parent and sub-topics that are constantly being searched and that appeal to your market by looking at its search traffic.
Look down further. See the top ranking pages and their estimated traffic. This would help you understand if it’s worthwhile to rank for that keyphrase.
You can also check the trend graphs of keywords to see its popularity over time. Here is an example of the trend graph for the keyphrase, “how to stop snoring”.
The trend graph will show how popular a keyword is for a certain period of time.
FURTHER READING
ON ASSESSING LINKABILITY OF TOPICS
Besides just looking at search traffic and trend graph of a topic, you want to make sure that the topic also has linking potential.
The question you need to ask is, “Is this topic linkable?”.
The way to answer that is to look at the top ranking pages for that keyword or keyphrase. See if these pages have at least 10 or 20 referring domains pointing to them. This kind of assessment gives you an idea if the topic of your choice has high linking potential.
Moz Toolbar is a nifty tool to quickly check how many referring domains are linking to each of the page on the search results.
Why do you have to check the linkability of the evergreen topic?
The simple answer is that the linkability of topic correlates with how frequent the topic is being cited by other publishers.
The frequency now gives its room for more linking opportunities month after month and year after year.
ON CREATING EVERGREEN CONTENT
The mindset of publishing evergreen content differs from others creators’ publishing 500-word blog post.
The piece should stay relevant weeks, months, and years after publishing (which will require maintaining it from time to time – that’s for a later topic).
But the point here is that before you create an evergreen content, decide that you’ll put hours of work into it in order to make it valuable and comprehensive to its audience.
There are many characteristics a solid content piece (or 10x content as marketers call it) should have, a few that are a must include the following:
Expert-driven
Do you have an expertise on the topic?
If it’s something you can’t write on your own, you may outsource it to someone expert in the field. Niche experts tend to charge higher than generic writers, but they craft content with the use of technical terms (jargons), authority, and credibility on the subject matter.
Uniqueness
Every blog is pushing out their versions of content for the topic, so what separates yours from their works?
Uniqueness doesn’t just refer to variations of words, but the ability to present ideas in different formats.
Implement other content formats in your content to make it the most comprehensive piece on the topic. A useful advice for this method is to present content in videos, data visualizations, rich media or slide presentations.
The purpose is not to make the page longer than the usual, but for better presentation purposes, and to attract more visibility from people who are likely to share it on other web places.
Inclusion of Thematic Keywords
Whether you target parent topic or a sub-topic for your evergreen content, you want to make sure that the page will be found by people who specifically searching for it.
The key to make it work is to optimize content for other thematically relevant keywords — several possible search terms people used when researching for information.
You can use Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer to discover these keywords that are connected to your topic. The tool can also generate questions keywords that will be valuable to add to your content — of which you can answer to make the content reach more audience.
Keep these characteristics in mind when creating an evergreen content: expertise, uniqueness and inclusion of thematic keywords.
FURTHER READING
ON PROMOTING EVERGREEN CONTENT
Whatever your goal is for your blog’s evergreen content, your page reach will highly depend on the level of promotional efforts that you put in.
Start by looking for ways on how to do content-based link building that can drive referral traffic to your evergreen page.
Find any pages linking to similar content assets. Utilize the value proposition of your evergreen content in your email pitches. Answer the question, “why do your link prospects have to bother with your content asset?”
Build more links through your site’s distributed content (contextually linking to them through your guest blogs). This will enable your evergreen page to get higher search rankings.
You can also maximize your brand’s social media channels to push further the audience reach of your content piece. Make your social sharing buttons visible to your visitors — placing it on the noticeable parts of your page.
ON MAINTAINING EVERGREEN CONTENT
It is important to update your content piece to satisfy new visitors as soon as they land on the page. This will also increase the chances that it’ll be shared to other target audiences — bringing in more people who will likely link to it as references for their content works.
What are the things you need to update in your content?
References and citations
You may have likely included information and even links to articles and new stories the first time you publish your content. These information and sources may no longer be relevant and useful at the time you decide to update.
It’s important to have a list of citations/references whenever you create content so you can easily go back to websites and blogs where you found them, and see if they have updated information on the topic.
For example, statistics normally get updated every year, and it’s easy to find their latest up-to-date version of the data if you have the website URL at hand.
Internal linking
Improve your content’s visibility factor by internally linking to other relevant pages on the subject, particularly the ones you’ve recently published on your blog — relevant to your evergreen content.
Use descriptive anchor texts in your internal links to drive visitors from other pages to your evergreen content.
Years and dates
Update years, months or any dates you include in your post’s titles and in the body of your content.
Use current year to increase the relevance of your post — leading to higher rankings and to higher search visibility for the page’s targeted keywords.
FINAL THOUGHTS
If you are looking for ways to scale your content marketing, invest in producing evergreen content assets. With the right execution process — from researching topics to promoting and maintaining the content piece, you can gain a constant flow of traffic and potential sales to your website.
Let me know in the comments how you develop and promote your evergreen content.