A combination of timely and evergreen content offers you great opportunities to use content to your maximum advantage. Do you use evergreen content as part of your content marketing strategy?
Evergreen content is great for driving targeted traffic to your website, and it will generate leads as well as help you convert prospects to customers.
Plus, great content helps you establish your business as an authority in your field of expertise, which helps build trust with potential customers as well as your industry in general.
This type of content can bring you an ongoing stream of steady traffic as well as serve your audience over an extended period of time. Spending time creating comprehensive, useful, evergreen content can pay off for years to come.
What is evergreen content?
Evergreen content is content that stays fresh and useful, even if it’s months or years after publishing. Similar to a forest of evergreen trees, the content keeps growing and gets stronger over time. Content is considered “evergreen” if maintains relevance, does not become dated (despite date of publication), and is not regarded as outdated information.
How to use evergreen content to your advantage
Evergreen content can be used in many ways on your website as search engine spider food as well as in other places that point back to your site.
Great evergreen content can be used in many ways, such as:
- Blog posts for your website
- Guest blogging or article-writing for your industry
- CRO-friendly website content
- Special reports for sales funnel material
- Email newsletter material to add value in your email marketing efforts
- Web series material (as a lead magnet)
- How-to videos for YouTube
- Social media fodder
- Link material that adds value to other content
…as well as a number of other ways not listed above.
Using evergreen content for sales funnels
Evergreen content can be a great lead generation and sales conversion tool. Writing basic content for your target audience can attract potential leads and include a call-to-action (CTA) that inserts that lead into a sales funnel where they exit as a customer.
Further content developed for intermediate or advanced information, or for existing customers, can help you continually provide value to customers after they buy.
For example, creating a web series or email course could include a set of content articles that teach potential customers about your industry or product while walking them through a sales process. Perhaps you want to make a how-to guide about something. This can provide additional value, serving as evergreen online content as well as helping with after-sales support for customers.
What kind of evergreen content should you create?
There are types of content that can help you no matter what your niche is, and there are specific things that could be a goldmine of lead generation and authority building opportunities as well. Having evergreen content shows that you and your site is an “authority” in your industry, making you the expert or go-to resource.
If you write great evergreen content displaying your knowledge, not only will your customers and target customers benefit, but you could also have that content featured on sites and social media accounts of industry publications and experts. Additionally, you might be able to get valuable backlinks to your content, further boosting the profile and visibility of your company.
Think about your target customers and what sort of information they might be seeking. Whether it’s problem-solving tips, how-to guides, or general knowledge on specific topics, like artificial intelligence, website building, or predictive analytics, you want to be the site to which search engines guide interested parties.
In short, you want your content to be seen as valuable.
You want to be considered an authority on your subject matter. You can optimize evergreen content to be found when target customers go looking. You can optimize this content to include a CTA so that it’s logical for the reader to visit your website, follow your social media page, sign up for your newsletter, call you for a consultation, and more.
Data mining from your site traffic reports
A great place to find potential ideas for new material, beyond industry keyword searches, competitive analysis, and basic how-to guides, is to take time to regularly hunt through your website analytics. Your traffic reports are an information goldmine.
For example, you might already have a post that has been steadily growing in website sessions month over month:
Or maybe one of your blog posts just needs some extra love and attention to get to the next level:
It’s important to keep watching your analytics after you start to publish new content and as you update existing content.
If your analytics show a high traffic count, but also a high bounce rate, that’s a sign that the content you served doesn’t quite deliver. Consider enhancing it and use that information to help you create more content to bring higher volumes of traffic to your site. Measuring what kind of results show up based on specific types and styles of content can help you continually refine your content strategy.
Evergreen content format types
Evergreen content can come in many forms. The most popular types include:
1. Blog posts
Add evergreen content to a blog on your business website to provide search engines with material that helps tell them what your website is about. This offers a great way to share keyword-rich information in the background of your website. Some companies make the blog more prominent. It’s helpful to measure the success of your business blogging efforts to determine how much of a role it will have in helping you use content to drive results.
2. Web pages
Help pages, FAQ pages, resource libraries, and product or service category pages can serve as evergreen content that assists you with sales or lead generation.
3. Social media posts
Bite-sized tidbits with links to ‘read more’ can drive traffic to evergreen articles as well as drive traffic and prospects to your sales funnel.
4. Video
How-to and help videos can link to more in-depth articles or sales landing pages.
5. Interviews
Interviews offer great content that provides information about your industry and your company history, which can help you establish status as a trusted authority.
6. 101s and purchase guides
A purchase guide for your products and services can help you assist prospective customers who are weighing options and comparison shopping. You’ll get more mileage out of something like this if you don’t push self-promotion too hard.
7. Glossaries
A glossary of terms related to your industry can include background and history as well as the five Ws for those investigating your product or service. Glossaries can provide valuable information to potential customers, helping them to view your company as an expert.
8. Guides and special reports
Beginner’s guides as well as more advanced evergreen content can be very helpful as shareable and ready-to-read content, or can be used as a lead magnet with an “opt-in” to a newsletter or other sales funnel.
9. Case studies
Publishing comprehensive case studies are evergreen content that can show your prospective customers how your product, service, or solution can work for them based on how it worked for others.
10. Listicles
List-like articles such as top ten lists, checklists, how-to guides, and similar tools and resources with fundamental information related to your industry can continually drive traffic to your website, blog, or social media accounts.
11. Reviews
Sharing product reviews and testimonials from customers on your website can help build trust with potential customers as well as provide great SEO results.
Developing a great content strategy
Beyond creation, you need a strategy. The best way to develop a great content strategy is to test out different ways of using content to see what nets the best results. Use keyword research and SEO best practices for content to help you get good SEO value.
Here are some ways to make sure your content is optimized for search results:
- Use targeted search keywords in titles and headings
- Strategically link to non-competitor authority pages
- Link to your evergreen content from other web properties (press releases, blog posts, newsletters, social media pages, etc.) so that it gets more of an opportunity to get seen
- Add images for visual appeal; tag with relevant SEO terms for additional SEO value
- Make content shareable. Add a social media plug-in to your blog so that those who find the content valuable can post it online
- Create content with strong headlines and intros to grab readers’ attention
- Make your content comprehensive and valuable
- Link to a variety of your evergreen content on social media
- When you write new content, link to other evergreen content within it
- Create courses or newsletter material with your content. Recycle it as much as you can
- Write round-up posts for your blog as an opportunity to link to existing content
| TIP: Learn about e-commerce SEO and how to gain organic traffic to your online store or business! |
Is your evergreen content truly evergreen?
Periodically look at it to ensure nothing has changed, no links to any sources are broken, and to check content analytics. Is it delivering good search engine results? How are your conversion rates? Is your CTA strong?
Is your content easy to read? Instead of one long block of text, consider catchy subheadings (a great opportunity to boost the SEO keywords in the content), lists, visual aids, and other things to amplify your content without overwhelming your readers.
Additionally, consider the kinds of devices on which your readers access your content. Will the content be read on a mobile device? If it’s a comprehensive article, layout might be different than an email newsletter, which could cause difficulties if web and mobile formatting differences aren’t taken into consideration.
Fresh content matters
Timely content is also important. It can help you capitalize on current events and news. It may have a shorter shelf life than evergreen content, but it will bring you more immediate traffic results, which help boost the authority of your site as well.
Plus, Google and other search engines look at the “freshness” of content content in order to determine how to rank it. You don’t want your website penalized because you created a bunch of evergreen content in 2015 and haven’t updated it since.
Balancing your content strategy with inbound and on-page content marketing and using a combination of breaking news, evergreen content, and overall valuable content marketing will help you in your efforts to attract attention from search engines and from prospective customers.
And while some of your content might be evergreen, there probably isn’t one evergreen strategy. SEO and digital marketing in general need to be fluid. Continually look at your results to help you find the best options and opportunities to make the most of content!
Ready to learn more? Discover the best B2B content marketing strategies for 2019.