Because of the constant forward momentum of the internet and of society in general, most of us understand that our web pages won’t be forever relevant. However, there are exceptions to this, and these web pages are known as being ‘evergreen’.
Rather than have your webpages only be effective in driving traffic for a short amount of time, it’s far better to maintain evergreen pages that continue to bring in search traffic months and years after they’ve been published.
The best kinds of content for evergreen:
How-to articles
How-to articles and guides are always popular for the simple reason that they provide a practical benefit to readers. Other than shopping, one of the main reasons people visit the internet is to get their hands on free information on how to do things so this kind of content is always going to be highly relevant.
Obviously, you should create guides that are relevant to your business and your products/services. For example, if you run an online pet food store then a guide on “how to house train a dog” could be very effective.
If your business site ends up having the quintessential guide for something then you’ll enjoy a huge boost in regular traffic. It will also increase the authority of your brand in the eyes of your audience.
Industry report
Depending on the industry you are in, there may be ripe opportunity for you to prepare a comprehensive report on an element of said industry. While reports are usually related to specific timeframes, they can still be relevant outside of them because people (like students) will often use them as research.
Explanations, definitions and examples
Some of the most effective evergreen content ever can be seen in the form of definitions for industry jargon and simple explanations of industry processes. They are even more effective now that Google has implemented featured snippets which take the most relevant answer and display it within the search result in a special GUI.
Being selected by Google for a featured snippet is a huge boon to your SEO efforts and is an example of the effectiveness of evergreen content as part of your content marketing strategy. A page that’s successful in this will usually begin with a succinct definition for the benefit of Google’s crawler but will also have a depth of following information backing it up.
How to create evergreen content
Above all else, evergreen content needs to be both highly relevant and of a high quality. While the subject matter and the quality of the material are the two main driving factors, there are some other steps you can take to help optimise your pages to be ‘evergreen friendly’.
Update the content routinely
Evergreen content isn’t about creating a single perfect piece that will remain relevant forever, as you can easily continually update a page to ensure its relevance into the future. As part of its indexing algorithm, Google prefers pages that are updated frequently because they appear to be fresh and engaging for users.
If you have a piece of content that needs a correction or update to remain relevant, don’t hesitate to make the change.
Show the date the webpage was published
There are few examples of situations where it would be preferable to hide the date of publishing. A user reading the content is naturally going to want to know whether or not it’s still relevant at the time they are reading it and the date is the first place they’ll look.
This is important as if the user is unsure if the content is still relevant they may leave the page and go elsewhere.
Let readers know if a page is outdated
Sometimes a piece of content can’t be edited to be relevant again and will forever be outdated. In this instance, be sure to disclaim this at the top of the page with a special note and include a link to a more current alternative.
By keeping the above information in mind, you can easily create and maintain evergreen content on your website.
As our marketing manager, James takes on the responsibility of overseeing the creation of original, persuasive and high quality content that is an integral part of how we achieve success for our clients. Through his experience working in the SEO field, James has developed a robust understanding of core digital marketing principles and has a particular interest in the growing importance of sincere and engaging content in world where issues like ‘fake news’ have become a major talking point.