According to Demand Metric, content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about 3 times as many leads.
In order to properly leverage the power of content marketing, you’ll need to focus on publishing content that retains its value over the long term. At Brandastic we make sure most of our content is evergreen, which has helped us exponentially grow our ranking keywords and organic traffic.
In this article, we will look at what evergreen content is and how you can leverage it to level up your content marketing efforts.
What is Evergreen Content?
The evergreen tree is best known for its role in the holidays, but you might not know that it is also a symbol of perpetual life. The tree deserves this distinction because they keep their leaves throughout the year without ever shedding.
That’s why content that stays relevant and produces value over the long-term is known as evergreen content.
The opposite of evergreen content is news and time-sensitive subjects that will only garner eyeballs for a short period of time. The idea is that evergreen content will rank well and gain valuable clicks over a long period of time. You can think of each piece of evergreen content as a valuable digital marketing asset.
While it’s important to push newsworthy pieces, you need to balance them out with content that will continue producing traffic well after the initial publication date. That’s why evergreen content is the cornerstone of all SEO content efforts.
Examples of Evergreen Content Topics
Most evergreen content fits within certain formats. These include listicles, how-to articles, educational videos, brand or product reviews, and more.
Evergreen Content From Brandastic:
- 7 Website Content Creation Tips to Help You Stand Out
- How to Build a Landing Page That Converts
- What is Readability? Why Does it Matter?
- 6 Ways to Boost Your eCommerce Sales
- 5 Reason to Add Video to Your Marketing Strategy
- 5 Essential Link Building Tactics for SEO
Tips For Making Your Content Evergreen
Now that you know how to spot an evergreen topic, it’s crucial to understand how to write in a way that keeps content fresh. If you want your content to rank well over the long term there are a few strategies you need to keep in mind.
Make Sure You Optimize for SEO, but Write for Humans
When it comes to creating high-quality content that will last, you need to be able to optimize your content for SEO without compromising on quality. Some of the SEO best practices you’ll want to follow include adding alt text to images, paying attention to readability, linking out to other pieces of content on your website and adding keywords where relevant. Optimizing for SEO also includes doing some preliminary research to find relevant keywords and make sure the topic you plan to write about has enough search volume to garner consistent traffic.
Tools like Yoast can help you to optimize your evergreen content more effectively.
Continuously Update Your Content
If you really want your evergreen content to continuously rank on Google over a long period of time you’ll probably have to periodically update it. You can use industry tools like Google Analytics, Ahrefs, or Moz to track your rankings for specific pieces of content and monitor which articles need tweaks or updates. Some things to look for when refreshing content are: broken links, language that could date your content, and whether the images are high quality.
Make Sure Your Evergreen Content is 10x Better Than Your Competitors
10x Content is simply a term for content that is at least ten times better than the next best piece of competing content on the same topic. By ensuring your content is far better than any competitors, you have a much better chance of ranking and staying on the first page for the long term. More specifically, quality 10x content often receives far more backlinks and social shares.
As a tip, make sure any aspiring piece of 10x content is high quality, unique from other pieces, and that your site holds some authority on the topic.
Avoid using words and phrases that will age your piece
To create truly evergreen content, you’ll need to steer clear from wording that conveys dates or time. For example, try to steer clear of language like “this year,” “in 2020,” and “last month.” On the other hand, in certain articles, you might want to the use dates in the title can help increase visibility and clicks.
At Brandastic we include dates in some of our listicle style content, but still aim to keep those articles relevant. We do this by constantly updating our content and making sure it’s still they’re still useful.
Writing content that contains specific dates or topical information is a good idea as long as you update it continually.
The article shown above is one of our highest ranking articles and we don’t plan to lose that traffic once it gets closer to 2021. Therefore, we plan to add in more upcoming conferences and remove individual events as they happen to keep the article fresh.
Promote Your Evergreen Content
Despite the quality of your content, it’s extremely difficult to consistently rank well in the SERPs without a little promotional help. For example, it’s a good idea to showcase your most valuable content somewhere on the homepage of your site or blog. You can even republish your evergreen content every once in a while to give it a little boost. Republishing allows you to keep the authority already built up from the existing page while at the same time gaining more visibility.
Another effective way of promoting your content is through social media. Ideally, you should share every blog post on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and any other social channels your brand or business is active on. As an added boost, you can even spend money on promoting your content on social media and get even more eyeballs.
