How & Why Evergreen Content Can Help Your Team

Let’s face it, blog writing can be hard. Besides deciding on a topic and sitting down to write the content, you also need to consider whether it will help your SEO ranking, if there is interest in your topic, and if it’s even worth your time. Evergreen content helps you address these concerns.

Evergreen content answers a frequently asked question, will not become quickly outdated, and creates a natural stream of steady organic traffic. The aim of these posts is to answer questions with longevity and shareability. Once you create a post, views can organically increase over time. Remember that you can leverage your CRM when mining for topic ideas, especially when it comes to seeing which content inspires the most engagements or conversions with prospects.

Yeah, it may sound a little too good to be true—but it definitely comes with a few downsides that we will delve into a bit later on.

How and why evergreen content lives up to the hype.

Evergreen is versatile and self-sustaining content that is well worth the time it takes to create—if it fits within your current content strategy. Ideally, evergreen content topics can stand the test of time (so a trending fad topic would not be ideal). This means less upkeep once you’ve posted the blog (unless you need to make minor edits to update the overall content).

Since the topics should answer a commonly asked question, search volume is often high, which leads to a higher chance of attracting organic traffic. The more traffic, the more times your content has a chance of being shared (which can also increase organic traffic). Ideally, the more you publish evergreen content, the higher your organic site visitor count should increase over time.

Make Your Evergreen Content Shareable

One key aspect of a good evergreen topic is shareability. Do your research to see if the question you aim to answer has a high search volume to see if there’s even a chance for your content to be shared. Once you’ve confirmed that the audience is there, format your post to make it skimmable. To do this, you can include:

• Numbered lists
• Graphs
• Embedded tweets
• Videos

You can also highlight important concepts in your content or break up your content into different blocks instead of one giant paragraph. At the end of your post, make sure to include a call-to-action for readers to share your post and leave their opinion in the comments.

Once you’ve ensured the audience for this question is there and you’ve optimized the readability, share it. In this case, social media, newsletters, forums, and any other method you have available to share your content becomes your best tool. Send your content to your audience and, again, encourage them to share it as well. A few extra shares go a long way!

Evergreen Content Snowballs

Once you have a foundation of a few evergreen content blogs with a steady stream of organic views per month, you shouldn’t stop there. Keep writing evergreen content to build upon that natural stream of organic views. Some sources claim up to 80% of your blog content should be evergreen.

Since each article should have a fairly reliable amount of organic views per month, each article you write just snowballs and increases that monthly organic view count. As time goes on, evergreen content should make up a core part of your monthly organic views with trending content creating organic spikes now and then.

Evergreen Content Is Easily Reusable

Another great aspect of evergreen content that can be easily overlooked is how often you can reuse it. Since the topics are often general questions, you can easily translate article content into a summarized infographic, a simple YouTube video (which can be made into a second evergreen content post with a video transcript below the embedded video), or a newsletter piece.

You can get really creative with how you reuse content. Every time you think of a new way to reuse it, you are also getting more of an ROI on your efforts made to write the original piece. It can’t get much better than that, huh?

Downsides of Evergreen Content

There are most definitely concerns one should consider before delving headfirst into creating evergreen content. Some of these are outlined below.

Evergreen Content Requires More Research

Due to the nature of evergreen content, you need to make sure that your content answers the question better than anyone else who wrote about the same topic. Since organic traffic results for evergreen content tend to be long-term traffic increases, rather than short-goal spikes, some may feel like their time invested was not worth it. It almost always is, as long as you make sure you share and utilize the content you make to the best of your ability.

Writing Evergreen Content Can Take a Lot Of Time

Besides the time used for research, writing the actual blog post can take just as much, if not more, time than researching did. Depending on the length of the content and breadth of the question you’re attempting to answer, organizing your thoughts, the article, and editing it all can be taxing on your time. As you write more content and become used to the process, this amount of time should lessen—but it still can be quite the time investment nonetheless.

Evergreen Topics Cannot Be Too Focused

Deciding on topics for evergreen content can be a long process as well. Many people want to write content that covers the latest trends in an industry, but most of the time that content will be outdated within a few weeks and the organic traffic will not convert into a steady stream. It will only spike, but fade away as the hype dies down.

That’s why you should make sure the topic you choose is not one that will spark and fade out—but one that will sprout and grow as time goes on. To help you determine if a possible topic is appropriate for evergreen content, consider the following:

• Did your topic gain popularity at an incredible rate and is likely to lose popularity at the same rate?
• Is your content discussing something that solves a problem and is only becoming a stronger trend as time goes on?

Many times, if a topic has gained immense traction quickly (like crazy YouTube challenges or other memes), then it is most likely a fad and not appropriate for an evergreen blog post. If you are writing about a subject that solves a problem and has become more solidified into society as time goes on, like social media, then it is most likely an evergreen topic.

So, Is Evergreen Content Right For You?

Answer: It Depends

Many people wonder if they should be writing evergreen content since it seems like a golden ticket to steady organic traffic. While I would agree that evergreen content is something every company with a marketing team should consider, first make sure that this sort of content fits within your current marketing strategy.

Strategize, see how you could utilize this content, and work it into your plans. A little bit of evergreen content is often better than none—so why not try out your hand at creating a few pieces of useful content for your audience and see how it affects your organic traffic metrics?

A digital marketing agency can help you decide which type of content is best for your business. SEO optimization at Workshop Digital helps ensure that you’re making the most of your content efforts—and that your audience can discover your content in the first place.