What Is Evergreen Content and How Can It Help Your SEO?
One of the biggest concerns for digital marketing specialists is website performance. More businesses are becoming aware of the importance that SEO has to offer a website, and the pressure is now on for digital experts to get websites on the first page of search engines like Google and Bing.
One area that has always been a vocal point of SEO is content marketing. Everybody knows that regular content helps SEO and that a flurry of blog posts can increase website traffic in the short term. Digital marketers have been raving about the value of blogs and news pages for years.
Recently, the trend has moved towards producing evergreen content. More content marketers and digital specialists are seeing its value, from both an audience perspective and for SEO purposes.
So what exactly is evergreen content?
One of the best descriptions of evergreen posts comes from its name: just like the evergreen fir that is used for Christmas trees, evergreen content doesn’t wilt or die; it stays fresh forever. That means evergreen content will always have a value on your website, whether someone saw it yesterday or sees it in five years’ time.
Web Mindset believes that evergreen content is popular with content producers because it drives more website traffic without the need for constant maintenance. They argue that evergreen content needs to have specific elements to succeed. For instance, it cannot be related to current events or provide statistical information; it should be narrow information for ‘beginners’, and it should be longer than your average post.
A few examples of evergreen content they recommend include:
- Definition articles
- Instructional information or how-to guides
- List of resources
- Checklists.
Evergreen blog content must have a timeless quality – but that doesn’t mean it just has to be an article. Videos, infographics and even podcasts all count as evergreen content. What matters is that the information contained within them isn’t dated in any way.
So how does it help SEO?
Evergreen content is very useful to SEO if used in conjunction with keywords you’re ranking for. Carrying out keyword research and injecting those keywords into your evergreen content will give it long-term validity. Wordstream recommends that you follow all the basic SEO techniques, from on-page keyword use to alt text for images and even the inclusion of sharing buttons.
According to Search Engine Watch, evergreen content should be written for SEO. What they claim is that evergreen content should always be written around keywords and topics that you want to rank for in future. They suggest using the same techniques that Wordstream recommends, but also taking advantage of internal linking for better optimization.
Its long-term value to your SEO strategy is incomparable to other content marketing approaches. Evergreen content may take a little bit longer to prepare and create than a simple news article, but the end result is that you have a piece of content that will boost website performance over a longer period.
Image: Photospin
Author Bio:
Anna May Trogstad is Content Delivery Manager and Outreach Executive at Copify, the global premium blog writing service. See more about what the Copify team have to share and say on Twitter.
