The Power of Evergreen Content

Content that never goes out of date, that’s always relevant. Evergreen content remains valuable long after it’s been released.

Some content always remains relevant to readers, regardless of current trends or the latest news cycle, and will always send you traffic provided you rank well.

It’s name comes from the plant the evergreen – that retains it’s leaves all year round.

Some examples of such content are:

• Weight loss
• Relationships
• Wealth

Now and in 100 years time, people will be searching about “how to lose weight” or “how to find love”.

While some examples of non-evergreen content are:

• US President Elections
• Current game score

US elections only occur every 4 years and searches will naturally drop outside of the election year, while not many people care about the score of a game the day after the game is on.

Evergreen content is important because while posting about current trends will give you a nice amount of temporary traffic, it will fall quickly over time. You’ll always have to keep writing to keep the traffic coming.

If you produce evergreen content however, the organic traffic will keep coming, regardless of how interests change over time.

Get more out of your work by posting content that will always be searched for, year after year.

So how do you do it?

1. Find Evergreen Content

Ever heard the advice to follow what’s trending? In this case, do the opposite. Instead, focus on the topics with consistent search potential.

The best way to do this is through keyword research.

First, you can start off with a bit of brainstorming. This can be based on the topic of your blog, and have some foundation on what you would actually like to write about.

From here, enter the topics into Ahrefs Keywords Explorer (or any other keyword tool of your choice). Or you can also look at different keyword ideads and their search volumes in their reports.

If a topic has enough search potential, you’ve hit a winner. If not, look at the parent topic and see if you have just chosen the wrong search phrase for the topic, or, you may to generalise your search terms a bit more.

If not, you may need to try target another search idea.

2. Create Evergreen Content

I find this to be the easy part, but I also love to write. In essence, all you have to do here is create something useful that withstands the forces of time.

Look at this from the perspective of search engines. To them, ranking high is being the best result today, tomorrow, and many months from year or now. If this proves to be true, your content is evergreen.

A search engines job is to deliver the best result. They’re not biased. If your content is the best, you’ll be rewarded for it.

So just make your content that much better than the competitions. Put it miles in front of the next best result.

If your content is the same as everyone else’s, they can easily edit their content and rank better than you. If it’s only marginally better, your content may rank higher for a few more weeks. But, if your content is miles better, it can stand the test of time for a lot longer before you ever have to touch up your article again.

Aim for quality, quantity and uniqueness.

Quality – Make sure your content is easy to read, engaging, unique, and informative. Most search users are looking to solve a problem. Does your content solve it?

Quantity – In general longer articles rank better than shorter ones. Just make sure you are still maintaining a high quality. 500 words should be the minimum, but depending on the length of your competitors articles, you may want to aim for 2000 words or more.

Authority – Show that you’re an expert in the topic. Use statistics, back up your article’s position with facts, use graphs and imagery. Quote experts, and prove you’re well researched.

3. Maintain Evergreen Status

If you follow the steps above, your content should rank well and be evergreen for months or years to come.

But facts may eventually change, or competitors may write better articles and push your page down the rankings.

So you have to keep an eye on your content’s evergreen status and try to maintain it. Here is how:

Track your rankings

Rankings are about relevance to readers. If Google is dropping your rankings over time, it means your content is less relevant and needs to be touched up.

Any rank tracking tool can be used to monitor your content, but Ahrefs Rank Tracker is a great option.

You’ll see search volume, rank position and how much of that traffic you are capturing and whether your traffic is trending up or down over time.

Touch up your content

When your content is becoming less evergreen and slipping down into obscurity in the search engines, it can be something easy like:

• Outdated statistcs
• Outdated year in the title
• Outdated screenshots
• Broken or no longer relevant links

Which is easy to fix by changing the year referenced in your article to the current one, or replacing the links or statistics or screenshots with up to date ones.

Or it can be something more like your competitors have caught up or overtaken you. In this case, look at the articles ranking higher and see what their content has that yours doesn’t.

Touch up your article to make it the better option again, republish and repromote it; make it the better option again.