Creating evergreen content

It’s not always easy to stay relevant, which is why brands should leverage on creating evergreen content.

Especially for brands, staying relevant is one of the goals to ensure you will stay top of mind for the public regardless of the time of the year. But in a digital age where we are constantly being bombarded with new information, it seems that trends come and go even quicker than before.

How do you make sure your brand stays relevant even through the changing seasons? It is what we call evergreen content!

What is evergreen content?

As the name suggests, evergreen content stays relevant and ‘fresh’, regardless of when it is first published.

In essence, it is content revolving around a topic that has virtually no expiration date — people will still be interested in that topic and search it for years to come.

Why is it important?

Drives organic traffic

First and foremost, the topics for evergreen content have a constant level of sustained interest, and they always resonate with readers — which means that people will always be searching for it. And that’s good, because even on days when you’re unable to publish anything new (for whatever reason), you can count on evergreen content to continuously bring in an audience to your site.

Look at this 7-minute workout article published by the New York Times in 2013. It still generates organic traffic even years after it was written — proving the power of evergreen content when done right.

Good for SEO

Evergreen content is prime content for link building. By providing valuable content that’s useful and stands the test of time, it’s natural that others would want to link it on their own sites.

An evergreen article can get backlinks years after it first goes live, and it’s also precisely because they’re link magnets that they tend to rank well in search engines. That’s because search engines tend to see backlinks as a vote of confidence — the more backlinks your content gets, the more likely they’ll be ranked for the relevant search queries.

Good for repurposing

Since you’re taking existing content assets and repurposing them for a different target audience, it’s natural that you’ll want to maximise their longevity.

As discussed in one of our other articles, evergreen content is great for repurposing into different formats. Turn articles into carousels, webinars into podcasts, reports into infographics… The list goes on.

Tips for creating evergreen content

Avoid specific events and dates

Without a doubt, one of the fastest ways to shorten the lifespan of your content is by using language that is time-sensitive.

Phrases such as “last week”, “this year”, “recently” should be avoided as they indicate a time period that might seems strange to readers years down the line.

This means, you need to make a clear distinction between content that is time sensitive – like news – and that which is timeless, or evergreen.

Update regularly

While there isn’t much to be done to update evergreen content, there will be new findings to which you can reference and hyperlink. And of course, if you’re creating content with a title that’s dated with the year, you might want to refresh it on a yearly basis.

The world is not a constant thing: it continues to evolve. Therefore, updating your content with the latest statistics and happenings within your industry is crucial. This allows your content to stay relevant and keep up with the times. Updating your content means it saves you time and energy while still maintaining a consistent result.

For instance, if you wrote about “The Best Social Media in 2014”, Vine and Path should be taken out and be replaced with TikTok and Clubhouse in 2021. You don’t need to create content from scratch — you just need to update parts of it and it will still generate traffic because Google has indexed and recognised it since 2014.

Do keyword research

The best way to find evergreen topics is to conduct keyword research. After you’ve figured out the topics that are broadly related to your brand that you want to touch on, tools like Google Keyword Planner or SEMrush can help you determine the search volume of related keywords that are consistently popular around the subject.

Once you’ve narrowed down the keywords that you want to use, you can target them to continually optimise your content.

Create 10X content

In the marketing world, content that is the same as others is called a 1X. If it is a little bit better, it is called a 2X. So, a 10X is the best content regarding a particular topic. How can you produce 10x content? Take note of these 3 characteristics: quality, uniqueness, and authority.

Yes, these characteristics are similar to that of thought leadership. After all, thought leadership is a piece of content that sparks new ways of thinking and conversations created by an expert in a particular field. So, it can be said that thought leadership is evergreen content as well.

Making evergreen content takes a lot of time and effort; you need to figure out a timeless topic related to your business. Once it is done, you still need to adhere to SEO practices. But, if appropriately created, evergreen content can earn good results on its own without needing you to do anything else.

Want to create and reap the benefits of evergreen content with ease? Contact our CEO Simon Kearney at [email protected] today.


Read more from Click2View:

1. Do you know how to create content that appeals to Millennials and Gen Z?
2. What makes for good thought leadership content?
3. Here are some tips on how to write a good blog.

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Click2View is Southeast Asia’s premiere full-service independent B2B content marketing agency servicing clients like Microsoft, Google, Visa, Prudential, and the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.