Driving organic traffic to your site with a content marketing strategy tests the creativity of many marketers. If you’re a content marketer, you know that the struggle is real in creating content that lasts.
How do you create content that attracts the right audience and continues to drive organic traffic over time? One answer is centering your content marketing strategy around evergreen content. Today we’ll learn why – and how.
Need help with your evergreen content strategy? Reach out to Human today.
What is Evergreen Content?
Evergreen content is timeless and has long-term value. It’s the type of content that remains informative for weeks, months or ideally, years. It has no real expiration date and inspires people to search for it continually.
Why is Evergreen Content Important?
Content on your site that remains relevant will continue to grow organic traffic over time.
Evergreen content builds page and domain authority, crucial factors for search engine rankings. It’s the “bread and butter” that you should focus your content marketing strategy on for long-term success.
Creating high-quality evergreen content positions your brand as a thought leader or go-to source. Promoting that content on your social media channels helps you connect with your target audience, building brand loyalty.
What is an Evergreen Content Strategy?
Timely content that capitalizes on current events or trends will always be valuable. But if you’re looking to generate consistent, long-term organic traffic, you need to make certain evergreen content is part of your plan.
An evergreen content strategy is centered around creating new content or repurposing existing content to meet evergreen standards.
While the importance of evergreen content cannot be overstated, it is also just a part of a well-rounded content marketing strategy. For the highest engagement, your content should be a mix of evergreen and topical subjects that are currently abuzz in the marketplace.
11 Evergreen Content Ideas to Get You Started
Here are eleven content ideas to get your evergreen content strategy off to a good start:
- FAQs
- How-to tutorials
- Infographics and listicles
- Whitepapers
- Case studies and success stories
- Glossary of terms
- Tips and hacks
- Reviews and testimonials
- Checklists, templates and downloadable assets
- Buying guides
- Interviews
1. FAQ
If your website doesn’t already have an FAQ resource, this may be the first step in building up your evergreen content library. Unanswered questions can encourage a potential customer to go elsewhere. Keep your FAQ page evergreen by adding answers to new customer questions as they accumulate via email, phone calls or chat inquiries.
2. How-To Tutorials
How-tos or step-by-step tutorials are endlessly appealing as new potential customers emerge and enter your marketing funnel. Create separate how-to content for both beginners and advanced customers to broaden your reach.
3. Infographics and Listicles
Since people are more likely to scan content than actually read it, adding colorful infographics and listicles appeals to a broad audience.
4. Whitepapers
HubSpot defines a whitepaper as an in-depth report or problem-solving guide on a specific topic. Whitepapers educate your audience about a particular issue, or explain and promote a methodology.
5. Case Studies and Success Stories
Unlike a whitepaper, a case study provides specific examples of how a solution has fixed a problem. Case studies generally present “before and after” scenarios that describe actual customer experiences and successes.
6. Glossary of Terms
A glossary functions as a compilation of little-known or confusing terms about your product or niche. Why send your customers scrambling to Google when you can create a glossary of terms that’s right at their fingertips?
7. Tips and Hacks
In today’s fast-moving world, creating content centered around tips and hacks is usually quite popular. Articles of this nature are ideal for sharing on social media channels.
8. Reviews and Testimonials
Customers are increasingly reliant on reviews and testimonials from other customers before they commit to a buying decision. If your business or brand has enthusiastic reviews, be sure to shout them from the rooftops!
9. Buying Guides
Why should a customer buy your product over a competitor’s? Buying guides give you a chance to compare and contrast your product with others and are popular year-round.
10. Checklists, Templates and Downloadable Assets
Downloadable assets like checklists, templates and buying guides offer tangible value to your customers. Requiring a customer’s email address in exchange for access to a “free” resource is a win-win that helps you build your email list.
11. Interviews
Interviews with company personnel or subject matter experts build authority and add unique human insights to your blog or website.
How to Create Evergreen Content That Works
Refer to this list of DOs and DON’Ts when creating evergreen content.
Evergreen Content DOs and DON’Ts
- DO: Create content your audience is looking for
- DON’T: Make your content hard to find
- DO: Make your content easy to read
- DON’T: Forget to optimize for SEO
- DO: Create a pillar page and use topic clusters
- DON’T: Forget to update evergreen content
- DO: Repurpose your content
DO: Create Content Your Audience Is Looking For
Always begin your content creation process with keyword research to identify topics with high demand or verify that your chosen subject is being searched for. Make sure to prioritize the keywords that will appeal to your target audience.
DON’T: Make your content hard to find
Highlight your content so it’s easy to find and attracts attention. If you have a website and a blog, there are a few easy ways to do this on your homepage:
- Include your blog on your main navigation bar
- Feature it prominently in your site’s footer
- Create a section on your homepage that features thumbnail images of your content that are clickable
DO: Make Your Content Easy to Read
Did you know that the majority of Americans read and comprehend material at around the eight-grade level? Even if you’re creating content aimed at experts, your audience will appreciate writing that’s easy to skim and understand. Use layman’s terms in place of technical jargon whenever possible.
Here are four quick tips to make content more readable:
- Use shorter words: Say “start” rather than “implement.”
- Use short sentences: Try to keep sentences under 25 words.
- Use more punctuation to break up sentences: Give the eyes a place to rest on the page.
- Use bulleted lists: Bullets make it easy to scan your content.
DON’T: Forget to Optimize for SEO
Use SEO best practices for on-page optimization.
- Add alt text to images and make sure they’re sized correctly to prevent slow page loading speed.
- Use keywords in the title, URL, headers and throughout the body copy.
- Link related articles together and link to reputable sources when citing facts or statistics.
Read: How to Write SEO-Friendly Content to Get Your Business Ranked
DO: Create a Pillar Page and Use Topic Clusters
A pillar page serves as an educational hub for a specific topic you want to be the expert on. Pillar pages link out to your related articles, and those articles link back to the pillar page as a resource for additional information.
A topic cluster strategy focuses on topics rather than keywords to improve your site’s architecture. Hubspot advises choosing the broad subjects you want to rank for, then creating content based on specific keywords related to that topic that all link to each other.
To organize your topics and subtopics, analyze performance and manage internal linking and site hierarchy all from one place, use a tool like Blueprint SEO. Blueprint SEO eliminates the need for multiple documents and spreadsheets, so you can spend less time managing tools and more time creating evergreen content that ranks.
Try Blueprint SEO for free for a limited time!
DO: Update Your Evergreen Content Regularly
If content is truly evergreen, why would it ever need to be updated? Even if your content contains unchanging information, it is essential to review it every once in a while.
- Check to see if any advancements in technology have been made since publication
- Make sure any hyperlinks you have inserted are still valid, as broken links can hurt SEO
- Revise content that includes numbers or dates to keep information current
Then promote the updated content on your social media channels.
DO: Repurpose Your Content
Why not write it once and use it twice – or more? Recycle parts of material used in an evergreen blog post as snippets in social media posts or email marketing campaigns.
Looking for more insider content marketing tips? Stay up-to-date with our blog!
Achieve Organic Traffic Growth with Human
At Human, we understand the importance (and challenge) of growing organic traffic. We help companies build up their content marketing strategies to lift search engine rankings and win more qualified leads.
Producing high-quality, consistent content is a top priority for us at Human. If you need a hand developing your evergreen content, or want to take the next step in advancing your content marketing strategy, let's chat!
