Building an Evergreen Content Strategy to Boost Your SEO

Do you want your content to continue reigning in a steady long-term flow of traffic? If so, then your content and the strategy behind it must evolve over time. Prioritize revisiting old blog posts to find ways to make them more current and relevant. You can also save yourself time and get a nice SEO boost from Google by being intentional in creating content that doesn’t go stale. This is where evergreen content comes into play.

Evergreen content definition

Before going into what evergreen content is, let’s take a look at its counterpart—time sensitive content.

Time-sensitive content is exactly as it sounds, only relevant for a limited time. Think of seasonal or holiday-specific content. For example, a blog post about the best seasonal holiday drinks at Starbucks is time-sensitive because those drinks will eventually be taken off the menu. After that, users have no reason to read that piece of content.

Evergreen content, on the other hand, remains relevant and valuable for much longer. It’s sustainable and doesn’t go “out of style,” so to speak. As opposed to a piece of content on holiday drinks at Starbucks, a blog post about the best Starbucks drinks for people who have a sweet tooth is evergreen. 

The name comes from evergreen trees, which hang onto their leaves throughout all four seasons, while other types of trees shed them. Just as evergreen trees stand the test of time, so does evergreen content.

Evergreen content offers a few main benefits:

• You don’t have to make as many updates to it over the months and years. It’s low-maintenance with a high yield.
• It’ll continue bringing you traffic.
• You can continue to promote it via social media, email marketing, and paid ads.

We cover everything from evergreen to all other types of content in our Academy’s Content SEO course. Go check it out and improve your content writing techniques!

Researching evergreen topics

Now that you’re familiar with what evergreen content is, how it compares to time-sensitive content, and why you need to be creating it, let’s go into ways to come up with evergreen topics.

Remember, we want to avoid things like:

• News stories
• Seasonal, holiday, and event-related material
• Statistics
• Current trends

Instead, think about:

• How-tos and tutorials
• Guides
• Reviews
• Listicles
• Encyclopedia-style entries containing general information
• Glossaries/explanations of terms

Consider these formats in relation to your niche, and you’ll have countless evergreen topics. For example, if your niche is maternity fashion, some evergreen content ideas might be:

• How to Style Maternity Overalls
• The Most Versatile Clothes for Pregnant Women
• 5 Post-Partum Staples You Need in Your Wardrobe

Find endless evergreen content ideas with keyword research

One sure-fire way to find evergreen content ideas is to do keyword research. Dedicated tools like SE Ranking’s Keyword Research tool know exactly which topics your target audience is fond of, and will provide you with plenty of keyword ideas. This is because more people google these popular topics more often than others, which is reflected in the search volume metric.

Keyword Research also analyzes seasonality trends—at a glance you can see if a keyword enjoys stable public interest throughout the year or if its search volume goes up and down.  

Just click the arrow next to the keyword of your interest to see a detailed graph. 

Unlike brainstorming, dedicated keyword research relieves you from the burden of second-guessing. You can rest assured that the chosen topic will resonate with your target audience. An even greater benefit is that once Google spots your article and finds it useful, your content piece will be driving a steady flow of targeted traffic to your website.  

Now, if you switch to the Organic results tab, you’ll see the actual titles that top-ranking pages have. These titles give you a good idea of what you should cover in your next article. 

You can even follow the links to read a couple of top-ranking articles and get inspired.

I hope that now you feel eager to try doing keyword research on your own. Here’s a simple three-step guide for you to follow:

• Start by coming up with a seed keyword—a general phrase that describes the industry you’re in. The tool will then offer you hundreds of suggestions like the ones in the screenshots above. 
• Pick the ones that will make a good evergreen content piece.
• Further select keywords with decent search volume and a realistic keyword difficulty score—a metric that shows how tough the competition is. If the keyword is lucrative, many websites (including well-established ones) would target it, making it harder to get your page to the first page of Google.

Make your evergreen content stand out

As you’re considering different topics, you might have a startling realization: “Everything’s been written about already!” 

You wouldn’t be wrong. These days, it’s hard to come up with an idea that’s 100% new. 

In fact, you don’t need it to be 100% new. If nobody covered a particular topic, that’s probably because people are not interested in it. To find a topic with potential, you can pick one of the popular topics as suggested by your keyword research, and then make your content piece stand out. Here are some suggestions:

Evergreen writing rules

While evergreen content gives you endless opportunities to be unique, there are a few general guidelines that you’ll want to follow to get the most out of your content.

• Avoid using short-term language, like “recently,” “this year,” and “in the next season.” The more you do this, the more diligent you’ll need to be about going back to your content periodically to update it. Doing this defeats the purpose of making it evergreen.
• Choose precise topics. Creating evergreen content doesn’t mean writing articles that are super general. You should still be mindful about choosing a topic and keyword that there is demand around, and always prioritize satisfying user’s search intent.
• Combine several sub-topics into one comprehensive guide. For example, you could write a blog post on how to write clever subject lines, another on what an effective cold email template looks like, and a third on how to follow up with cold leads. Or, you could combine all three into one bigger tutorial.
• Make sure your content piece is optimized for search engines. SE Ranking’s Content Marketing tool can be of great help here. It analyzes top-ranking sites using AI and NLP technologies and gives you tips on:
  • Recommended wordcount. 
  • Recommended number of images.
  • Terms your text should feature to make it relevant in the eye’s of search engines.
  • Target keyword density (the number of times a keyword should be used in your copy).
  • Strategic keyword placement (which term should be added to the headings, main copy, highlighted in bold, etc.)

The tool also helps you build a perfect text structure, runs basic grammar and spelling checks, and measures your texts’ readability score. 

Maintaining performance

One of the primary reasons for writing evergreen content is to get the most out of it. To achieve this, you must be mindful of long-term maintenance, promotion, and monitoring of your evergreen content. Here are a few ideas.

1. Consistently promote it on social media

Brands tend to think, “We’ve already shared that on Facebook. We can’t share it again.” False! You can share evergreen content over and over again. Try this:

• Switch up the posting times. You might find, as an example, that sharing it in the morning triggers more engagement than sharing it in the evening. You won’t know until you test, and you might reach a different crowd of people.
• Update the caption when you post it.
• Switch out the featured image.

You can also repurpose your content across different social media channels. For example, could you pull a quote from your blog and share it as a graphic on Instagram?

2. Build backlinks to the page

When another site links to your content, this tells Google that your information is authoritative and trustworthy. These are called backlinks. The more backlinks you can get, the better — assuming that they come from relevant, high-quality websites!

Check our exhaustive backlink guide to learn why backlinks are crucial for your SEO success and where to get them.

Simply put, the best way to get backlinks is to create content that people want to link to. You need to offer either unique data or your own unique perspective. Additionally, your article can include unique visualization elements such as infographics. If you provide very similar information in a similar manner to your competitors, the chances are low that you’ll get a backlink.

Another way is to get your article on the first position on the SERP. Users often don’t want to scroll down and if they need to link to a relevant source, they will choose your website. Moreover, the first position often is a sign that you are a trustworthy source. 

Beyond this, networking and collaborating are your best friend. Reach out to websites that you think could benefit from your content and see if they’d be willing to give you a shout-out. You should pitch your content and explain how they can improve their content by using some of your data and linking back to it. 

3. Monitor rankings and revise accordingly

How your evergreen content ranks can change over time. It might climb to position three on page one after a few months, only to drop to position 10 after another few months. Keeping an eye on these changes and responding accordingly so your content consistently ranks well.

SE Ranking’s Rank Checker shows you these changes in one intuitive dashboard. Monitor the keywords that your content is ranking for and how those positions are changing over time.

If you notice that one piece of content is dropping in rankings, consider ways to improve it:

• Could it benefit from more images, videos, or GIFs?
• Could you expand on certain points to provide more information and value?
• Are you incorporating a strong CTA and relevant internal links?
• Are you consistently promoting it on social media and to your email list?
• Can your content piece get quality backlinks? What about the backlink profile of the pages that are pushing you down the ranking ladder?

Here’s how you can find all the backlinks pointing to a page (yours or competitors’).

4. Update your top-performing articles

What about content that consistently performs well? You might very well still need to maintain it over time! Revisit it every few months to ensure that everything is still accurate and applicable, and, as previously stated, see if there’s any room for improvement.

Evergreen content examples

When looking for ideas, there are plenty of great examples of evergreen content that you can turn to — some of which you may already be using. One example? Wikipedia! While quality control isn’t necessarily the platform’s biggest strength, it’s still a one-stop hub for evergreen content. You can look up well-known figures, events, and objects and get a highly detailed description with all the nitty-gritty details. For example, Oprah Winfrey’s Wiki page includes everything from her early life to her television career to the awards she’s won.

wikiHow is a similar story, except it’ll teach you how to do things — just about anything. Search “how to tie a tie,” and you’ll get more tutorials than you could ever ask for.

Answers.com is another great resource for evergreen content examples. Input your question and get many detailed responses.

Mix evergreen with trendy content

A solid content strategy combines both evergreen articles for long-term traffic  and trending content that keeps readers updated on industry trends and answers time-sensitive questions. A healthy balance is key because, remember, even if a trending topic brings you an immediate surge in traffic, it won’t last. 

Putting it all together

Evergreen content is an indispensable part of any good content strategy. It applies to all industries, and might be especially beneficial for smaller teams that don’t have the resources to publish several articles a week. Sprinkle in some click-worthy trending content to build more momentum and satisfy your visitors’ demand, and your content marketing efforts will surely pay off.