If you’re creating content, whether it’s for SEO, content marketing, or anything, it’s much easier to have a topic that’s going to remain relevant forever, without you needing to come back and renew it all the time. Imagine having a plant that you need to keep watering every day, or it’ll turn brown and wilt.
If you’re creating content, whether it’s for SEO, content marketing, or anything, it’s much easier to have a topic that’s going to remain relevant forever, without you needing to come back and renew it all the time.
Imagine having a plant that you need to keep watering every day, or it’ll turn brown and wilt.
That’s the problem with creating content around trends or anything that’s time sensitive.
It’s not long before what you created in the first place is outdated, and you have to come back to renew it to keep it fresh.
If you’re new to the idea of evergreen content, then this article is for you.
It’ll tell you what it is, what content formats are best suited to being “evergreen”, and give you tips for finding topics and writing content that you can let sit in the background and never get old.
Evergreen content is any content you can publish that remains relevant to readers over a long period, without needing updates (or minimal updates, and not very often).
Unlike news articles or stats, which have a shelf life before they become outdated (tomorrow’s fish and chip wrapper), evergreen content can sit on your website for months and years without edits and still be relevant to a reader who finds it.
For SEO, creating evergreen content is ideal because you can write an authoritative guide or blog and have it bring a reliable amount of traffic without updating it all the time.
Something that isn’t evergreen content is anything with a shelf life that can become outdated without being renewed.
The most obvious examples of non-evergreen content are news articles.
Things move so fast online that a news article today is likely to be irrelevant by this time next week as people lose interest and move on to something else.
One example from our own website is this article we wrote about Google updating its transparency policy.
From a keyword ranking perspective, this is a great article, and we rank third if someone were looking for this story:
But, because this is a passing story (albeit an important one if you have a Google Ads account), the search interest in the topic is limited to the immediate days on and after it was announced, as you can see in the graph below from Google Trends.
And, this is reflected in the traffic we got to our site for this article (a spike on the day the announcement was made, and a few days after) and then the traffic to the article went down as the topic became older and people stopped looking for it.
Does this mean we shouldn’t have written the article?
No.
The topic is relevant to our audience, and anyone interested may have been looking for answers on how to manage the policy change, which we provided, and that helps us build trust and authority.
But, it can be a lot of effort to put into a single piece of content with a short shelf life, and if this is the type of content you’re relying on, you’re constantly going to be looking for new angles and topics.
Other examples of non-evergreen content include stats (which can be outdated after six months) or anything relating to a passing trend, the most common being anything to do with culture or fashion.
Although evergreen content is more related to the topic than the format, there are certain content formats which lend themselves more to evergreen topics than others.
It’s not very often that the way to do something changes so dramatically that it requires you to update content.
For example, how you create local SEO schema for a website hasn’t changed in years, so you could create a how-to guide on this and then not touch it again for years.
Same with other tasks, like learning an instrument, swinging a golf club, or even building a garden wall.
These are all examples of evergreen content because they’re topics that will always be relevant (there’ll always be people who want to learn that stuff), and the content you create is always going to be applicable because the process of learning these things doesn’t change.
Again, think about a repeatable task that someone might be trying to learn and would look for help to do it.
An example could be “How to set up a GA4 account”.
FAQs can be a gold mine for evergreen content because, by nature, they’re common and ongoing questions people have that you can create a single piece of content to answer.
Unless the answer to the question drastically changes, the content you create will continue to be relevant and fresh even years after you’ve published it.
Definitions are another thing that rarely change. SEO will always mean search engine optimisation. PPC will always be Pay-Per-Click.
So creating something like a complete Digital Marketing glossary is a piece of content you can create once and it will always be relevant to people looking for it (and those topics will always be searched)
Although you may need to update this content type more often the actual topic is evergreen because people will always be looking for it.
For example, a listicle about the best SEO tools may need updating periodically as new tools come on the market but overall people are always going to search for SEO tools, and the main players in the market aren’t going to change.
A checklist is something that can be reused repeatedly to solve the same problem without needing to be changed.
For us, an example of evergreen content we could create is a checklist for launching a new Shopify website.
The basic steps we’d take aren’t likely to change very often, and it’s a topic that’s always going to be relevant.
The main thing to remember about evergreen content is that it needs to be something that won’t become quickly outdated.
Think about your industry and the things that have been the same for years, the questions everyone asks, the common problems that keep coming up and the best practices for doing things that you advise customers to do.
These are all great for creating evergreen content.
As we’ve shown with our example about the Google transparency policy, focusing on news or topics that are time sensitive can give you results in the short term, but they have a limited shelf life, and you won’t get long-term traffic or interest.
The best thing about FAQs is that they’re common, and people always ask them.
This is a great source for evergreen content because you know people will always search those topics.
Plus, by creating content on these topics, you can free up your sales or service teams from answering the same questions all the time because customers can find the information themselves.
With Google’s Expertise, Experience, Authoritative, Trust (EEAT) signals now playing a part in search rankings, and LLMs pulling authoritative content from trusted sources in answers to prompts, it’s never been more important to focus on in-depth content, focused on answering questions and solving genuine problems for your customers.
By focusing on these bigger topics and creating authoritative content, you’ll be seen more as a trusted source in your industry, rather than just seen as following trends.
There are lots of reasons to create evergreen content, one of the main ones being it’s less of a strain on your resources than constantly trying to find news or trends to create content about.
It can take longer upfront to create the kind of in-depth content you need for evergreen content.
But, the results compound over time because you can let the content sit on your website and attract traffic without needing to go back to it.
Because topics for evergreen content are focused on answering customer questions, they’re going to attract more people to the top of your sales and content funnel. Once they’re there, you can start to nurture them towards becoming a customer.
This is a harder point to make now with AI and LLMs taking much of the traffic around informational, top-of-funnel content (which a lot of evergreen content is).
But, because evergreen topics are always relevant, you have a steady stream of people looking for information on them.
If you can become visible for these topics and searches with evergreen content, you can create a reliable stream of traffic to your website, without the need to constantly create new content.
Because non-evergreen topics (news, stats, etc) become outdated so quickly, it’s hard to become an authority on them. With evergreen content, because the topic is always relevant, it’s much easier to become seen as an authority and trusted source if you create in-depth content.
As with any content you create, it’s a bit of a waste to just create it for one channel and leave it.
When it comes to evergreen content, it’s always worth figuring out how you can break it down into other formats to promote on your other marketing channels.
For example, an in-depth blog on an evergreen topic could be broken down into 4-5 social posts across LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.
It could even be repurposed into a video, and this is great because you already have the content you need.
With evergreen content, you have a ready-to-go stack of ideas that you can fit into your content promotion calendar for times when you’re struggling for new ideas.
If you’ve not got the time or resources to focus on evergreen content or are struggling to come up with ideas, our content marketing agency can help.
We have a team of strategists and experienced SEO copywriters who have helped hundreds of clients improve their search rankings and conversions by creating evergreen content plans that position them as a key voice in their industry and a trusted source of information.
Just complete the form and get a free strategy session.
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