5 Tips for Creating Evergreen Content

Evergreen content serves as the strong foundation of an effective content marketing strategy. Unlike articles, blogs, or case studies that provide value for a limited time, evergreen content continues to drive traffic — and conversions — for years, if not indefinitely. 

Done well, evergreen content earns higher search engine rankings and drives a significant portion of your website traffic. 

Before your business plans content initiatives for a new or existing website, it’s important to consider your current and future target markets. Taking this step is the key to creating evergreen content that produces consistent results. 

What is Evergreen Content?

Take a moment to think about an evergreen tree. No matter the season, its foliage remains functional and green. The same holds true for evergreen content. It’s always fresh and useful. 

Evergreen content refers to material that doesn’t become outdated quickly, such as tips, tutorials, advice, and lists. 

Since this type of information isn’t based on trends or news stories, it will remain relevant and useful long after its initial publication date. 

Some examples of evergreen topics include “how-to” guides, interviews with experts in your industry, industry reports, case studies, product reviews/comparisons, or data-driven analyses.

Unlike topical content, which generates a lot of buzz surrounding a time-sensitive event or trend, evergreen content continues to generate traffic, leads, and value for your target audience for the long haul. 

Sometimes people confuse evergreen content with pillar content. They are not the same. Evergreen content stays relevant and valuable. Pillar content supports a topic cluster strategy designed to improve search engine rankings and drive traffic to your website. The two types of content work together but do not serve as a replacement for the other. 

Evergreen content isn’t a one-and-done job. It must be nurtured over the years if you want it to continue to produce solid leads for your business. 

Updating research and external links is part of the process. Verifying the relevance of any methods mentioned in the piece is another piece of the equation. We’ll get into the updating process in more detail later in this article. 

The 5 Best Tips for Creating Evergreen Content

Content marketing is only as effective as the strategy you’re using. Creating evergreen content helps you get the most out of your digital content. Use these 5 tips to create evergreen content that stands the test of time. 

1) Conduct extensive research

Even if you’re one of the most reputable and knowledgeable voices in your industry, you can’t skip the research phase of writing evergreen content. Citing reputable references that support your ideas lends credibility. Your target audience knows it can trust your information and returns to your site regularly to consume more educational content. 

Make sure you choose the most updated authoritative sources to back up your ideas. You may need to review these sources periodically to ensure they’re still relevant. Sometimes new research invalidates previous findings. You don’t want to be caught with outdated information in your evergreen content. 

Not sure how to conduct research? Here’s some tips on how to proceed. 

‍
Know your audience (ICP)

‍
Creating an ideal customer profile (ICP) helps you target your content correctly. For instance, you wouldn’t focus on topics more attuned to corporations if your target audience was small businesses.

ICPs are detailed outlines of your ideal customer. Their primary purpose is to help you figure out who would benefit the most from your product or service. Let’s say your ideal customer is small businesses with brick-and-mortar stores. Once you establish your target, you can define which marketing approach works best to attract their attention. 

Think about who would be most interested in your content and why they would want to read it. Consider their age, gender, profession, location, interests, and other demographics that may help you narrow down who your ideal reader is. This will help you create content tailored specifically for them and ensure that it resonates with them. 

Once you have identified your target audience, the next step is to gather data about them so that you can create a comprehensive description of them. 

You can do this by asking questions such as “What motivates my readers?” or “What are their biggest challenges?” You can also use surveys or focus groups to get feedback from readers on what they like or don’t like about your blog and what topics they would be interested in reading about in the future. 

Use this data to create a detailed picture of who your audience is so that you can create content specifically tailored for them.

Primary vs. secondary research

Conducting extensive research requires exploring primary and secondary sources. Primary research is any type of data that you collect yourself, usually through surveys or interviews with experts in your field. 

This type of research can be very time-consuming and expensive, but it allows you to get firsthand knowledge from people who are directly involved in your topic or issue. In addition, primary research often yields more detailed and insightful results than secondary data collection methods. 

The downside of primary research is that it can be difficult to find trustworthy sources who are willing to answer questions or provide useful insights into your topic. 

Additionally, this type of data collection often requires expensive equipment or personnel to collect and analyze the data correctly. 

It also takes longer for primary research results to become available because all the data must be collected before analysis can begin.

Then, there’s secondary research, which is arguably the most common method for collecting information when writing evergreen content. Secondary research involves collecting existing data from sources such as books, reports, journals, websites, newspapers, and more. 

This type of research is much faster and less expensive than primary research because it does not require any survey administration or interviews with experts in the field. 

It also allows you access to a larger pool of resources since there may be more information available on a given topic than what you could uncover through primary methods alone.

Topic clustering

Topic clustering is an effective content marketing method for boosting organic traffic to your website. It's an approach that helps bloggers organize their content into meaningful categories or clusters. 

It involves taking related topics and creating subtopics for each one. This way, readers can easily find the information they are looking for without having to sift through long blocks of text or multiple posts on the same subject. 

When conducting content marketing research, you may want to explore using this method. Here’s how it works.
‍
Topic clusters include 3 components: pillar pages, supporting pages, and internal linking between the two pages. Your pillar pages should contain meaty content on a core topic. The goal is to entice the reader to keep reading more content on the same topic from your site.

The second component is a cluster, or supporting pages. They can include additional articles, blogs, and case studies that support the topic from your pillar page. The goal with cluster pieces is to dive deep on the topic to address user intent.

Finally, link content from the cluster pages to the pillar pages to redirect readers internally. Use a descriptive anchor text. Choosing a targeted SEO keyword works well because it boosts your organic search ranking. 

You might also find that topic clustering helps you come up with new ideas for blog posts. When you break down your topics into smaller chunks, it can help spark your creativity and give you new angles to explore for each post. In addition, topic clustering allows you to create an organized structure for your blog posts that keeps readers engaged and makes them more likely to return in the future. 

2. Find industry-relevant keywords‍

Evergreen content works well for organic search. To reap the most rewards, you must find industry-relevant keywords that match your topic. Known as search engine optimization (SEO), keywords help satisfy user intent.

You can use keyword research tools like Semrush and WordStream. If you use Google Ads for your business, it comes with a tool for conducting keyword research.

Another way to come up with relevant long-tail keywords is by plugging some relevant SEO keywords into Google. Along with the usual listings the search engine produces, it also spits out something called “People Also Ask.” 

It’s a list of common questions consumers who are interested in your products or services have asked Google during their searches. You can use them as H2 section headers to further satisfy user intent, boosting your organic reach. 

3. Focus on quality

The main purpose of evergreen content is to educate your customers and position yourself as a subject matter expert. Focus on the needs of your readers by putting yourself in their shoes. Conduct research on your products or services from the lens of a consumer who might need them. Then, craft evergreen pieces that suit the topic that also show off your expertise.

Let’s say you’ve created a new app that helps businesses find local freelancers interested in fractional employment. You could create a piece of evergreen content that defines fractional employment to help both businesses and prospective fractional employment candidates decide if this model of employment is right for them. 
Focusing on quality pays dividends with search engines. What do we mean by quality content? Well, it must meet certain parameters to earn the label. Quality content:

• Achieves your content marketing goals. 
• Answer questions about your industry for your target audience. 
• Encourages deeper engagement. 
• Entertains and informs. 
• Provides transparency about your products or services.

Google especially loves quality over quantity these days. When it updated its algorithm in 2022, the search engine behemoth made it crystal clear it preferred helpful content over content-mill quality copy stuffed with keywords.  Prioritize quality over quantity with your evergreen content for the best results.

4. Promote it on social channels

Promoting your evergreen content on social media drives traffic to your website and increases engagement. This content marketing strategy works particularly well with Gen Z, who uses social media platforms like TikTok and YouTube to conduct keyword searches. 

With intentional planning, you can use social media to drive traffic to the evergreen content on your website. Insert SEO keywords into captions, alt-text for images, and even subtitles to draw viewers to your social media accounts. From there, you can redirect them to your website to learn more about your products and services.  

Having a strategy for promoting content on social media is very important. Creating high-quality content is essential but it’s not enough if no one sees it. That’s why optimizing each post is so important – it increases visibility and engagement levels. 

Make sure you include relevant hashtags that relate directly back to your brand or topic as well as a catchy caption that encourages readers to take action (i.e., link clicking). You should also consider using graphics or videos since those types of posts tend to get more attention than text-only posts.

It’s also important to identify where your audience really spends most of their time. If you’re a B2B company, it makes sense to promote your brand on LinkedIn, while also promoting on Twitter and Facebook. 

Having dedicated promotional strategies for each platform is important too. While you can always repost content, it makes sense to have different promotional strategies for each platform, as you can’t expect people to engage in the same manner with posts on LinkedIn as compared to Instagram, for instance. 

5. Repurpose your content

Help the right people continue to find your evergreen content by repurposing it into different formats. We already talked about how to do that on your social media channels using SEO keywords.

You can also turn case studies, how-to guides, and other evergreen content into amazing infographics or a topic for a podcast that features other industry experts sharing their advice on the same topic.  The possibilities for repurposing are endless. 

Turn blog posts into videos or podcasts 

Videos are a great way to engage with your audience in a new way while also showcasing your expertise on a particular topic. You can also turn long-form blog posts into shorter podcast episodes for busy commuters or people who prefer audio over video or text. 

Create an infographic 

 Infographics are one of the best ways to present complex data in an easy-to-understand format that resonates with viewers. Take the key points from a blog post or article and create an eye-catching infographic for social media sharing or embedding on your website!  

Share snippets on social media

You don't have to share the entire piece of evergreen material all at once; instead, break it down into smaller chunks and share them selectively on social media over time! This also gives you more opportunities to engage with your followers by asking questions related to each snippet you share. 

Why do you need evergreen content?

Businesses need evergreen content because it leads to increased traffic and potential leads. Since they’re not tied to a current event or other trending topics, evergreen content produces compound interest. Invest once in its creation and continue to reap the rewards for years to come. 

Think of it like the equity you build through home ownership. You pay one price for the initial product, then watch as that asset grows over time.  

Some of the proven benefits of incorporating evergreen content in your content marketing plan include:

• Lead generation. Evergreen content is the perfect way to demonstrate your expertise in a specific industry. It can guide new visitors to your website and encourage them to try your product or service. 
• SEO boost. Evergreen content fulfills user intent during searches by focusing on answering common questions about your product or service. You can choose subjects for evergreen content by playing the role of a prospective customer and searching for relevant topics. 
• Increase in website traffic. Evergreen content never gets old, so it continues to drive traffic to your website. Make sure you craft it around frequent questions customers have about your product, service, or industry. Answer the question thoroughly for the best results. 

Content marketing is an investment. Play your cards right, and your business can reap a significant return on that investment when you include evergreen content in the plan. 

What are some examples of evergreen content?

Creating evergreen content isn’t as difficult as you might imagine. A solid content marketing strategy can point you in the right direction for which topics work best. 

Some examples of the best kind of evergreen content include:

Educational content

This type of content encourages visitors to your website to bookmark the page and use it as a future reference for a specific topic of interest. For instance, if your business specializes in breeding Jersey cattle, you could create an “Everything You Need to Know About Jersey Cattle” blog that contains information about the breed that remains relevant over the years. 

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) 

FAQs can boost your search engine ranking by providing helpful information about your products or services. Research long-tail keywords for your industry and use them to craft the FAQs. One way to generate ideas about popular search questions is to play the role of the consumer and plug your keywords into Google. You’ll see a “People Also Asked” section that is a goldmine for crafting FAQs based on popular questions about your product or services.  

How-to guides 

Comprehensive guides serve as a means for increasing traffic to your website and gaining loyal followers. They’re an ideal way to show off your industry expertise. Pair your know-how with some solid research and you’ll have a piece that resonates with your target audience. 

For example, a bathroom remodeling company could post a how-to about regrouting your bathroom tile, breaking it down into easily digestible steps that anyone can follow. 

Evergreen content doesn’t have to be in the form of a blog. You can create website pages that serve as a hub for this kind of information, then add the spokes pages with more specific information. Sometimes that information expires, but that’s OK if the main hub page contains evergreen content that never gets stale. 

Maximize your ROI with Evergreen Content

If you’re not already creating evergreen content, it’s not too late to get started. Evergreen content takes more time to produce but the ROI is worth the effort. You’ll generate consistent traffic for your website, turning curious visitors into returning customers.