Creating Evergreen Content: A Comprehensive Guide
Learn how to create evergreen content is an important part of your content strategy. Check out these tips to create evergreen content that lasts forever.
Evergreen content is a term used to describe any piece of content that remains relevant and useful months or years after it was created. It’s different from news, which goes stale within a few days. Evergreen content can be text articles, videos, infographics or even images—anything you can repeatedly use to help market your business. But how do you create evergreen content? And what does an evergreen piece look like? In this article, we’ll cover everything from the basics of creating effective evergreen content to some advanced techniques for writing compelling headlines they practically write themselves!
What is Evergreen Content?
Evergreen content is information that is still useful and interesting to readers even after a long time has passed. It is the opposite of news-based or seasonal content, which only has a short shelf life and quickly becomes irrelevant. Evergreen content can be made in many ways, like blog posts, articles, videos, infographics, and how-to guides.
Why is Content Marketing Effective?
Content marketing is a strategy that involves making and sharing useful, relevant, and consistent content to attract and keep a target audience and, in the end, get customers to do something that makes money. This can take the form of blog posts, infographics, videos, or other types of media and can be an effective way to establish your brand as an authority in your industry and build trust with your target audience.
Content marketing has also been shown to bring in leads and sales and improve search engine rankings, which leads to more people finding your website on their own.
Why is evergreen content important?
Evergreen content is important for several reasons. Firstly, it provides a constant source of organic traffic to your website. This is because evergreen content is always useful and keeps bringing in visitors. Second, evergreen content helps your brand become known as an expert in its field, which makes it easier to bring in new customers. Third, it gives your audience a consistent way to get information, which helps build trust and loyalty.
Examples of evergreen content
Examples of evergreen content include:
- How-to guides and tutorials
- List posts
- In-depth articles on industry topics
- Infographics
- Product reviews
- Industry reports
Video content. For example, a guide on how to make the perfect cup of coffee or a list of the best hiking trails in a specific region
How to create evergreen content
To create evergreen content, you need to follow a few steps:
Do keyword research
Keyword research is the first step to creating evergreen content. It’s important because it helps you figure out what people are searching for, allowing you to create content that answers those questions.
Keyword research can be done manually or with tools like Google’s Keyword Planner tool. Either way, this step involves understanding your target audience and using keywords they would likely use when searching online for solutions related to their problems or interests (in this case: “how do I create evergreen content?”).
Write for your target audience.
To create evergreen content, you must write with your target audience in mind. You should be able to articulate who this person is and what they care about so that every piece of writing is relevant and exciting to them. This doesn’t mean that all readers will share the same interests–the key is finding out precisely what makes one particular group tick (and then giving them more of it).
Avoid newsjacking and topical content.
If you’re a news junkie and love to keep up with current events, then you’ve probably heard of the term “newsjacking.” It’s when a brand or business jumps on top of an existing news story, either piggyback off of its popularity or capitalizing on its publicity. Newsjacking is excellent for getting quick exposure and gaining traction quickly–but it’s not necessarily evergreen content.
Newsjacking can be effective in the short term (especially if you’re offering something relevant or helpful). Still, if your goal is a long-term engagement, then topicality isn’t always ideal for creating lasting impressions with readership. Instead of focusing on being topical and trying to make evergreen content from newsworthy events happening now (like Hurricane Irma), focus on creating timeless pieces that are relevant year after year — like our guide here!
Find out what your audience wants to know
Before you start creating evergreen content, it’s important to understand what your target audience wants to know. This can be done in several ways, like through surveys, focus groups, and keyword research. Understanding your audience’s needs and wants will help you create content that is both relevant and valuable to them.
Create content that ties into the keyword
Once you clearly understand what your audience wants to know, you need to create content that ties into the keyword or phrase they are searching for. This will help search engines rank your content higher and make it easier for your target audience to find.
Revisit your content to refresh after publishing
After you publish your content, it’s important to check back on it from time to time and update it as needed. This will help ensure that your content remains relevant and up-to-date.
Choose your topics and make sure they qualify as green content
When choosing topics for your evergreen content, it is important to ensure they have long-lasting relevance and are not tied to any specific event or date.
Conduct research
Before you start writing your evergreen content, it is important to research the topic you have chosen. This will help you understand the subject and create informative and accurate content.
Make it helpful and practical
Make it helpful. The first step in making content that will last forever is to make sure that your audience can use what you’re giving them. Make sure the information you provide is practical and actionable, whether it’s in a guide or an infographic, so readers know exactly how to apply it in their lives.
Make it memorable. One of the biggest reasons people share content online is because they think others will find it interesting or relevant enough for them to pass along, so give them something worth sharing! Your goal should be for people to remember how much value they got from reading your article (and then share it). This means keeping things short and sweet: no one wants to commit more than two minutes worth of attention span when deciding whether or not something deserves their time investment; if possible, try not even including any links within posts themselves so readers aren’t distracted by external links while trying out new ideas/methods themselves later down the line once they’ve finished digesting everything else within each post itself first before moving onto anything else outside its boundaries.”
Make it easy to understand and take action on
You want readers to be able to understand and act on your content. Use clear, simple language that’s easy for them to read and understand. Make it easy for them by using bullet points, numbered lists and diagrams where appropriate.
- Break up the text with subheadings so readers can skip directly to the information they need without reading through everything else first.
- Use images, charts or diagrams where possible (and relevant) – these will help break up the text and make your content more visually appealing too!
Make it easy to navigate
To make your content easy to navigate, you should use headings and subheadings. You can also use bullet points and numbered lists to break up the text. Images are another way to make it easier for readers to get through your article by giving them something visually interesting to focus on while they read. Finally, provide a table of contents at the beginning of each post so that readers know what’s coming next in case they want more information about one particular topic or section of an article instead of reading through everything at once (which can be overwhelming).
Give it an irresistible headline
The headline is the first thing readers will see and it’s an important part of your content strategy. It should be short, snappy, and catchy–but also relevant to what you’re writing about. You can use several different types of headlines depending on what you want to achieve:
- Headline: The title should be written in active voice (i.e., “How I Improved My Writing Skills” instead of “How My Writing Skills Were Improved”) because it makes the article sound more authoritative and persuasive when read aloud or spoken aloud as opposed to the passive voice which sounds less authoritative and persuasive when spoken aloud or heard by others who may not know much about our business field yet but might still become customers later on down the road due to our great reputation among peers within this industry space where everyone knows each other’s name before meeting face-to-face!
Make sure the URL is easily understood and descriptive of the content.
Once you’ve decided on your topic and written a draft, it’s time to think about the URL. The URL is what people will see when they search for your content on Google, so it must contain keywords related to your topic. You also want a short URL that won’t be too long or difficult to type out, especially if people share links through social media or email rather than typing them into their browser address bar (since most URLs are auto-filled by browsers).
The best way of making sure this happens? Use words from both the title and meta description tags in the URL itself!
Give it a meta description that elicits a click-through.
The meta description is the snippet of text that appears below your content in search results. It’s one of the most important parts of your page, because it’s what users see first and often decide whether or not to click on your link.
The meta description should be relevant to the content on which it appears and should be written for people, not for search engines. The ideal length is 150-160 characters (including spaces).
Optimize the content for keywords and search engines
Now that you’ve written your content, it’s time to make sure it will be found in search engines.
- Use keywords in the title and subheadings of your article. Keywords should make sense for what you’re writing about, but also be specific enough so that people looking for information on those topics will find your page when they search for those terms. For example, if I was writing an article about how to install drywall in a bathroom (which I am), I would want my title tag to include both “drywall” and “bathroom.”
- Use keywords in the URL of your article or blog post–this is especially important if you have multiple pages with similar content on one site because they’ll each need their own unique URL containing relevant keywords so that Google knows which one(s) go together when crawling through them all at once later on down the line when searching through thousands upon thousands of articles across hundreds upon hundreds of domains all over the internet!