Evergreen Content – One of the Most Powerful Types of Content for Your Website

Evergreen content is the type of content that never loses relevancy. Much like evergreen trees that stay green year after year, evergreen content remains valuable to your readers long-term.

Bad Idea: Playing the Viral Lottery

Everyone loves it when an article or a post goes viral. It’s a rush when you find out a page or post has been shared thousands or maybe even millions of times. But that popularity is usually transient and tapers off quickly.

In order to maintain the potential for viral content, a blogger or website owner must continually crank out new content. Then, they have to push it on various social media outlets with the hopes that they’ll hit the viral jackpot. Viral content is extremely rare and difficult to achieve.

Almost every website or business that’s tried to market themselves on producing viral content has failed. Can you even think of more than a handful of business that came into being from a piece of viral content?

SEO: Content is King

The most successful online businesses have carved out their spot on the Internet by being easily found by major search engines.

Back in the early days of the Internet, getting found a search engine was a simple matter of stuffing your website with more keywords than your competitors.

But today’s search engines are incredibly sophisticated. Artificial intelligence algorithms used by Google, Bing, & Yahoo (among others) actually read your content. Modern search engines make an attempt to understand what it’s all about.

You have to write great content. Great content takes time and energy, it’s not like just churning out article after article. You want your time and energy to pay for itself long-term. You need to write evergreen content.

Evergreen Content: One of The Most Powerful Types of Content

One of the most, if not the most powerful type of content, evergreen content is critical to the traffic acquisition strategy of any website. It might not get huge traffic spikes, but it has the potential to generate consistent search engine traffic for years.

Writing articles that are always fresh and remain relevant for long periods of time is critical to the success of just about any website.

I wrote an article a couple years ago on one of my blogging sites that initially got 20-30 search engine hits each month. After about 18 months, that article now gets about 100-300 search engine hits every day. This happened because it was a timeless piece of content and those initial 20-30 search engine hits eventually resulted in backlinks building up over time which increase the ranking of the post.

Evergreen content, especially pages and posts that rank well on search engines, can drive traffic to your site indefinitely with little additional work on your part.

Over time, this consistent traffic leads to more backlinks which leads to better SEO. Evergreen content can help snowball your site’s traffic and SEO.

Types of Posts That Can Be Evergreen Material

There are plenty of different content types that can qualify as evergreen.

DIY articles are some of the most popular. In fact, DIY sites can be made up of almost all evergreen content. The same is true for “how to” posts.

Reference articles make really good evergreen content as well. Wikipedia is a great example of a site that is made up of mostly evergreen content.

Articles that cover historical events would also fall into the evergreen category.

Other types of content could include recipes, workout plans, and health & fitness tips. In fact the health & fitness category is one of the most popular categories on the web.

Evergreen Content Examples

Content that never gets dated comes in many flavors. Take a look at the following articles I’ve written on other blogs that would be considered evergreen content:

How to Feng Shui Your Bedroom & Sleep Better Than Ever

Running After 40 – 10 Tips to Keep it Going & Staying Healthy

How to Combat Anxiety: These 3 Tools Make the Ultimate Cheat Sheet

If you notice, these titles are continually relevant and readers who’ve visited them once can actually find value in referring back to these titles.

Other Keys to Creating Evergreen Content

News articles are not evergreen. If your goal is to create content that is always fresh, avoid writing about topics that refer to specific points in time. While these can be good in the short-term, generally the die off very quickly.

Stay away from click-bait titles. Click-bait titles are ones that usually don’t really tell you what a post is about. Search engines use the title of an article to determine whether it’s relevant to a search term. Titles like, “This Single Food Might be Sabotaging Your Health” might share well on social media, but search engines practically ignore it. Since the primary purpose of evergreen content is to be found by search engines, click-bait titles can sabotage an otherwise great piece of content.

Evergreen content still requires good SEO practices. You still need to do keyword research and ensure that you’re linking to related sources. In fact, standard SEO techniques are critical for the success of an evergreen piece of content.

Final Thoughts

Evergreen content can be an excellent way to add consistent long-term traffic to your website. It’s important to be patient with this type of content. It could take a while before you get an idea of how much traffic is possible.

Evergreen content can be huge, it just might not happen right away. I run many websites and 100% of them receive the majority of their traffic from evergreen content.

The best part about evergreen content might simply be that once a piece gets rolling, there’s little more for you to do other than enjoy the traffic.