What Makes Good Evergreen Content?

By Communications Team July 10, 2022

We hear a lot about the importance and benefits of good evergreen content. Having a mix of both timely and evergreen content on your business’s website is important. It shows, among other things, that your business is experienced and well-versed in your chosen industry, while also still showing that you like to stay on top of changes within your industry, too.

So, let’s talk about the big components of this content type, what it looks like, and how to build your evergreen content strategy to answer the important question: what makes good evergreen content?

What Is Evergreen Content?

Evergreen content is content that is perpetually relevant to your readers and prospective clients. Like an evergreen tree retains its color regardless of season, evergreen content is built from topics that are of unending interest to your audience. This is the opposite of timely content, which is used to showcase current events and topics.

Evergreen content can be used to create helpful backlinks to your website and it adds weight and depth to your marketing offerings. It’s also a way to lend transaction-less credibility to your brand: by sharing relevant insights that are always in season, you can boost your reputation as a business that is truly dedicated to helping its clients and customers. It’s important to remember that “evergreen” refers to the fact that your piece of content is going to stay relevant, even after a trend, season, or year has passed.

Here are some questions to ask to determine whether something is truly evergreen content. If you can answer yes to these, your content is likely evergreen:

  • Does your content describe a process that has been long-established? This includes things like step-by-step instructions, how-to manuals, and videos, etc.
  • Are you creating a list or glossary of industry terms or specific words that are used in relevant spaces online and in person? An effective evergreen content strategy offers beginners and those who are new to your industry’s offerings a great way to brush up on the basics quickly.
  • Does your content answer a simple and straightforward question?
  • Is your content a testimonial, review, or case study?

Why is evergreen content important?

  • Evergreen content, and blog articles especially, can be used to guide prospects through the buyers’ journey.
  • It offers a continuous source of traffic and allows you to recycle previous assets into new videos, articles, social media posts, and more.
  • It contributes to brand awareness, brand authority, and brand trust. So much of a brand’s online audience is looking for content (promotional, informational, etc.) that shares “the truth” about an industry, product, service, or company.

So, let’s talk about the top characteristics of good evergreen content.

SEO

What Makes Good Evergreen Content? It Has Quality SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the biggest components of good evergreen content. Content is king, as they say. And almost 60% of the pages that rank in the top 10 Google search results are 3+ years old. But if your content exists and no one can find it, that’s almost as bad as not having any content at all.

Your evergreen content must be easily discoverable in basic searches. You can optimize SEO by using key words and phrases in your article titles, meta descriptions, image names and descriptions, and more.

SEO content also often is very user-friendly. Shorter, punchier sentences, bulleted lists, and big headers (using your keywords of course) can all increase the likelihood that your content is reaching the largest audience possible.

For a truly effective SEO program with insights that span each page of your online content efforts and website copy, you’ll need to have periodic audits of your site to update information and keep things fresh. But getting started is easy: you can reverse engineer an SEO effort by spending some time gathering information from your customers, employees, and the Internet to find out what people are searching for most when it comes to your industry.

Blogs are a great way to improve your brand’s SEO and content marketing efforts. Click here to check out one of our recent articles about how SEO and blog content can work together to help your business.

Originality

Evergreen content that has an original angle or topic is content gold. While there will always be room for staples like introduction articles on your industry’s core products or services, how-tos, and top ten lists, the best evergreen content is full of originality.

When you are thinking about the types of original content you can create, it’s often a good idea to start with a list of questions, touchpoints, and other items that speak to your prospects’ pain points or knowledge gaps.

For example, if you want to create a strategy for an online ebike selling business, there are hundreds of how-to articles, infographics, videos, and other organic, evergreen content you could create simply using the FAQs that people ask you every day!

If you run an IT business that provides a range of security and network products and services for individuals and small businesses, you can create a whole range of great instructional content that teaches your website visitors a little more about your expertise and also helps them troubleshoot minor IT and security issues themselves. Your original spin on these items through the sharing of your unique years of expertise can build trust and garner you a larger audience.

Content Writing

Relatable Language

Blog articles are like research papers only in that it’s good to do quality research before writing informative content on a topic. The rest is very different – the best evergreen articles are ones that are engaging and easy to read.

Most people head to evergreen content to answer some kind of question or to give guidance on a subject, not to attend a Master’s level thesis presentation. Clear and concise writing is the best way to leverage evergreen content so that it can reach a maximum audience.

Many business leaders and professionals who aren’t well-versed in content marketing can often create great insights, but the content itself is too in-depth for your average website visitor to grasp in the short amount of time they are interacting with your content.

Think of it like this: the majority of drivers don’t know much more than the basics of how their vehicle functions and what it takes to keep the motor running. But that doesn’t mean we don’t hand them the keys to the car, right? Mechanics will always possess a wealth of knowledge that far exceeds that of the average driver – but we still have to find a way to share information about safely operating our vehicles, don’t we? That’s what good evergreen content does: it gives you the knowledge to drive the car without having you memorize the entire owner’s manual.

You can take that manual for your business or industry and break it down into endlessly relatable and helpful content, which gets right to the heart of a good content marketing strategy.

Content Organization

Being easy to read also means your content must be well-organized. Strong section headers and sub-headers, bulleted lists for clarity, these things add layers to your content and more layers means better search engine interpretations. Having a clear structure will also increase your chances of having the content chosen for Google’s featured snippets.

You are likely aware of good content organization even if you aren’t paying attention to it specifically. When you read an article, from a how-to guide to a quick recap of a current event, the structure of that content is what allows you to find the answers you are looking for quickly (we hope). And we have all clicked on a link that we thought would be very promising, only to reach the content and feel like we got tricked into interacting with unhelpful or “clickbait-y” webpages.

Content organization allows your readers to “skip to the good parts” if they want. We can use the car manual example from the last section here.

Most of the time, we don’t interact with our owner’s manual in an effort to read it cover to cover. We want good section headers, a table of contents, etc. – we are always, as marketing content consumers, looking for the fastest way to get the best information that will help us with our task at hand.

If you make your content hard to access for your target audience, they’ll go somewhere else where things are cleaner, tidier, and more accessible for their own personal goals.

Content Organization

What Makes Evergreen Content?

SharedTEAMS Can Help with Your Content Marketing Strategy

Evergreen content is just one facet of a great marketing and communications program. SharedTEAMS offers communications services based on a good content marketing strategy that is scaled to meet your specific business needs. Our communications team wants to help members create and optimize their content, including:

Interested in becoming a member and gaining access to insights about what makes good evergreen content? Here’s how it works.