The online landscape is rapidly shifting. Trends come and go quickly, and creators who want to stay relevant need to adapt to these trends. However, there’s also another vital component for remaining relevant and developing a comprehensive content plan: evergreen content.
What Makes Content Evergreen?
Evergreen content remains relevant regardless of the news, trends, and the passage of time. It stays valuable to creators and their audiences long after it’s been published. Evergreen content is often value-driven, explaining the core elements of a brand and reinforcing the relevance of new content and products.
For instance, a beauty influencer might shift their content to reflect current styles and trends but still maintain steps they always include in their beauty routine, like skincare and haircare. This creator could create content around these routines and products that are applicable regardless of current beauty trends. A brand that offers sporting equipment might create guides around the appropriate gear needed for different activities, helping shoppers better navigate their choices and use them effectively.
Formats That Work Best for Evergreen Content
When crafting evergreen content, there are several content formats to consider. These include:
- Tutorials and How-To Guides – These are opportunities to provide a breakdown of steps for commonly asked questions. They can serve as excellent places to provide affiliate links or links to specific products and services, directly showcasing where your brand provides value.
- “What Is” Explainers – Like tutorials and guides, these make sense of topics that your audience may need more explanation on or would like a deeper understanding of.
- FAQs – These answer common questions about your content or offers and can serve as valuable jumping-off points for creating content that caters directly to your audience. Each question can serve as a content piece, or all can be gathered together as a one-stop place for answers to questions.
- Listicles – These are opportunities to bring together curated recommendations, expert insight, and tools or resources that are useful to your audience. These also provide opportunities to naturally share links to products, services, or affiliate products to help increase passive income and showcase knowledge and industry expertise.
- Case Studies – These are opportunities to deep-dive into the value of products or services by showcasing real-user examples and success stories, which always help build authority and deliver social proof, winning over new shoppers.
These formats may not suit all creators, but they’re generally among the most effective approaches for creating and publishing evergreen content. They also serve as content options that can be shared across different media, such as blogs, emails, and social media.
Strategies for Building Evergreen Content That Lasts
With the ideal forms of content for creating evergreen content out of the way, we can now look at strategies for determining what to discuss with these methods.
Identify Timeless Topics
To consistently create evergreen content, it’s helpful to develop a pool of topics for reference. To do this, you’ll want to look at the fundamental principles of your platform, services, or offer, as well as at common challenges that your target audience comes to you with. For instance, a dog trainer might explore common training concerns frequently raised by clients. They might even create content that walks potential clients through teaching puppies basic commands or walks them through what it’s like working with a trainer. These topics will remain relevant even as new techniques and training approaches come and go.
If you’re unsure where to start for your platform, try looking at tools like Ahrefs, Google Trends, or Google Search, as these can be handy jumping-off points for brainstorming ideas.
Create Comprehensive Content
When creating evergreen content, it’s worth dedicating time and energy to go beyond the basics and craft comprehensive guides, how-tos, and explainers. Since this content will continue to serve your platform and your audience for years to come, dedicating time to dive deeply into topics and answer questions will demonstrate your expertise and provide your audience with useful insights.
As you explore topics in-depth, keep the content well-structured and easy to follow—deep dives are interesting, but overwhelming audiences with walls of text might have the opposite impact you’re hoping for with your content. Include images, videos, and bullet points to break up text and add different ways of engaging with the content.
Incorporate Keywords & SEO Best Practices
Evergreen content is an excellent opportunity to enhance SEO efforts. As you create content, take the time to incorporate keywords and to implement SEO best practices such as including:
- Title tags
- Meta descriptions
- Headings
- Alt text for images, videos, and other visual elements
- Internal links to relevant content on your site
In addition to these elements, keep in mind that having a mobile-friendly website with fast page loading times is useful. But the most important thing you can do for your SEO efforts is to prioritize your users by offering high-quality content that’s easy to navigate and interact with.
Update & Refresh Older Content
While the goal of evergreen content is for it to remain timeless, this isn’t always easy or even possible. Some industries change so rapidly that a blog post that was once evergreen now has misinformation or is no longer relevant. Thankfully, these outdated content pieces don’t need to be discarded. Updating them ensures relevance without requiring a full rewrite.
An example of a brand using this strategy is Casinos.com. The gambling industry is frequently updating, whether it’s in the growth of new gaming sites or updates to regulations. Casinos.com handles this challenge by frequently updating its guides and top platform recommendations to reflect current options available to its audience.
Why Evergreen Content is Key for Long-Term Success
Evergreen content is important in all industries and should be a core part of any strategy as it offers many benefits to brands, creators, and their target audiences. It showcases expertise, provides seamless opportunities for product integration, improves the user experience, and strengthens SEO. The simplicity and cost-effectiveness of creating evergreen content is an essential element of building an effective online presence—even as trends, industries, and technology rapidly shift and change.
