What Is Evergreen Content and Why Do You Need It?

Whether you’re a seasoned digital marketer or you’re just getting started developing a brand, it’s likely that you’ve already heard about evergreen content. Routinely described as one of the most important aspects of content marketing, evergreen content is vital for growth and business success.

But what exactly is evergreen content? What role does it play in your content marketing strategies, and why is it essential? Most importantly of all, how do you go about creating brilliant evergreen content?

Read on to learn all you need to know about becoming a master of timeless content, and drive continual, ongoing success in your content marketing activities.

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What is Evergreen Content?

To put it simply, evergreen content is content that combines immediate relevance with timeless success. It is search optimized to draw visitors in upon posting, and yet is also carefully written to stay relevant long after its publication date. Plenty of digital content gets a lot of traffic as soon as it is published, only to drop off over time. With evergreen content, visitor numbers can actually increase over time, as the content is designed to keep delivering results long after its publication.

Why is Evergreen Content So Important?

Fresh content almost always drives a spike in traffic. But if your content is time-sensitive, the novelty soon wears off, and visitor numbers will tail off and flatline. This means that to keep attracting a steady stream of visitors to your site, you need to keep creating new content.

Evergreen content, on the other hand, is content that keeps delivering long after it’s been published. It may not receive quite as big of an initial spike as something more immediate, but traffic will grow over time rather than falling away. By attracting visitors off the back of your evergreen content, you’ll have less to do, as you won’t have to keep pumping out tons of new material. This will save you time, money and a lot of cognitive energy – things that can be put to good use elsewhere in the marketing world.

What’s more, evergreen content also helps enormously from an SEO perspective. Your content will generate a steady flow of organic traffic and will never go out of date, meaning that it will keep ranking on Google – something coveted by every online brand and business.

How Do You Create Evergreen Content?

So how do you make your content evergreen? The first step – and one that seems counterintuitive for many marketers – is to steer clear of trendy, popular topics. Sure, these will get you big numbers immediately, but their popularity will fade quickly. Plus, you’ll be competing with everyone else’s content on the same topic. Produce content about enduring issues that have significant search volume on a regular basis instead.

Make sure your content isn’t time-sensitive and avoid using language that dates it. Dates and phrases like ‘over the last year’ serve no real purpose except to give your content a lifespan.

There are a few main content types that stand the test of time and lend themselves well to evergreen content. Lists, tutorials, guides and videos all tend to have the longevity that regular content does not.

What is Evergreen Content for Blogs?

When creating evergreen blog content, you need to keep two things in mind. The format of the blog post you’re creating, and what you’re going to make it about.

Formats

With a bit of thought and effort, any type of blog post can be made to be evergreen. But there are a few formats which lend themselves particularly well to evergreen content, typically delivering results month after month.

Listicles

– list articles like ‘Top Ten Ways to Write Evergreen Content’ tend to be interesting, useful, and not saddled with time sensitivity. As a result, this is a great format to write evergreen blog content in.

How-to guides

– detailed guides exploring the ins and outs of a task or skill are another format that rarely goes out of style and can keep bringing traffic back to your website long after publication. This is particularly relevant if your guide solves a common problem!

Product reviews

– product reviews can be a double-whammy content format. They can have great success initially if you get your review out as the product is launched, but will continue to deliver traffic as long as the product remains on sale!

Tips and advice

– similar to how-to guides, advice articles providing solutions to common problems or dealing with everyday issues can be hugely successful and will cement your reputation as a go-to source for reliable content.

Topics

Evergreen topics are topics that see consistent interest and engagement over time, with viewers constantly searching for related articles. If your content deals with evergreen, non-time restricted topics, then your blogs will see sustained, long-term traffic.

Diet and exercise

– diet and exercise never go out of fashion. Avoid the ‘trendy’ diets of the day and stick to classic advice and guidance and you will always find an audience.

Recipes and food content

– Similarly, everyone will always need to eat! Food content and step-by-step recipes are a great way to bring in traffic that will stay on your page for a while, and if your recipes are good enough they will come back time and again.

Common mistakes/issues

– articles that help fix common mistakes or discuss solutions for everyday issues always do well.

History

– if your topic already happened in the past, it’s not going to get any less time sensitive! Writing articles about historical topics is a great way to provide content that can’t age.

What Is Evergreen Content On Facebook?

When it comes to social media, evergreen content is vital. Regular posting is the number one way to keep your engagement rates elevated, but constantly creating new content for Facebook is an enormous challenge. Having a library of evergreen content means that you always have something up your sleeve to post, allowing you to keep your followers engaged and entertained.

Here are five main types of evergreen content that works on Facebook:

Engagement

Questions, quick quizzes, or snap polls – interactive posts are an immensely successful and wonderfully evergreen way to engage your followers without worrying about timeliness or keeping up with trends. People love to offer their opinions or give input on social media, so grab their attention with great visuals and ask simple, relevant questions. You’ll enjoy the benefits of evergreen content and build a more engaged audience at the same time. A digital marketing win/win!

Blogs

Not every post on Facebook has to be created specifically for social media, and people love it when you share external content. Funny, inspiring, emotional, or educational articles are a great way to grab your followers’ attention and build a reputation as a thought leader. You can write your own blogs on platforms like Medium (see above for the best article styles for evergreen content) or share fascinating, relevant content from others.

How-To Guides

How-to guides are one of the best examples of evergreen content and work brilliantly for a Facebook audience. Guides like Neil Patel’s How To Get More YouTube Views or our 8 free SEO tips for boosting visibility on Google (Danish) are immensely successful and forever relevant. Posting your own guides and advice articles on Facebook will encourage your followers to share your content, boost engagement, and drive traffic to your website all in one go.

Inspiration

Inspirational quotes, timeless wisdom, and profound life advice will never not get ‘likes’ on Facebook, and are some great examples of evergreen content. Give your followers a morning pick-me-up or a motivational boost with some feel-good content and you’ll get startling results.

Video

Video is enormous on Facebook. Videos on the platform receive more than 4 billion views every day and over 500 million people consume 100 million hours worth of content daily. For these reasons, evergreen videos are a must-include for your content strategies.

How To Make Evergreen YouTube Videos

Marketers often talk about viral video content, but when it comes to serious, long-term impact, making evergreen YouTube videos is the way to go. Old videos can still attract new views month after month, allowing your channel’s overall analytics to keep growing.

Evergreen video strategies work like an SaaS business model, providing a base layer of views, then adding new ones each month, rather than starting from scratch every time.

When creating evergreen YouTube videos, it’s crucial to get both topics and types of content right. What works for articles typically works well for videos too, so how-to guides, documentaries, tutorials, and educational videos are all failsafe options.

There are also a number of lesser-known tricks that can make your video content evergreen, and more successful as a result. Here are a few ways to add extra longevity to the videos you produce.

Keyword Research

If you’ve written any SEO content as a digital marketer, you’ll be well aware of the importance of keywords. But not everyone is up-to-speed with how important they can be for videos too.

Conducting solid keyword research each month and creating videos based on your findings can produce startling results. Optimize your YouTube post with title, description, tags, and YouTube SEO tools, and you’ll see a constant stream of traffic to your video.

Answer Popular Questions

Another way to maintain a steady level of interest in your YouTube content is by creating videos that answer the most popular and commonplace questions.

You can discover what the internet is asking by heading over to Quora, using the Google autocomplete bar, or exploring common search queries on Semrush. You can also use a software such as Storybase to find the best content ideas for all of your social platforms.

If your video content is offering useful answers to questions that are asked over and over, you’ll always have an audience.

Add Value/Interact With Pre-Existing Content

YouTube is a vast repository of video content, with over 500 hours of content uploaded every minute! As a result, almost every topic imaginable will have been covered by someone, somewhere in a dark corner of the platform.

So don’t worry about finding new topics to cover, but rather engage with what is already on there. Find elements missing from popular videos, pick holes in what they have to say, and engage competitively with successful content. Its popularity shows that there is an interested market in the topic, so take full advantage!

Creating evergreen content is an absolute must for any serious content marketer. It helps keep your web hits up, boosts your Google ranking, and saves you time, money and enormous amounts of effort!

Article by:

Torbjørn Flensted

CEO/Co-Founder