A comprehensive guide to evergreen content
Evergreen long-form content is helpful for growing your business’s online reach due to its permanent nature. It enables you to establish a strong foundation of consistently relevant web pages for your business.
In simple terms, content is ‘evergreen’ when it continues to be relevant over a long period of time. Examples of evergreen content are ‘guides’, ‘FAQs’ and ‘listicles’. They are general pieces of content that are easy to build on top of.
By including evergreen content in your SEO strategy, you can expand your company’s outreach and present a website that boasts both quantity and quality.
Want to learn all there is to know about evergreen content? Read on
What is the difference between time-sensitive and evergreen content?
When you’re writing content for a website or blog, it’s important to know the difference between evergreen and time-sensitive content. Like with keywords, some content can be useful only for a specific amount of time. Typically, this sort of information relates to news or trends. For example, you might be writing to advertise an upcoming networking event or a sale on your products or services.
For example, this blog post called Looking to the Future: Members of Team Embryo Give Their 2024 Marketing Predictions, would be time-sensitive because at the end of 2024, it will no longer be temporally accurate – and now, thanks to the inclusion of the future tense and 2024 as a time marker, neither will this article.
Evergreen content, by contrast, will remain relevant and valuable both to your potential customers and to the foundations of your company’s online visibility.
This might include things like well-written, comprehensive guides (like this one), listicles, resource lists, and information pages about your company’s products and services.
An example of consistently relevant Embryo content could be What are ‘Impressions’ on Pinterest? The key metrics explained, or Six reasons for cart abandonment and how to reduce it. In two weeks, months, or even years, the information in these articles will be as relevant and factually accurate as the day it was written.
However, it’s important to keep this page updated with progressions and developments to maintain maximum SEO and present the most compelling version of your company to online browsers.
Evergreen content is also a great way of demonstrating your company’s authority on a certain topic by presenting it with unerring and infinite certainty as a place for people to return to again and again.
Some common evergreen formats might include:
- Listicles – this is a good way of organising information under a certain topic that can help you build SEO advantageous topic clusters in an easy-to-read format.
- How-to content/Guides – like this one, are handy pages to have on your website to provide accessible information about how to use certain elements of your company in order to help customers engage with your content.
- Product Reviews – reviews are a good way of advertising products or services and providing expert or consumer testimonials to provide an authentic user experience.
- Glossaries – especially in marketing, glossaries can be a useful way of making certain terminology commonly used in relation to your brand accessible to your customers.
- Expert interviews – this content helps to demonstrate authority and expertise on your chosen topic by providing a trustworthy source who can provide factual information as well as a human element to your marketing strategy
- Case studies – similar to reviews, case studies show your audience that your products and services have been tried and tested. They help boost the empirical value of your content in order to attract a confident customer base.
- FAQ pages – these are a great and simple way of showing any potential customers what your company is about, and quickly answering any questions they may have. If customers can find the answers to their questions efficiently and without having to leave your website, they’re more likely to be interested in your company.
- Checklists – similar to guides, you can create an ultimate checklist that is easy to consume for the reader and provides value in a condensed way.
- History – You can have a history of a product or a service. It may not seem like the most relevant or interesting content, but it can be extremely effective as often other articles will link to ‘history’ pages.
How can evergreen content benefit your SEO?
Because evergreen content won’t go out of date, these web pages are more likely to be shared. This will, in turn, generate more backlinks to your site. As well as keyword rankings and high-quality content, backlinks are one of the most impactful things you can include to boost your website’s SEO and attract more organic traffic.
When considering which evergreen topics to write about, you must have a comprehensive understanding of which keywords lead to higher rankings for your website, and how this in turn encourages a higher CTR (click-through rate) from your website’s meta description.
You can check which keywords generate the highest search volume through third-party keyword researchers, such as Semrush or WordStream. From here, it’s about incorporating those keywords into high-quality evergreen copy for search engines in a tone that sounds natural and authoritative.
Remember, in order for your content to be successful, it’s worth remembering the acronym E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authority, trust). By keeping all of these factors in mind, you minimise the likelihood of shoehorning in keywords just for the sake of it by prioritising the actual content and tailoring it to the needs and preferences of web browsers to turn them into loyal customers.
One of our Embryo’s Content Writers, Ciara Johnson, says:
“Evergreen content hits every criteria of the helpful content guidelines.
It’s fresh, constantly up to date, unique and engaging. Seasonal or trending content can very quickly lose demand, whereas evergreen content is based on ongoing search volume and interest.
The more evergreen topics you produce compelling the content for, the more consistently your website brings in traffic.”
How to write evergreen content
To write successful, timeless evergreen content, you should try to avoid including specific years or references to temporary circumstances that are likely to change or be updated shortly. While some time-sensitive articles might have a longer shelf-life than others, ultimately it’s the evergreen content that will keep people coming back to the same source for trustworthy, accurate, and expertly conveyed information.
Think of it like visiting your favourite restaurant. If every time you go the food is good and reliably similar to what is on the menu, you’re more likely to go back. Whereas if you go to order from the menu, only to be told that they don’t serve those dishes anymore, you’ll be left at best slightly disappointed and at worst, hungry.
Often (but not always), evergreen articles tend to be longer and more in-depth than news updates or year-specific stats lists. By going in-depth to a certain topic, you’ll position yourself as more authoritative, and therefore more likely to be used as a point of reference via backlinks.
However, linking works the other way too. In order to demonstrate your own expertise, make sure you’re presenting well-researched and well-written information, and back it up with outbound links to show that you’ve engaged with other authorities on the topic.
Examples of our evergreen content:
| Article | Type of evergreen content |
| How to Pitch to Journalists in Digital PR | How-to content |
| 30 Vital Key Data Visualisation Effectiveness Stats | Listicle |
| Using a modern, multi-channel marketing strategy to transform business into an authority in an emerging market | Case Study |
Enjoy evergreen success with Embryo
The truth is that as well as evergreen content, your brand needs a wide range of copy to satisfy those all-important KPIs – from social media captions to snappy landing page copy. To learn more about how we can help facilitate that, contact us today.
FAQs
Answered by Charlie Meyler
Can local content be evergreen?
Yes, any content can be evergreen. This is all about the intent behind the user search query. A good example of this could be a guide about places in the local area eg ‘Things to see and do in Manchester.’
How many words should evergreen content be?
There isn’t a set amount of words for evergreen content. There are plenty of studies evidencing the correlation between higher word count and SEO benefits. A higher word count provides opportunities for more links, more knowledge providing, and places to prove authority. Look at your competitor’s work and top 10 pages ranking for your specific keyword to get an idea of the number of words on these pages that are performing well. There is no real upper limit to content- for blogs I would always say between 800 and 1000 words is enough for a good ranking, providing it is consistently hitting user intent.
What are the cons of evergreen content?
If it is not updated, it can actually date. Just because evergreen content is designed to last a long time doesn’t mean it won’t ever need tweaking, updating, changing, and pruning. You need to make sure that evergreen content is checked so that all information is most relevant, up to date, and matches the current state of things.
Can I post evergreen content as a blog post?
Yes absolutely! I always think, with all of my content, where is the best place for this content going to be in order for it to perform well? For example, a topic that is revisited regularly may be better having its own topic cluster, also providing an opportunity for internal links. Blogs are usually stand-alone for a reason, because they are highly topical and usually age quickly. As long as user intent is met and you think it would perform better as a stand-alone piece, evergreen content can definitely be in the form of blogs.
