Tag Archives: Evergreen Content

Should you publish evergreen content or trendy content?

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Evergreen content or trendy content

Evergreen content or trendy content?

For lasting search engine rankings, it is often recommended that you publish evergreen content.

What is evergreen content?

Evergreen content is the content that is relevant for a long time – even multiple years. This type of content doesn’t go out of date. You can call it practically an ageless wisdom.

Take for example, if right now I write a list of tips on how to write SEO content (assuming that the search engine algorithms by now have matured a lot), I’m pretty sure that provided I stick to the fundamental Google SEO guidelines, it will be an evergreen content.

People will find this blog post useful and relevant for at least 2-3 years and consequently, it should enjoy higher search engine rankings accordingly.

Here are some examples of evergreen content titles:

What is trendy content?

Trendy content or non-evergreen content is topical and relevant to something that is going on right now.

Let’s hope we don’t have to write evergreen content on Covid, but right now, if I write something about content writing related to Covid, it is a trendy topic.

Take for example this blog post that I wrote recently: Am I getting more content writing assignments post-Covid?

As you can see, since Covid is a temporary situation (hopefully) this is a trendy topic. It is based on an ongoing trend.

When Covid is over, except for journalists, academicians, scientists and doctors, there will be few people searching for it.

Striking a balance between evergreen content and trendy content

Trendy content gets you instant traffic. Evergreen content gets you ongoing traffic.

Both types of content are important. When you publish trendy topics, for a few days you increase your visibility. More people can find your website or blog.

They may link to you. They may share your content on social media. They may also stumble upon evergreen content.

Since Google may be constantly looking for updated content to present to its users searching on a trending topic, it will quickly crawl and index your trendy content.

A problem with trendy content might be that since thousands of bloggers and web publishers may be writing on the trending topic, the competition might be too high.

In such cases, you should give the trending topic your own twist. Write about something that is about the trending topic, but an aspect that very few people are covering.

What about highly competitive content for evergreen topics? The same advice. Even for evergreen content, the competition might be quite high. Give your own twist. Create a unique title that very few people might be covering.

What should be the balance between evergreen content and trendy content?

My personal experience says that go with the flow. Regularity is more important than strategizing in this regard, as long as you maintain a balance.

Participate in ongoing conversations. At the same time, publish content that people are going to look up for, for a long time.

You get more back links for evergreen content because publishers who are linking to your content know that it is going to be relevant for a long time to come.

Yes, they also link to trending topics but only when they themselves are writing about those trending topics and they want to add value or add another perspective.

 

Are you updating your evergreen content?

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Auditing your existing evergreen content

Auditing your existing evergreen content

If you wrote and published your evergreen content a few months ago or a few years ago, even if it enjoyed better search engine rankings back then, by now it must have moved down. Can you bring it up again? This Business2Community blog post says that updating your evergreen content can help you improve your overall SEO.

Although this post puts more stress on the need to target individual stages of your sales funnel through updating your evergreen content, my main point is to reignite the rankings of your existing evergreen content by constantly auditing it and then updating it.

What is evergreen content?

As the name suggests, it is the content that remains relevant irrespective of when your website visitors access it.

It can be your homepage. Your FAQs. Your how-to guides. Your case studies and white papers.

So, if it is evergreen content, why do you need to update it?

Over the time, the context changes, and the data that you used changes, the preferences of your website visitors change, and you gain more knowledge.

There are many webpages and blog posts on my website that I think I can change. I’m certainly a better writer than what I was 5-10 years ago. I’m certainly less pretentious. I have learnt how to say more with less words. I know not to get obsessed with keywords. I can clearly see that some blog posts can be stretched to 2000 words from merely 500 words (read about my content writing services for long blog posts).

Hence, I can make changes to my evergreen content and align it more with the contemporary ways of writing optimized content.

You should do the same. I can understand that revisiting existing content and then undertaking the task of rewriting it or updating it seems daunting, especially, when writing new content seems more exciting.

But believe me, improving your search engine rankings by updating your existing content is much easier compared to writing new content. It is also faster.

Create a list of all your web pages and blog posts and arrange the list vertically in an Excel sheet. In the next 2-3 columns, write the dates on which you are updating the links. This way, you will be able to track when you have updated these links.

Writing a new blog post or a new web page may take anywhere between 3-4 hours. You can audit and edit an existing blog post or web page in just half an hour.

 

 

 

What is evergreen content and why it is good for your business

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Evergreen Content

Evergreen content remains relevant to your audience no matter when it is accessed. It does not depend on the current trend or another hot topic people are dying to read about. It is like the wisdom of the ancients – it can be applied anytime.

Take for instance the importance of quality content. The importance of quality content never wanes no matter when you use it, no matter how you use it and no matter which channel or which language you use to publish and distribute it. If you read Dostoevsky or any other such writer you will realise that, although the circumstances happening inside the novel might be related to that time, the inherent message, the inherent dynamics of how the characters react to different situations, have timeless attributes.

The greatest benefit of creating evergreen content is that it gives you a steady stream of traffic over a long period of time. Since the traffic does not depend on a particular time a post that you write in 2014 may go viral in 2016 due to some related events taking place. I will give you a small example. I’m a big fan of cleanliness and whenever I get an opportunity to write something on this topic, I do it with great enthusiasm. So a few months ago I wrote about how great I feel when the new Prime Minister Narendra Modi again and again stresses upon the need to clean up India at the earliest. As I say, the article was published many months ago. Then this October 2, 2014 (Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday) Narendra Modi launched his government’s “Clean India” campaign and the online newspaper that had originally published my piece on cleanliness replugged it on Twitter and it got more hits than it had got when it was published and promoted for the first time. This is the article I’m talking about.

Another benefit of creating evergreen content is that it increases the level of familiarity among the regular net surfers. Since there is a greater chance of evergreen content being shared on multiple websites over a long period of time, people will come across it multiple times helping them remember your brand name or your company name or your name. Familiarity and trust are very important for any business to grow on the Internet.

But how to write evergreen content?

Some good examples of evergreen content are:

  • A blog post that is repeatedly updated according to new developments taking place centered around the chosen theme (The football World Cup statistics spanning multiple world cups)
  • Why your product or service is the ultimate solution to the perennial problem being faced by your prospective customers and clients
  • Your FAQs section giving answer to possibly every question someone may have about your product or service
  • Chronicling the activities of your office pet animal
  • The common grammar mistakes repeatedly made by professional content writers
  • Using historical references to explain your business tactics

Remember that the basic idea of writing evergreen content for your website or blog is to give people something that they can make use of, share or talk about at any time whether they do it now or 10 years from now. Even 100 years.