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 This type of content doesn’t go out of date.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:
- How to cook a healthy vegetarian meal in 10 minutes?
- How to write content with sincerity and focus?
- What are the ageless tenets of copywriting no matter what the medium?
- What differentiates a great content writer from an average content writer?
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.
