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.