What is Evergreen Content?

You may have noticed that nowadays, it’s all about content marketing, which is basically what you say, and most importantly how you say it. Customers want to know that you are an expert in your area, and one of the ways to prove it, is to produce evergreen content.

What is it?

Evergreen content can be defined as « forever green », which means it never dies or becomes outdated. It’s also a reference to evergreen trees which are known for retaining their leaves throughout the year. Contents in blog posts, white papers or e-books for example, are considered evergreen if they are: simple, timeless and beginner friendly. The point here is that, everybody should understand what you are trying to say, even though they know nothing on the subject. Creating such content is far more sustainable for your business than regular news and reports.

How to create it?

FAQs, “how to” guides, “x ways to” guides, tutorials, case studies, glossaries of terms, “history of…” articles, just to name a few. The most popular example of evergreen content is Wikipedia. Although they are frequently updated, Wikipedia pages are practically eternal. Their content is timeless because it’s beginner friendly, straightforward and simple.

Why should you create it?

The good thing about these types of posts, is that they are perfectly reusable. Just don’t mention the date, and you can publish it a year after you writing it. It’s totally up to you. Also, evergreen content is one of the keys to search engine optimization. Have you ever noticed how Wikipedia pages are always first in Google results? It’s because high-quality evergreen content gets very good ranking from search engines.

What is not evergreen?

– An event report
– A press release
– Statistics
– “Trends” article
These types of content all have one thing in common: they provide information that will easily be outdated.

Do’s:

– Include SEO, for more powerful content
– Link posts together
– Publish regularly

Don’ts:

– Post very short articles
– Use technical words
– Write on every topic under the sun: choose a specific one to reach your niche and generate leads

Examples of websites which swear by evergreen content

1. Wikipedia

2. Entrepreneur

Non-evergreen content is useful too

Although evergreen content is more sustainable in the long run, you should definitely still publish non-evergreen content, every now and then. To get traffic as much traffic as possible, don’t underestimate the power of events, which can have an immediate impact on traffic. You just have to figure out how to turn it into a unique, long lasting content, like a “x ways to…” article.