How to Create and Maintain Evergreen Content

Creating and maintaining evergreen content can be one of the best strategies for increasing traffic to your website, if the process is undertaken properly. In fact, your evergreen articles can become your largest single source of targeted traffic, provided that you make good choices on the topics for your content.While most marketing gurus are well aware of the value of evergreen content, and the vital role it can play in marketing, it's still not generally known among many Internet users. This discussion will center around the value of evergreen content, and why you should make a huge effort to create it and maintain it as part of your overall marketing strategy.

Importance of evergreen content

If you haven't heard the term before, evergreen content refers to all those posts which seemingly never go out of date, because the topic of the post is universal in its approach and can be appreciated indefinitely. Evergreen content will always contain useful information that remains relevant through the years to a broad number of readers.The trick is in choosing your evergreen topic, because it's very possible to settle on a topic which seems to be evergreen, but in actual practice turns out to be something different. For instance, if you were to write an article about bitcoin pricing, it's very possible that this trendy kind of topic has little or no relevance in just a few years. However, if you were to write content about how to go about shedding a few pounds, this will likely have relevance far into the future.The reason evergreen content is so important is that it helps your post sustain its appeal beyond that first day when it's a brand-new post on the Internet, and hopefully allows you to avoid the inevitable period that comes when people completely lose interest in it. Another reason why evergreen content is important is because if you're successful in creating good evergreen content, it means that you won't have to write as many posts, because it will save you time and money by remaining popular.It will also provide you with a source of steady traffic, because Google does not rank content which becomes outdated. If you can create evergreen content that stays fresh and relevant to readers, it will remain highly ranked and your flow of traffic will remain steady.

How to pick good evergreen topics

Researching your keywords is always a key to writing good content which is of interest to your readers. That means your first step in finding good evergreen topics is to focus on keywords which demonstrate consistent popularity and tend to generate a high volume of traffic. In tandem with this step, it's a good idea to conduct a little research into your target audience and get their feedback, so that you can learn about issues of interest to them, and what their pain points are.

One of the ways that you can help yourself considerably in researching your keywords is to use Google's Keyword Planner. This isn't foolproof though, because the Keyword Planner tends to be focused on ads, and it also groups keywords by volume, and this can sometimes make it difficult to evaluate their potential effectiveness. There are also other keyword tools which will apprise you of search volumes that you can trust, so that you can analyze their search potential.Before writing your content, assemble a fair number of keyword ideas and see how they rank with users. Those which are consistently ranked highly may be suitable topics for your evergreen content. After having determined keywords you want to use in your content, you should check out which topics are trending on the Internet. Those which are declining should be simply disregarded, because they're already on the downslide, and you should also avoid seasonal topics because these will lose their appeal as soon as the season is over.You're much better off selecting topics which show stable appeal over an entire calendar year, with no real significant ups and downs. Always keep in mind what any potential reader is intending when they conduct a search. Whenever such topics are unclear, they probably will not be good candidates for evergreen content. Regardless of how great your content is, it won't be ranked highly by Google because it will not seem to match the intent of what users are searching for, so your content will be pushed down in the rankings.

Creating your own evergreen content

The Holy Grail which all Evergreen content writers aim at is to create content which is the best possible choice for Internet readers today, tomorrow, and for many years beyond the present time. Always keep in mind that your content should be aimed at Internet users rather than business marketers, because that's exactly how Google ranks all content.All this being said, some of the best performing evergreen content articles are those which fall into a few specific categories. How-to articles remain popular because they provide a valuable step-by-step instruction to users, and often help them understand how a product or service should be used. The expert opinion article is very useful to a broad number of readers, and if you happen not to be an expert in your particular field, it may be worth your while to borrow some material from those who are.List posts are always popular because they organize ideas and clearly display them in a very readable format, but you have to make sure not to overdo these kind of posts, simply because they're already so popular. Another really popular category of evergreen content are posts which include Frequently Asked Questions, because many users will immediately zero in on this kind of article to find out information which they need about a particular subject.

Maintaining your evergreen content

Once you have created some outstanding evergreen content, that doesn't mean it should be left alone for the duration of its life. Even good evergreen content requires periodic updating with information that has changed, and this will generally cause Google to reevaluate your content, and keep it ranked highly. Even these periodic updates will cost you far less investment of time and effort than the creation of entirely new content, so if you have a highly-ranked evergreen post, it's certainly worth keeping it fresh and of interest to new readers all the time.