What Is Evergreen Content and Why Is It Important?
The importance of evergreen content for any writer, marketer, or entrepreneur
What is Evergreen Content?
Evergreen content is content that is perpetually relevant to readers. Due to its timeless subject matter and its appeal to a large and recurring audience, evergreen content has no real expiration date and retains its value long-term.
The term “evergreen content” comes from the Evergreen plant— a plant that has leaves throughout the year that are always green. And much like the way the plant retains its colors year round, evergreen content is characterized by its consistent ability to drive traffic.
The reliable stream of traffic that evergreen content produces can be attributed to:
- Search Engine Optimized (SEO) Content — Given that content is largely discovered through search engines, its not surprising that a lot of evergreen articles are search engine optimized. This can include the use of strategic article titles, customizing an article’s meta description, utilization of custom images, and organizing content into numbered or bulled lists.
- Original Content — Both search engines and readers crave original content. Originality is a key attribute of evergreen content. It’s OK to aggregate information (such as in a master listicle) but you must make sure the writing is original and that you are adding insightful analysis. Otherwise readers and search engines will refer to the articles you are citing.
- Demand for a Topic — There must be proper demand for a topic in order for it to produce sufficient traffic. This does not mean that evergreen content must only discuss broadly searched topics. Creating authoritative content within a niche can be a great way to create evergreen content. Still, there must be steady demand for a topic, in order for there to be ample traffic.
- Clear and Concise Writing — You may feel the need to share your expertise, but do so in a way that caters to beginners. Experts aren’t likely to be searching on broad topics, and you want to generate evergreen content for a large and recurring audience. Similarly, beginners often don’t understand overly-technical language, so try to avoid using it whenever possible.
- Article Structure — Evergreen content is typically structured in an organized form that is easy for both readers and search engines to scan and interpret the content. An example of this is using article section headers to organize your articles into subtopics. This makes it easier for readers to follow. It also helps search engines which will interpret the coded headers as a new layer within your article. Clear structure will also make it easier for your your content to become Google’s featured snippet (which can be seen as a strong indicator of evergreen content).
“Evergreen content is content that is perpetually relevant to readers. Due to its timeless subject matter and its appeal to a large and recurring audience, evergreen content has no real expiration date and retains its value long-term.”
Why is Evergreen Content Important?
- Lead Generation — Since these posts will be ranking highly and receiving a large amount of traffic you should properly optimize these posts to collect leads. These posts can bring you a steady stream of leads for a long time without you having to do any additional work beyond the initial publishing and promotion.
- Traffic — Since evergreen content tends to rank higher in the search engines, this means these posts can be responsible for a lot of website traffic. Once these posts rank highly they tend to stay, since they are often the definitive pieces of content on the topic. This means this kind of post will send your site a high volume of traffic even a long while after you published the post.
- Scale/Efficiency — Evergreen content will work for your you or your business a long time after it’s originally published. Typically when a writer posts their content online, the trajectory of views is fairly common:
Content that is topical or time-sensitive tends to experience a brief spike in traffic followed by a significant drop off in views.
Evergreen content remains relatively steady in producing views, and can even increase in views as it climbs the ranks to become a top search engine result.
What Article Style is Best for Creating Evergreen Content?
There is no single type of content best suited for evergreen content. There are a few types of article structures that are frequently used in most evergreen content.
1. How To Guides
How to guides are a prime example of evergreen content. These guides can be divided into two basic groups — content that remains pertinent, regardless of passing time and changing culture, and content that loses relevance and importance over time if it’s not tended to and updated to reflect changing trends and technology.
Examples of the first type of how to guides, content that remains pertinent, regardless of passing time and changing culture, would be a guide such as “How to Change a Tire” or “How to Tie a Tie.” The answers to these topics may change slightly over time, but a well written how to guide will contain essentially the correct information for the next few decades.
Examples of the second type of how to guides, content that loses relevance and importance over time if it’s not tended to and updated to reflect changing trends and technology, would be “How to Bypass Virtually Any Paywall” (an article I actually wrote).
People, for the foreseeable future, will be looking for ways to get around paywalls and improve their online reading experience. This article has generated nearly 300,000 views and shows no signs of slowing down.
However, unlike the first type of how to guides, this article will need to be tweaked periodically, to ensure that it is still an accurate, up-to-date, and definitive guide. But the beauty of evergreen content is that even if you have to make updates, once you obtain a high ranking in search engines, it is harder for a new article to come along and “dethrone” you as the definitive source on that topic.
2. Case Studies
Case studies are an effective form of evergreen content because they involve conducting deep research on a topic and, typically, a first person account of an experience. This
88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as recommendations given to them from people they know. That’s a huge number.
You can take advantage of this with evergreen content by doing a case study, which is really just a long-form review. Someone is telling you their experience with a product/service/technique.
A good example of this type of content is an article I wrote “How to Make $158,404 in Passive Income Writing Books for Amazon KDP.” This article covers two highly searched topics — publishing a book on Amazon and passive income. People will be searching for both of these topics for the foreseeable future.
In this article, I document my experience writing and publishing books on Amazon. This content is effective because:
- I essentially provide a mini how to guide (the previous type of evergreen content referenced).
- I share my personal experience following the steps outlined.
- I provide actual outcome data, allowing the reader the assess the efficacy of my steps. Specifically, I disclose my earnings utilizing this method:
Not only do these characteristics make the content valuable to readers, but the bounce rate (the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page) is much lower because readers can understand my thought process, and if they find it useful, they can easily read more of my other content.
3. Product Reviews
Sharing product reviews and testimonials from customers on your website can help build trust with potential customers as well as provide great SEO results.
Product reviews are effective because you can form a bond with the reader, something vary difficult to achieve through standard content.
For example, I wrote an article reviewing the mobile app 1Q which is a great way to make small amounts of money, by answering a single multiple choice question that you sporadically receive through the app.
Part of why this review is effective, is I genuinely use the product and I feel comfortable recommending it to my readers. It payout instantly through PayPal and it is hands down one of the best money making apps I’ve reviewed.
As long as this app remains functional and reliable, my review will be a valuable piece of content for new readers. Even if the app did change, because I actually use the app, personally, I would be able to edit my article so that it was still useful to readers. This would further reinforce this status as evergreen content.
4. List Posts
List posts (or listicles) were pioneered by clickbait publishers like Buzzfeed and Upworthy in the mid-2010s, and have slowly made their way onto independent blogs and company news sections. While their content was originally intended as click-bait, it is possible to write lists with quality content in mind.
List posts are always very readable (for both readers and search engine crawling bots) if structured correctly. People will bookmark a well-structured post and search engine bots will favor content with clearly marked sections, especially lists, as they can easily recognize the format.
An example of evergreen content that is a list post is 12 Free Stock Photo Sites for Medium Stories:
This article addresses a specific need (royalty free stock photos) and organized the answers to these questions (websites that provide stock photos) in a single article.
The advantages of using a list format for your evergreen content are:
- Readers have an easier time following lists and are familiar with the format.
- The reader can quickly scan the list to gauge whether the websites suggested are a good solution to their problem.
- Lists allow you to aggregate content from various topics, allowing you to cross promote content from different subject areas. This can help introduce your existing readers to other articles or types of content you have written.
5. Glossary
You can create evergreen content around the history of your niche or product by building a glossary or producing an exhaustive “everything you need to know” post.
An example of this would be my article The Best Medium Article Formatting Guide:
This contains an explanation of virtually every formatting term associated with writing on Medium. It offers an exhaustive guide which encourages readers to bookmark the page or return to the article when they have new questions.
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Casey Botticello is an internet entrepreneur and the founder of Blogging Guide, an online community of writers with an award-winning newsletter. He is also the creator of the popular Medium Writing Course and the Substack Newsletter Course.
Casey previously worked at several tech startups, a lobbying & strategic communications firm, and has created several businesses of his own. He is a graduate of The University of Pennsylvania, where he received his B.A. in Urban Studies.
You can connect with him on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, follow his Medium publications, Digital Marketing Lab and Medium Blogging Guide, or reach out to him directly on his personal website.
