In a marketing world obsessed with new shiny objects (TikTok, AI tools, vertical video, stories, reels and YouTube shorts), it is easy to get caught running harder and faster in a quest to break the algorithm code of increased exposure.
Chasing social media impressions and engagement certainly can work. And it’s absolutely worthy of your time to keep abreast of trends and leverage them to your advantage. But what if there was something equally as effective, remarkably simple, that would deliver results over the long term?
Enter evergreen content.
Search versus entertainment
Evergreen content is that stuff you produce, which lives online forever, easily mined in search, which drives interest in your business, and sales on a monthly basis. Like the mighty evergreen tree that never drops its needles, it just keeps on doing the reps for you – every season of the year.
What is evergreen content?
Think blog posts of timeless relevance, YouTube videos, and to a certain extent Pinterest pins linking to blog posts. What all of these have in common is the mindset of the viewer. The are in SEARCH mode, looking to discover something new, or solve a problem.
Most often the mindset of the social media scroller is fleeting – they are in ENTERTAINMENT mode and easily distracted.
Creating evergreen content is a bit like hanging out with adults, rather than toddlers.
Adults versus toddlers
Unlike social media, evergreen content doesn’t require daily (and sometimes hourly) feeding of content and minding of comments. If social media is the toddler requiring constant attention, evergreen content is the adult who, after initial thoughtful direction, happily continues to do their job, without further attention.
So let’s have a look at what the top 10% of bloggers do in terms of best practices for producing content that consistently ranks high in search, and remains there because it is evergreen.
10 tips from the top 10% of bloggers
1. Publish daily
This is likely to be a tall order for many, but some sense of regularity is definitely rewarded. Google SEO content crawlers love new content, and reward sites that produce it consistently.
2. Write 3000+ word articles
In a world of fleeting attention, this may seem counter intuitive, but in blogging, the depth of coverage on a topic matters. Google SEO rewards articles which people spend time on, and don’t leave to search for more, or go somewhere else. Exhaustive coverage, ideally with internal links to related articles on the same topic or theme, gets rewarded.
3. Write 10+ draft headlines before choosing one
This is where AI tools can work their magic. Combined with a preliminary search for key words you wish to rank for, getting those terms into the headline can work magic. Using a paid plugin tool like Yoast on the back end of your WordPress site can also help in analyzing headline effectiveness, in addition to optimizing for keyword search within content. But then plugging this basic info into an AI tool like ChatGPT, asking for alternatives, then testing them, is a game changing time saver.
4. Search keywords for every post
Keywords are the single words or phrases that someone might be searching for when they are inquiring online about a topic. There are many AI assisted tools out there to potentially help with this, but one tool that is fun to play with is https://answerthepublic.com/ It allows you to discover what people are asking about, and renders search numbers and possible phrases to consider for keywords. Of course you can also go old school and just start typing into Google, and see what words are offered in sentence completion, since that will indicate what is most often searched for. Then link to see what type of content shows up, and decide if you might be able to outrank it with a more thorough post.
5. Include 10+ images per post
Images are eye candy, but they also serve to break up long form content and make it more easily read. Being sure to tag images with the keyword search names included is another often overlooked way to adding SEO juice to the post
6. Add video to most of your articles
This of course adds another layer of work to a post, but it also makes it that much more informative, engaging, and ultimately rewarded by Google, due to time spent on the post. I personally do this with all of my travel post content on Carryonqueen.com, and with many of the articles here on fiveminutemarketing.com. The key is to post the video to your YouTube channel, and then link it, so it plays automatically in the post. But videos can also be discovered on YouTube – through search, or as suggested content which YouTube will do, and readily reward with increased viewers, if people are finding it engaging and useful. I always also tag the post link and content description in the YouTube video, to enable viewers there to come back to the blog content, should that be where they first found it. I’ve had videos blow up (and posts as a result) simply by the embedded videos ability to show up in search. Not to be overlooked in all this is the fact that Google owns YouTube, so video there is tied strongly to search results for evergreen content.
7. Check analytics
This goes without saying, but knowing where traffic is coming from, the number of page visits to your site or landing page, and for how long, matters. I was able to embed a newsletter sign up mid article specifically catered to the readers, on a piece of content published back in 2013, which continues to deliver a steady stream of traffic and subscribers. Why? Because somebody at the Wharton School of Business uses the post and examples in it, teaching at their school of business. It’s like clockwork every fall and winter. That’s likely the oldest example, but there are many recent ones on both my fiveminutemarketing.com and carryonqueen.com blogs.
8. Contributor quotes
Where possible, and ideally for every post, get contributor quotes. This serves three purposes: link backs to other reputable sites are usually reciprocated (which helps your overall SEO), it adds authority (see above for SEO), and there is strong potential that those quoted will share the content out to their audience, resulting in increased exposure.
9. Original research
Conducting some sort of original research, and share the results through multiple posts about the topic – ideally all internally linked posts, with one uniting anchor piece of content. This signals to Google thought leadership or expertise in your particular area.
10. Update blog posts
It’s important to update content for accuracy even though you may consider it evergreen in nature. Finessing a few paragraphs to mention current examples, shifts in trends, or referencing updated regulations, is all that might be required. A fresh set of eyes which asks – is there any way this could be more helpful in its current form?
A recent example where I saw an immediate jump in traffic, was for “Is Angels Landing Really That Scary?” on my travel writing site. By simply updating the content around the lottery ticking system for daily trail access, now made permanent after a trial, Google seems to have given it elevated status. The post was already doing well in search, but it also seems to have had a knock on effect, with over 2.5k YouTube video views on my channel, within the video embedded in the content.
Of course paid promotion can also deliver increased search results, but as you can see here, there is a lot which can be done to deliver increased results and traction, through a simple organic approach, tied to creating evergreen content.
Some additional questions for you to consider when assessing your evergreen content marketing strategy:
- Does your site have a blog? (It should, so Google has fresh content to crawl!)
- Do you publish content, related to your area of expertise, regularly?
- Do you follow the best practices noted above?
- Do you have a YouTube channel?
- Do you publish video content (traditional long form horizontal, or short form vertical), related to your area of expertise, regularly?
- Do you follow the best practices noted above for embedding videos, and linking to post content from them?
