Evergreen content: more marketing with less effort

Evergreen content is designed from the outset to have the longest possible shelf life. It will keep bringing new visitors to your site for months or even years without you having to constantly update it. In this article, I explain how to find and implement such topics.

Why is evergreen content a good idea?

If you create content for your website, then you’ve probably already experienced it yourself: Publishing is usually not the end of the job. Among other things, you have to make sure that the posts remain up-to-date and relevant. If they are no longer relevant, you have to make a decision: delete, improve or simply ignore?

One way to keep this follow-up effort in check is “evergreen content”: content that stays fresh and up-to-date for a long time. At the same time, it constantly brings new visitors to your site. This in turn has a positive effect on your content ROI (return on investment): The income from the content increases steadily, while the effort is high, especially at the beginning, but is low afterwards.

Evergreen content also has the potential to increase your brand’s visibility on the social web if it is recommended again and again. In most cases, it can also regularly collect more external links, which in turn helps the search engine optimisation (SEO) of your entire website.

Last but not least, evergreen content is particularly popular in content marketing. After all, it often answers basic questions. This means you can reach people who are at the beginning of their customer journey. You can then hopefully prove to them that you are as knowledgeable as you are trustworthy with further helpful articles.

In short: evergreen content pays off in the long term. The only question is: How do you find the right topics? And how do you best implement them?

Evergreen content: Finding topic ideas

I have already described in a separate article how you can test and refine content ideas in advance. Many of the tips and hints from that article also apply in this case. One point: make sure that your topic ideas match the company’s goals. They don’t have to lead directly to the goal. This is usually not realistic, as the decision-making processes for many products and offers are too long for this. However, they should make a recognisable and ideally measurable contribution.

The next step is keyword research and competitor analysis: Do you have a chance of prevailing against existing posts with your content? And if that seems doubtful: can you change your idea, its realisation or even the content format to improve your prospects?

With regard to evergreen content, there is another question: Can I implement the topic in such a way that it remains current and relevant for as long as possible? A basic rule for this is: the more general you make your post, the better. Nevertheless, it should also be helpful enough, otherwise nobody will want to read it.

Let’s take the topic of “WordPress” as an example. Things are constantly changing here. New features are added, others are removed or revised. How can you deal with this?

• You could write an article: “All the new features in WordPress 6.1”. This is as up-to-date as it is relevant around the release date of this version. However, your article will be outdated as soon as WordPress 6.2 is discussed and released.
• A more general article would be: “10 WordPress functions you don’t know yet”. You also need to keep this content up to date so that your descriptions and screenshots still fit. You will also add or remove a function from time to time. But the lifespan of this article is already quite a bit longer.
• An even more general article would be: “5 areas of application for WordPress”. In principle, this is also still about functionality. But the topic has been generalised to such an extent that you only need to update it occasionally.

Of course, you should measure the success of the content and keep your target group in mind. After all, someone who is already familiar with WordPress will hardly be interested in the last post example.

Another option for evergreen content are the fundamental issues briefly mentioned above. Explained using the topic of WordPress: A how-to article with solutions for the “white screen of death”, for example, will remain current for quite some time.

Tip: It’s worth taking a look at the content archive

All of this is not necessarily about implementing new content. You can also find one or two diamonds in the rough in your existing content. In fact, I would advise you to try this first. One reason for this is that this content has usually collected its first backlinks and social interactions. They can therefore get off to a flying start compared to a completely new post.

Search engines also like it when you revise, update and improve existing content. It also avoids duplication of effort. You don’t have to create a second post on a topic that you’ve already covered. Last but not least, similar content can even get in each other’s way in terms of SEO if they target the same keyword.

Implement evergreen content correctly

Speaking of search engine optimisation: evergreen content will receive many visitors via Google & Co. It is therefore important to keep SEO in mind during planning and implementation. This includes the keyword research mentioned above. But also, for example, a WDF*IDF analysis to understand which other terms, questions and topics should appear in your content so that it achieves a high level of relevance.

Even more important is the question: What information needs does your target group have? The answer to this is just as relevant when assessing potential competition. Are they addressing the same group of people that you have in mind? For example, it makes a difference whether you are active in the B2B or B2C sector. Or whether you are targeting professionals or non-professionals.

Another question: Which content format is best suited to which channel? On the one hand, it depends on where you think your content is most likely to prevail over other posts. On the other hand, it also depends on what your target group prefers and what makes sense for the intended purpose.

Content is usually very fast-moving, especially on the social web. Exceptions are platforms such as YouTube or Pinterest, which also serve as a visual search engine. Offerings such as TikTok or Instagram, on the other hand, are designed more for the moment and are therefore usually not particularly suitable for evergreen content.

Success factors for evergreen content

The portal Backlinko has analysed 3.6 billion pieces of content to find out more about success factors for evergreen content. How-tos and lists seem to work particularly well. And it’s no wonder: they are usually as practical as they are helpful. As the author of the content, you relieve your readership of the effort of researching and prepare the knowledge in the most digestible way possible.

Overviews of an industry and facts and figures that you have researched yourself are therefore also promising. With such content, you ideally create virtual contact points for information seekers. And in the case of self-organised studies and surveys, you even offer new insights and findings that only you have and no one else. This is a major competitive advantage in the content business.

At the same time, evergreen content does not have to be particularly detailed to work well. It can be enough to answer frequently asked questions briefly and concisely. However, the disadvantage of such short posts is that users often leave as soon as their question has been answered. With in-depth content, it is more likely to get them interested in further articles, downloading a whitepaper or subscribing to your newsletter.

A successful approach to content distribution

Once you have found your topic and realised it perfectly, it’s time to distribute the content. You should also invest a lot of energy here so that your efforts pay off. As a reading tip, you can find my detailed guide to content distribution here in the magazine.

A special feature of “evergreen” content is that this content is also distributed over the long term. So you don’t just promote these posts once or twice. Ideally, you will always find new ideas and opportunities. For evergreen content, I recommend that you pay particular attention to the following points:

• Make sure you have thought of the essential SEO tricks. If you publish the content on your own site, remember to display it prominently and link to it as often as possible from other relevant posts.
• Pay attention to the shareability of your content. It should naturally inspire, i.e. meet the target group’s need for information and satisfy it particularly well. And it should be perfectly suited to the platform for which it was created. So always pay attention to what goes down well here and also fits in with your goals.
• Make multipliers (influencers) and relevant websites aware of your content. I advise you to do this in a targeted and manual way and not via an automatic tool. This will work particularly well if your content is excellently realised or contains exclusive information. At the same time: promotional articles are rarely recommended and distributed.
• In the spirit of classic content marketing, you should therefore concentrate on enriching the internet with relevant and helpful content.
• Last but not least, you will also think about paid distribution methods. Depending on the topic and target group, this may include adverts via Google Ads or Facebook Ads. The rule of thumb from my article on content distribution: With Google Ads, you can reach people who have a specific question. With Facebook Ads, on the other hand, you can target people who have specific interests or who match demographic data.

And even though I mentioned content distribution at the very end, you should think about it right from the start. Then you already know which other elements you need.

In the case of a how-to article for the B2B sector, this can mean that you put together a slideshow for LinkedIn with the most important tips and statements. Or a how-to becomes an Instagram story. If you have planned this from the outset, it can be created in parallel with your content.

Evergreen content can be a lot of work at the beginning. But, as explained at the beginning, this investment pays off over many years, while the follow-up effort remains low. At the same time, this does not mean that you should leave this content completely to its own devices.

On the contrary, especially if a post is already working well, you should decide how often you want to revise, expand and update it. Otherwise, you may end up forgetting about it or it may be displaced by the competition.