The Everlasting Benefits of Evergreen Content and Why Your Website Needs It

Content is the sustenance that makes your website valuable to its audience. It gives users a reason to visit and interact with your website. Without it, your website’s traffic and conversions will suffer. Some forms of content, however, are more valuable than others. No matter what type of website you operate, evergreen content will bring the greatest benefits to it.

What Is Evergreen Content?

Content is considered evergreen if it has a long shelf life during which it remains accurate and relevant. It can consist of how-to articles, tips, lists, guides, tutorials and more. Regardless, the defining characteristic of evergreen content is a long shelf life.

Even if a piece of content is relevant and accurate when you initially publish it, it may lose these qualities in the near future. Most news articles, for instance, have a short period of relevance. If you publish a news article about an upcoming local event, it will become irrelevant once the event has ended. Therefore, news articles aren’t considered evergreen content; they are considered time-sensitive content.

Traffic Growth

All forms of content can bring visitors to your website, but evergreen content is a step above the rest in its ability to generate traffic. It won’t just increase your website’s traffic; evergreen content will grow your website’s traffic.

With evergreen content, the number of visitors your website attracts will increase over time. Users who discover it may bookmark and return to it in the future. At the same time, evergreen content will continue to attract new users long after you publish it. Time-sensitive content has the opposite effect. As it loses relevance, it will attract fewer users to your website.

Social Media Engagement

Evergreen content performs better on social media than time-sensitive content. Social media networks are filled with pieces of evergreen content shared by users. Most social media users share content because they believe it’s valuable and relevant to their followers. Evergreen content fits the bill in this regard. It stays valuable and relevant for a long time, so users share it more frequently on social media than other forms of content.

The high rates of social media engagement associated with evergreen content will boost your website’s presence on popular social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Users of these social networks will share links to evergreen content published on your website. Each of these shared links will create a mention of your website that other users can click to visit your website.

Easy Maintenance

Evergreen content is easy to maintain. With its long-lasting relevance, you won’t have to update it as frequently as time-sensitive content. Many pieces of evergreen content, in fact, don’t require any updating. Once you publish them, you can move on to other website development activities. Evergreen content will continue to bring new and returning users to your website without any additional work on your behalf.

Time-sensitive content, on the other hand, often requires regular updating. If you publish a news article about an upcoming event, you’ll probably want to go back and update it after the event has taken place. Even then, the news article will have little relevance.

Natural and Organic Backlinks

Your website will attract natural and organic backlinks with evergreen content. When other webmasters and bloggers discover it, they may want to share it with their own visitors. Instead of just copying your website’s content, they’ll link to it from their sites and blogs.

Time-sensitive content can attract natural and organic backlinks as well, but it’s not as effective as its evergreen counterpart. It may take a while for other webmasters and bloggers to discover it. By that time, the content may be inaccurate or irrelevant, in which case they probably won’t link to it.

Repurposing

You can easily repurpose evergreen content for other marketing activities. Evergreen articles and blog posts, for instance, can be repurposed into infographics. Just take some of the key facts or points and convert them into an attractive illustrated image. Canva and Venngage are two online tools that you can use to easily design infographics out of evergreen content.

In addition to infographics, you can repurpose evergreen content into videos. If you’re comfortable in front of a camera, you can create a video of yourself talking about the main topic of an evergreen content piece. After creating the video, upload it to your website’s YouTube channel.

Another way to repurpose evergreen content is to syndicate it. Once you’ve published an evergreen article on your website, syndicate it on other channels. Syndication involves republishing the same evergreen article on other websites. You can syndicate evergreen articles by targeting channels such as Tumblr, Medium, Quora and Reddit. Just remember to add the evergreen content pieces on your website before syndicating them.

Improved SEO Performance

Evergreen content will improve your website’s search engine optimization (SEO) performance. It encourages higher and more stable search rankings than time-sensitive content. With evergreen content, your website will possess Google’s top two ranking signals: high-quality content and backlinks.

Google has yet to disclose the complete algorithm it uses to rank websites. Nonetheless, the search engine company revealed in 2016 that high-quality content and backlinks hold more influence over rankings than all other signals. Evergreen content, when properly created, is very high quality. It also attracts natural and organic backlinks to further improve SEO performance.

Time-sensitive content can rank high in the search results as well, but high rankings are essentially worthless if they don’t generate impressions or clicks. Search engine users rarely search for irrelevant topics. Therefore, a page of time-sensitive content may rank high, but it won’t result in traffic after its relevance has expired. The page will sit uncontested at the top of the search results, only for few or no users to see it.

The benefits of evergreen content are everlasting. Most internet users visit websites to find content on a particular topic. Evergreen content revolves around topics that are accurate and relevant for a long period, so users constantly search for it. You can create time-sensitive content as well, but evergreen content will benefit your website the most.