How To Create an Evergreen Content Strategy

There’s no way to avoid creating content if you have an online business. Content is as inevitable as paying taxes. But creating consistent content can quickly take up all your time and energy and some creators find themselves completely burnt out very quickly. Luckily, there’s a solution. It’s called evergreen content and creating an evergreen content strategy just might be the cure for your burn out.

What is Evergreen Content?

Let’s start with a quick refresher on evergreen content. Evergreen content is content that continues to stay relevant and valuable long after it’s been published. It’s not seasonal content and it doesn’t revolve around trends.

‍Common Evergreen Content:

• How to’s
• Industry resources
• "History of" pieces
• “What is” pieces
• Step by step processes
• Case studies

Why You Need Evergreen Content

An effective evergreen content strategy will create consistent website traffic without the pressure of constant content creation. If you’re a busy content creator, you’re going to want to maximize your time and ideally, you should want your content working for you instead of the other way around. Writing evergreen content is like hiring a low-maintenance, hard worker who will dedicate themselves to your business for years without much input from you.

One of the reasons we love evergreen content here at MeetEdgar is because it allows you to create the very best content and put that forward. It’s not possible to churn out your absolute best content every week if you are juggling everything else in your business and in your life.

The online world is very, very busy these days. It’s crowded with content. If you want your content to stand out, to attract an audience and build trust with them, it has to be fantastic. And since we’re all normal every day, multi-tasking humans with lots of responsibilities, we can’t churn out the very best, most magnificent content every week so we need to strategically create.

Evergreen content relies on SEO to keep its power. That’s where you’ll want to focus your efforts when you’re creating your strategy and your evergreen content pieces. It’s all about finding the right topic, choosing the right keywords, optimizing for SEO and then updating as needed.Let’s dig into how to create your evergreen content strategy.

What Should Your Evergreen Content Be About?

The first thing you need to tackle is what you’re going to write about! Think about the types of topics you want to be known for, the topics you provide solutions for and the topics related to your product or service.

It may help to think about your audience. What solutions are they Googling that your product or service can provide? What problems are they encountering that your product or service can solve?

For example, let’s say you’re a copywriter for new entrepreneurs. Your clients are probably looking for help with their website. They might be asking “how to write an about page” or “What to write on a business website.”

If you’re a bit more advanced in your business, you should consider where your audience is in their customer journey with you. For example, if they’re still in the awareness stage, they might be learning about what types of copy they need or considering writing it themselves, so the topics above would be ideal. If they’re actively looking for a copywriter and are more in the consideration stage, they might be Googling “When should you hire a copywriter” or “How to work with a copywriter.”

If you’ve already been creating content, you can identify some high performing content by analyzing your past analytics and identifying your top-performing pieces of content. This will show you what topics are already attracting visitors to your website and what content they like.Since you’re creating your overall strategy, come up with a few different topics for your evergreen content strategy. This way, you can plan ahead for your content calendar. Breaking your content into these topics or categories can help you organize your content calendar and can inspire more content ideas in the future.

Do Your Keyword Research:

Keywords are the key to successful evergreen content. Sorry, we just couldn’t help ourselves with that one! The important thing to realize is that the keyword should be related to your business and your topic but it also needs to have a high enough search volume. It won’t help to write a fantastic evergreen piece around a keyword that gets low traffic.

There are many different tools you can use to start your keyword research, such as Buzzsumo, SEMRush or Ahrefs. If you want a free option, you can always use Google’s Keyword Planner.

When doing your research, look at the competition and average search volume. Also, check Google Trends to determine if the keyword has been consistent over time or if it’s seeing a more recent spike.

After you’ve narrowed down the keywords for your evergreen content strategy, research the competition! Google them and read the top 10 articles that rank for these terms.

Your content needs to be better than everyone else’s. Look at any similarities among the results. Try to identify if there are any gaps in the articles. What isn’t covered about the topic? How can you create a more thorough article for the keyword and around the topic?

Create Your Evergreen Content Schedule

Not everything you publish will be an evergreen piece of content. In fact, you need a healthy mix of timely, seasonal and evergreen content.

Map out when you’ll publish evergreen and how it will fit into the overall calendar. Remember that timely pieces can link internally to your evergreen content so be sure you’ve mapped out where you can link

In addition to making a schedule for publishing content, you should create a schedule to update your evergreen content. Updating evergreen content will keep it evergreen for years to come! Schedule a reminder every 3-6 months to check in on your evergreen content. During your audit, check for broken links and update any outdated content.

Create a Path

Your evergreen content is going to attract new visitors to your website, which is great. But don’t forget that you need to keep those people in your audience after they’ve found your evergreen content.

You need to create a path for evergreen content visitors to become part of your audience. When planning and creating your evergreen content, think about how you’re going to entice the visitor to keep in touch with you. Adding calls to action to opt-in for lead magnets in the piece or setting up pixels so you can retarget with ads on social media or Google are two smart methods for keeping those visitors in your audience.

Consistent Promotion

Finally, be sure you’re consistently promoting your evergreen content! Promotion is important in any strategy but especially so with evergreen content because it stays so valuable and relevant long after it’s been published. Don't worry about sounding repetitive either! Keeping your evergreen social posts fresh and consistent will help keep the traffic rolling in!

An evergreen content strategy is a strategy that works more for you the longer you work with it. Try planning out your strategy in advance and committing to it for 6 months to a year then measuring your results. We think you'll love what you discover!