In a blog, newsworthy content that’s relevant to people working in a certain industry or niche almost immediately brings in people from search engines to get the latest information. There’s also what’s become known as evergreen content which is less timely because it covers a topic that’s of universal or ongoing interest.
Evergreen blog posts as so named because they’re like a tree that keeps its leaves all year round. In this article, we discuss why evergreen blog posts are important (or even essential) for your blog.
It Avoids the Content Treadmill
If you’ve ever looked at the BBC website or CNN, the problem for their journalists and editorial team is that to bring in new visitors every day, they require fresh content. Indeed, if you look at the home page of CNN, you’re hard-pressed to find yesterday’s stories above the fold. They’re buried several screens down because visitors are only seeking the latest news. And then they leave…
This situation puts a website and the blog on a constant content treadmill. When teaching the audience to expect daily content in a news-like fashion, visitors will be visiting frequently to receive it. For such blog owners, like a hamster on a wheel, they can never stop running if they wish the organic traffic wheel to keep turning. Similarly, the writing team at the website cannot stop either.
By publishing evergreen content as well as other types, it avoids having total reliance on publishing daily to keep the regular visitors’ attention.
Brings Visitors in Automatically
Longer content forms are popular with Google.
They provide greater value than shorter articles. They also naturally include many more relevant keywords within the copy, which get picked up and provide numerous opportunities to rank for them. Therefore, longer content often ranks higher for many long-tail queries, which while driving small amounts of individual traffic is often highly targeted.
Evergreen Content Can Go Viral More Easily
Evergreen content is also quite viral too.
Once a few respected websites begin linking out to it, many other websites in related fields also do the same. This creates a virtual avalanche of inbound links to evergreen articles which not only helps them rank better to drive more organic search traffic, but it also raises the profile of the site overall.
The ranking of other articles and pages on the website often move up as a result too.
The same is true of evergreen content that catches a wave of social media interest leading to many shares, likes, and tweets. Google currently pays attention to social media and how it influences traffic patterns with sites often seeing an uplift in their ranking once social media interest grows substantially.
Broadens and Deepens the Discussion
While shorter content certainly has its place to cover smaller topics that naturally have less depth, evergreen content being longer can go deeper and wider into the subject matters discussed.
The deeper exploration of the topics along with providing more useful information or answers to visitors’ questions is in many ways far more valuable than other content forms. It’s also a chance for company employees to “show their chops” against larger rivals. Not only does that make their competition respect (or fear) them more, but customers or clients are likely to associate brand quality with clear-minded thinking demonstrated through evergreen topics.
Enhances Brand Reputation
It follows that with evergreen content done right, the brand improves its reputation.
Even for smaller companies with a far smaller presence in the marketplace yet, a well-written blog with interesting short form and long form content is going to stand out from the crowd when making original points on popular topics.
This requires companies to avoid repeating what’s already been published and instead tackle each topic anew. Readers don’t wish to consumer rehashed or low-quality content. The mistake many companies make is to not respect the value of a blog and what it can do for their business.
High ROI Compared to News Content
While it takes more research, writing and editing time than short form or news content, due to the extended shelf life of evergreen content, there’s a much longer period to recover the cost of production.
Depending on whether the blog is monetized by third-party advertising, affiliate commission links or purely with the direct promotion of the company’s products and services, the larger traffic over a substantially longer period of time provides many more chances to find new customers and sell to existing ones too.
Direct Visitors to the Sales Channel or Newsletter
Smart companies use their website and blog especially to direct visitors to a newsletter opt-in page or through their sales channel by promoting their most relevant or popular offerings on the blog. This doesn’t necessarily have to be a blog post about the product specifically.
For instance, a gardening tools manufacturer could have a blog post about how to cut your lawn with the attractive stripes that homeowners see at Lord’s cricket ground on TV. Within the post, it’s certainly possible to link to the product page of their most relevant lawnmower without coming across as overly promotional.
For companies that sell dearer products into the four-figures and beyond or direct to other businesses, they usually won’t get the sale on the first visit to their website. Knowing this, using evergreen content to bring in search visitors and then heavily promoting their newsletter to gather up their email addresses before they leave and never return again provides a new opportunity. The subsequent email responder series can then warm up the prospect and eventually re-promote products that have the high-value sale.
Allows for Investments in Additional Media
Investing in video production, infographics, diagrams or original digital photography (or premium stock photography) is expensive and time-consuming. It’s not practical to do so with every blog post for companies with a small digital marketing budget or where they wish to invest in adverting instead.
Because of the higher expected return from evergreen content, it’s an easier sell to pay up for additional media to really make the long form content ‘pop’. It’s also a chance to create original media that hasn’t been seen before, which rates highly with visitors and increases the likelihood of a social media share or like.
While the prospect of arranging longer content is tough for managers to accept because of the extra time and money needed for research, writing, and editing, it returns far better than flimsy news content that is read today and forgotten tomorrow. For companies that are willing to produce more evergreen content, they’re likely to reap substantial benefits from doing so.