How to create a content strategy: The importance of evergreen content

Before we dive into the data, it's worth confirming exactly what evergreen content is. Despite being a bit of a buzzword when first created, it's actually stuck around and we use it lots at Fresh Egg as it seems to be the simplest phrase to use.

Evergreen content is defined as being content on your website that has no 'best before date'. It's content that someone could read now or in five years and still be relevant.

A caveat to this is that potentially all content can get a bit stale after a while, therefore one good practice is to check on your top performing evergreen content regularly and update it with some fresh learning, extra resources or information etc.

There are several key types of content that are commonly accepted as being 'evergreen', including:

• 'How to' guides

• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

• Lists of resources

• Definitions (for specific industries or topics)

This content is usually located within specific 'resource' or 'guides' sections on a website – you would not ordinarily put this on your blog.

How do we know that evergreen content isn't the 'instant remedy'? Well we have the data to show us…

For this study, I selected five client websites from a variety of different industries. Using Google Analytics, I wanted to investigate what happened when evergreen content was created and added to these sites.

All of the data below is just for organic as a channel, as we know that attracting traffic from Google (and other search engines) is usually the key reason for adding evergreen content to a site (although it is often important for users who may well have arrived via other channels).

I've just used traffic here as a KPI (with 'Sessions' as the metric), but it's worth noting we've also seen these results reflected in the organic visibility of these websites as well – adding this content has increased search impressions for the related topics (hence the increased traffic we are seeing here).

As well as being sector specific, some of the content is designed for different stages of the customer experience journey – awareness, consideration, conversion.

All of the data below was tracked from the live date of the content until the end of February 2017.

For this insurance client we created a new guides section that focused on topics relevant to their key audience groups. These were designed for 'awareness', as the topics were fairly general and not directly related to insurance.

For this client we had carried out some audience intent research and discovered that there were people searching for information about the company and their services, but the existing content was not strong enough to answer these queries. We created a section around key 'Why use us' topics, which included a series of pages to help people who had no knowledge ('awareness') of the brand, but also to those who had heard of them, but had searched on Google to read more about them ('consideration').

Date range: 01/12/15 – 28/02/17

Competition is fierce when it comes to the health and beauty sector, so we needed to give our client the edge when it came to using Google to attract potential customers that were searching for topics related to the service they provided. A number of key topics were identified and a 'Guides' section ('awareness') was created.

Date range: 01/01/14 – 28/02/17

With a new website launching, we spotted the perfect opportunity to create a whole new 'property resources' section ('awareness') for this estate agency client. Again, we had identified that people were searching for these topics on Google, but the quality of the content on offer by competing sites was not always up-to-scratch.

Date range: 01/04/15 – 28/02/17

In this example, we had identified that there was a need to include information on this car leasing website for both general motoring advice ('awareness') and also specific personal and business car leasing content ('consideration').

Date range: 01/10/14 – 28/02/17

Although this study only includes five websites, the results do clearly show some key learnings around the importance of evergreen content:

• Whilst in some cases there has been a period of a few months before the true organic traffic benefit is shown, some have started to see it quickly

• There is an initial investment in planning and creating the content, however in all cases this is likely to have been repaid by the 'lifetime value' that the content is providing to the website

• Evergreen content can be used as 'awareness' content, but also can be used to help customers make a decision and purchase, for example with the automotive leasing content. Evergreen content can drive transactions and revenue!

• It can take time to grow and gain traction, therefore don't just measure it after a few weeks and dismiss it – keep on measuring and reporting

• In some cases you might find that out of a whole content hub or collection of guides, one or two individual pages might be contributing to a large proportion of the traffic. These are your 'star pupils' so need to be investigated further to understand why they are good and whether you can replicate anything for the other pages

Knowing that evergreen content can take a while to really start to show the benefits, this means it's vital to plan ahead and to get started right now!

Here are a few tips on how to start planning your content as part of your strategy:

We've looked at evergreen content here in terms of the organic traffic benefits it can produce, however it's a good idea to use the success of your organic content as an indicator of a topic being popular and therefore potentially driving interest from other channels.

Therefore if you do discover your content is getting traction from search you should instigate another one of my favourite strategies – content repurposing.

This technique is where you take one piece of content and 'repurpose' it into a variety of different content types and formats, then distribute these far and wide across your social networks, email, document sharing sites, video platforms etc.

By repurposing your evergreen content you are really getting an ROI, but many people don't take the time to do this.

Would you like a handy way of planning out all of your evergreen (and other) content? See our blog post on creating a content and social plan.