Did you know that 95 percent of people only look at the first page of Google’s search results? This is why producing high-quality content is so important.

It’s also the reason why you should place a focus on producing evergreen content.

What is evergreen content?

Generally, content can be divided into three categories of “evergreen-ness”:

• Non-evergreen content
• Semi-evergreen content
• Evergreen content

Non-evergreen content

Non-evergreen content loses its relevance in a short time. A product you reviewed might have gone out of stock or you’ve written about a trend that died out quickly.

If you are using time-based terms to promote the product (talking about how you currently have a time-limited discount or using terminology like “new” or “just-released yesterday”), this content won’t be evergreen.

Seasonal content is a grey area. Writing about the last Christmas of a decade isn’t evergreen but writing about Christmas as a season is. If you are writing about tips for cutting your grass during the summer, planting trees during the spring, or cleaning out your furnace in preparation for the winter, this might be considered semi-evergreen content. It’s the epitome of “seasonal” content after all.

Good examples of non-evergreen content would be articles about trends or fashion fads. These trends and fads will eventually fade and the content will become irrelevant.

Semi-evergreen content

Semi-evergreen content is relevant year-round. While the topic might be evergreen, the actual content might not.

An example would be an article teaching you how to properly build backlinks. In general, most content about SEO and digital marketing would fall into this category.

The reason it’s semi-evergreen is that SEO strategies can change from year to year or even month to month. The same goes for articles that discuss statistics, for example.

With this kind of semi-evergreen content, you don’t have to shy away from writing it. After all, if you are operating in the digital marketing industry, you simply have to write about these topics to get traffic (as long as they’re relevant to you).

However, it is crucial that you constantly update your articles as soon as new updates or statistics come out.

Another type of semi-evergreen content would be technical tutorials like “how to change the settings on your Android phone” or “how to fix a glitch on your Windows laptop”. All kinds of technology-based guides can become old information quickly – this is why it is important to constantly update them when new versions are released.

Yet another type of semi-evergreen content would be scientific research or health-based content. These can fall into the following category as well (content that remains evergreen for a long time), but it really depends on the topic and how solid the research is.

Sometimes, new research will come out about a medical or health-related topic that will require you to update the article.

Evergreen content

Finally, we have content that is truly evergreen. This is content that you probably won’t have to update as much as the other two (at least not wholesale changes).

Examples of evergreen content include:

• Recipes (how to make a vegan chocolate cake)
• Instructional/how-to guides (how to tie a tie, how to change a lightbulb)

However, you won’t be able to have this kind of content in every niche. Some niches are more volatile than others.

What type of content to write

There are different types of evergreen content you can write. Here are some types of articles you might want to consider when writing evergreen content:

• Listicles
• How-to articles
• In-depth manuals and guides
• Stories
• FAQs
• Q&A posts

While listicles and guides can be placed under the blog section, you can create separate pages for FAQs and Q&As.

Update your content

I can’t stress this enough – it is crucial that you keep updating your content for it to remain evergreen. This is especially important with semi-evergreen content, but it is important with all of your content.

Here are some things you might want to consider updating:

• Outdated Information: If there is any information that needs to be updated, update it right away. This can include technology and model updates, changes in SEO strategy, new research or statistics that came out, or simply new updates that affect the validity of the article.
• Outdated Links: Links can become broken due to the original page that you linked to becoming changed or deleted. Go over your links and if you find a broken link, find a new article to link to.
• Dates: This includes both dates mentioned in the article (which you should generally try to avoid in the first place when writing evergreen content) and the date that the article was published.

With a WordPress website, it is easy to republish a post to change the date, bump it to the top of your blog feed, and possibly get an SEO boost.

Tools to help you write evergreen content

How can you come up with topics to write about that are evergreen? Here are 3 tips you might find useful.

1. Use Google Trends

Google Trends can be one of your most powerful tools when deciding whether content is evergreen or not. Simply type in any topic into the tool and see its search popularity over time.

If you see that it is just spiking now but hasn’t been popular previously, you may want to reconsider writing about this topic.

Google Trends can also help you find seasonal content, worldwide or by geographical location. If you see that a topic is trending every year for a long period of time, it will most likely continue to be popular year after year.

2. Use a keyword tool

Using targeted keywords is one of the best ways to improve your SEO and get more organic traffic. However, there are a number of things you should be looking for when researching keywords.

Since this article isn’t about how to do keyword research properly, I won’t delve too much into it but I suggest you read about keywords with low search volume and why they’re good for SEO.

However, it is important to find that balance of search volume, difficulty, and intent and most keyword tools such as SEMRush, Mangools Keyword Finder and Adzooma’s SEO Performance Report, will give you this information.

3. Use Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is a tool that lets you find the most trending content online. You can also search for commonly asked questions to get ideas for what to write about.

They even give articles evergreen scores, which are based on an article’s shares and links over time.

Buzzsumo offers free limited plan but it can give you an idea of what kind of content is evergreen – but make sure to search for content that has been popular over a longer time period.

Wrapping it up

Evergreen content will bring you consistent traffic over time, as opposed to articles that become irrelevant. As such, they are simply a better investment. In addition, evergreen content tends to attract more backlinks as time goes on, which can boost your site authority and overall SEO value.

Creating evergreen content can be a challenge, and it might be easier to just follow the most recent trends. However, although trendy articles do have their place and shouldn’t necessarily be ignored completely, focusing on evergreen content will pay off better in the long run.