The Long Term Impact of Evergreen Content

Writing by Nick Stamoulis in Content Marketing

Evergreen content is content (blogs, articles, white papers, videos, etc) that will be useful and informative for your readers for a long time to come. The beauty of well-written evergreen content is that it will continue to naturally attract visitors, links and social shares long after its initial publication and promotion. The graph below shows how an evergreen blog post, published in early April 2012 is still seeing spikes of traffic and activity from time to time. As this post ages it builds up search engine trust (helping it perform better in the SERPs) which might also explain why it did better at the end of 2012 than it did when the post first went live and was promoted via social media.

Now 850 unique pageviews is a pretty solid number in my book, especially when over 600 of them are coming from Google (source traffic now shown). To me, that’s a good sign that this piece of evergreen content was well optimized when it was written. It’s important to optimize all your content for SEO, but especially so when it comes to evergreen content, which can attract visitors and links for months (or even years) to come. A well-optimized piece of evergreen content is going to have a stronger foothold in the SERPs right out of the gate and only get more valuable with time.

So this one blog post has gotten 850 unique pageviews since April 2012. What if this blog had ten more evergreen posts that got the same amount of attention over time? Suddenly that’s over 9,000 extra unique visitors coming to your site! I can’t imagine any site owner would be too upset at 9,000 extra visitors, especially when they are as well targeted at the ones coming to this post. You’ll also notice in the above chart that the average time spent on page was 8 minutes. 8 minutes! That tells me that this piece of evergreen content is really resonating with the readers and it has been properly optimized to be found for the right searches and the right target audience.

The thing to remember about measuring the success of your own evergreen content is that it takes time. Content that capitalizes on the “moment” or a hot trend might see an initial burst of traffic and activity but as the situation develops and new information is available your content might get pushed out for the latest breaking news. Evergreen content is going to build on its own value overtime and pull visitors and links in at a steady, albeit slower, pace. Like most components of SEO, evergreen content is something that you have to strap in for the long haul with.

Also keep in mind that just because a piece of content is evergreen that doesn’t mean it couldn’t stand a little freshening up every now and then! If 90% of the content is still accurate don’t hesitate to update it as necessary and let that content keep working for you. Why waste quality content? Plus, it’s a great way to save yourself some time when it comes to content marketing because you can re-promote the updated content.