The Benefits of Evergreen Blog Posts
Whenever clients ask what kind of content they should be writing to share in their blog, we always recommend that the content be evergreen, meaning that it will be just as relevant in the future as it is now. This is something that website owners sometimes struggle with. It’s much easier to write news type posts about things that are going on in the industry right at that moment. However, that post has an expiration date on it regarding how long it will be useful. Evergreen content, on the other hand, doesn’t have that expiration date which means that it will be much more valuable over the long term.
Here are 3 benefits to including evergreen content on your blog:
Generates traffic from the search engines over the long term
When writing a blog post it’s always important to keep SEO in mind by optimizing the post to include targeted keywords in the title and within the content itself. Most likely this will occur naturally as you write but it’s always smart to re-read it with SEO in mind and optimize as necessary. It takes time for a blog post to generate search engine trust, but over time it can rank for specific keyword phrases, especially long tail keywords. If the post includes evergreen content, and doesn’t seem outdated, it will generate clicks and traffic to the website.
Generates inbound links
Inbound links that point to your blog post (and therefore, to your site) are what help to convey trust to the search engines. When a third party site links to your site, it means that your site has something of value. The search engines like to see these links grow naturally. If the content in your blog post is valuable, it can be used as a reference within content on other sites and will be shared in social media.
It can be reused
If you are only writing newsworthy, time sensitive content on the blog, it can really only be shared at that time. Within a few weeks, or even a few days, it becomes “old” news. On the other hand, evergreen content can be used multiple times and in different ways. There’s a good chance that when the blog post first went live, not everyone that could possibly be interested in the content saw it. Businesses are always gaining new prospects, new target audience members, new newsletter subscribers, and new social media followers. If you published and shared a blog post 6 months ago, but it’s still relevant today- why not share it again? You can share it in your newsletter and through your social media outlets, which helps to stimulate social media activity.
In some cases evergreen content might just need a few small adjustments to remain relevant. There’s nothing wrong with going into that old blog post and mentioning that it was edited on a certain date. If the majority of the content is still relevant, it can still reap the benefits of being evergreen! One way to make sure that target audience members don’t think that your content is “old” is to remove the dates from the posts. Even if the content is just as relevant as when it was published, a post from more than a few months ago could potentially be a turn off.
Categorized in: Content Marketing
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