The Value of Evergreen Content

Evergreen content is an investment in your brand’s long-term success. MSPC content director Amanda Welshons explains how strategic copy and visuals can make your content work harder and last longer.

At MSPC, we live by quality over quantity. It’s true that a wide variety of content serves audience needs, but evergreen content—strategic copy and visuals with long-term utility—will bring incremental value and help build trust for your brand. When it comes to ROI on content marketing, evergreen will get you the most juice for the squeeze.

Evergreen Content, Defined

Evergreen is living and breathing content that lasts over time. It is search engine-optimized, ages gracefully and can easily be updated while remaining relevant. Even if it was published several years ago, the messaging has the ability to stay fresh to a reader today. Done right, evergreen content may outlast your current branding.

Evergreen Content Is a Service to Your Audience

To me, evergreen content is pure gold. It continually serves your target audience and business objectives without trying too hard. It’s not meant to be flashy. It’s a smart, strategic content investment that emphasizes the everyday solutions you bring to someone’s life.

Consider this: Nearly 60% of the pages ranking in the top 10 Google results are 3 or more years old.​* Which means evergreen content also builds strength as a site traffic driver over time.

Evergreen content production isn’t about your branded products or services. We’re talking listicles, tips with downloadable checklists, embedded spot graphics and infographics, and how-to content. Consider it a trust-building endeavor. Evergreen content tells universal truths as a halo to your services or products. It is about what matters most to your audience: what are they searching for and how do you solve it or add to the conversation?

How to Make Evergreen Content Last

• Choose the right green content
• Conduct keyword research
  • Include potential algorithm updates to optimize for
  • Monitor metrics
• Build evergreen content updates into the plan
• Make sure visuals are up to date and relevant
• Create it inline with brand
• Don’t water it down trying to make it evergreen
• Know when to update and when to start fresh
• Protect the SEO that is built around that content

Even though evergreen content remains relevant over a long period of time, it should be updated every year to keep pace with the ever-evolving world of SEO. The algorithms just aren’t what they used to be! A hero image and words may not be the most SEO-friendly way to continue to fuel your traffic-driving heroes.

A site redesign recently gave way to an important SEO-enhancement project for one of our long-term clients. We audited all existing lifestyle content and picked the top contenders to refresh to help increase search rankings and provide longer-term value to our client and target audience. We improved structured data and metadata, titles, subheads, descriptions, tags and embedded graphics, and we feel confident this will have a long-tail payoff to work we published more than five years ago.

Why You Should Invest in Evergreen Content

Evergreen content is an investment in your brand’s success: your story, expertise and longevity. And, though it’s not all about you, it shows you care about your audience. Content that answers questions thoughtfully will usher someone to the next step of the consumer journey.

If you’re embarking on a site redesign or building a new content strategy, it’s a great time to review the content you have and go through a “keep, revise, toss” exercise. You may be surprised at the number of pieces that can still provide value for your business with some SEO and creative rework. If you’re not sure how to assess the quality of content, let us know, and we would be happy to take a look!

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