Use “Evergreen” Content to Anchor Your Small Business Website

What is Evergreen Content?

“Evergreen” is a lofty-sounding phrase for a simple concept. Evergreen content on your business website, like the evergreen trees that retain their leaves year-round, is content that won’t easily become outdated. It will hold its value – as is – and won’t need frequent updates.

This is some of the most important content on your website for two reasons:

1. The information, instruction, or ideas will likely still be relevant in a year or more
2. Its ongoing relevance is tied closely to its usefulness to the customer

Are there aspects of your business that will always be relevant, informative, or just highly interesting to your customers?

This article will teach you how to turn it into rich, evergreen content that will become among the most visited pages on your website.

The Many Roles of Evergreen Content

Keeping fresh content on your site is an ongoing business challenge. But you must keep your site refreshed, for a couple of reasons – in order to satisfy return visitors, for one thing. And to satisfy search engines, for another. Search engines reward active websites that offer new content to users on a regular basis.

Yet, there’s that content that stands the test of time and rarely has to be modified or replaced. That’s your evergreen (or “cornerstone”) content. And it has great advantages too! Among them, it allows you to:

• Provide high-value original content that becomes part of the infrastructure of the site
• Curate and offer highly linkable content (that leads the user on an insightful journey to different parts of your site, or to outside sources)
• Establish authority in your area of expertise

If your product requires an educated customer, your evergreen content will likely be focused on helping them to do business with you.

Search Engine “Findability”

You want your business site to be easily identified and indexed by search engines. The game with search engines is to have your site pages rank high enough to appear on page one of an organic search – ideally in the top 3 results. These are called OSR – Organic Search Results. That means people searching the web for your service can find your company. Most searchers never click past page 1. Ranking high is essential.

Then there are social media posts, where businesses place content on platforms like Facebook and Instagram to attract, hook, and draw people back to their websites – where they can then engage them further, and maybe sell them something.

If you are investing in content marketing as a core business strategy, you need search engine-optimized (SEO) content to place on websites that have been designed and built for this type of marketing. And you need loads of it: content to keep your website active – including things like special landing pages, giveaways, and free downloads.

With this heavy demand for content, the average marketing manager begins to treasure the content that is evergreen.

Link Strategy

Providing links both internal to your site and external to other authoritative sites is a secondary function of evergreen content.

Evergreen content aims to provide information that people find useful enough to bookmark, link to, or share. These links from other sites demonstrate that the website is a valuable contributor to the common conversation in their subject area.

A well-optimized site will also have internal links, looping back to other pages of its own. In order to link internally, a site must become content-rich, with related pages that create a “web” of knowledge.

Search engines will begin to recognize the page as a body of knowledge, linking together related bits of information – and will reward it with higher rankings. This web of knowledge is the aforementioned high-value content that becomes part of the infrastructure of the site.

Establishing Authority

Evergreen content plays a significant part in establishing a site as an authoritative source for certain information. Evergreen content is often the more long-form, in-depth content on the site: articles, case studies, and highly instructive writing.

Serving Your Potential Customer

If you’re a plumber, the evergreen content on your site might be an article telling homeowners what to do if they come home to find two feet of water in the basement. Another article might alert them to act quickly if they smell a gas leak.

The basic information in these articles will never change (Quick! Turn off the main water valve and call your plumber!) These are problems that ordinary people will be seeking guidance on every day of the year.

Turn them into evergreen content that serves your customer.

Saving you Time

These kinds of articles don’t have to be scheduled into your content planning calendar for review more than once a year, if that. You’d go crazy if you had to update every single word on your web page on a regular basis. Thank goodness you don’t!

Details like external links – links to other sites – will have to be checked at review time. And if you’re tracking your analytics, as you should be, you will verify that the page is still active: attracting regular visitors, being bookmarked and shared.

Other than that, evergreen content won’t need much tending.

The best evergreen content can even be recycled and repurposed for blog material and video scripting over the course of your content calendar year.

Our Evergreen Content

Here’s an example from us at The Allyson Group. This article that explains branding — What is a Brand? – is a piece of evergreen content.

As copywriters, we represent brands, and our work always begins with an assessment of a potential client’s brand strength. We talk about it all the time. But not everybody knows what branding is. We explain it in that article. That’s evergreen content.

From that article, we can link to other articles on branding. For example, Brand Voice – the personality of your company reflected in the tone and tenor of your content, Workplace Culture – the organizational culture, as experienced by the people who work for you, and Brand Equity – the value that builds in a brand as it becomes more successful.

How to Create Evergreen Content to Stand the Test of Time

To create great evergreen content simply put yourself in the shoes of your customer. Aim to serve them with your content. Here are some examples:

How to Work With You

Before anyone does business with you, would it serve them to know more about things like…?

• • The problem you solve with your product or service
  • The conditions surrounding the problem you solve
  • The evolution of the problem – and your solution
  • Your company’s unique approach to the problem (UVP)

In discussing the problem, expand your customer’s body of knowledge. Tell them something about your industry and how your industry’s solutions have evolved to meet their evolving needs.

Your Company Story

Tell the story of your company – the founders, your inventions or patents, or a timeline of your accomplishments. History doesn’t change, making it excellent evergreen content.

Let readers know when, how, and why you got into the business and how long you’ve been around. People like to know the people behind the companies they do business with.

Your Mission, Vision, and Values

While these elements of your brand do change over time, they don’t change with the seasons.

Therefore, they are good material for evergreen articles. The “About Us” page is one of the most read pages on websites, as customers attempt to understand you before they choose you. About Us is not content that needs frequent updates.

Share who you are in the community and the world. What organizations or charities do you or your employees throw your weight behind? And why? All that corporate identity data helps the reader understand you. It can be evergreen content.

An Evergreen Content Library

There are lots of other subjects that can be evergreen.

While seasonal messages may seem fleeting, they do come around every year. As such, businesses can recognize holidays and national days of recognition that communicate a message about their values. What does your company stand for, want to recognize, or choose to shine a light on?

Breast Cancer Awareness Month (October)? Veteran’s Day? Earth Day?

You can choose to celebrate National Small Business Week in the spring and build some annually recyclable content around it. And Small Business Saturday is the weekend after Thanksgiving. All are events around which you can develop evergreen content.

By building content around the stuff your company cares about – or that connects you to your ideal customer – you will eventually have a robust library of evergreen content.

Evergreen content is workhorse content. It will fulfill its function today, tomorrow, and hopefully well into the future. And it’s helpful to people!

What Kind of Evergreen Content Could Fit into Your Digital Marketing Plan?

At the Allyson Group, we help companies plan content calendars that take the guesswork out of content creation.

Give us a call to discuss how we can build a library of rich, evergreen content for your website or blog.