Content is essential to the success of your website, and it falls into two categories – trending or evergreen. So, what is evergreen content? Read on…

What Is Evergreen Content?

Evergreen content is content that never loses its luster; it is always going to be relevant to someone somewhere, and as such, someone will always be searching for it.

In short, evergreen means content that is continually relevant and stays “fresh” for readers.

Evergreen content delivers the following in the long term:

• relevance
• leads
• shareability
• traffic growth

Evergreen content can be updated with the latest information as time progresses, so readers can make sure that they’re always up-to-date.

Finding the right evergreen topics to write about for evergreen content can come as a challenge to some.

If you spend too much of your time chasing trendy website content ideas, you can lose sight of the core topics in your niche that can be even more rewarding over the long term.

In this article, we’ll be discussing some ideas and inspirations for the kinds of evergreen content you can write.

If you want more information on how to write evergreen content, we’ve already covered that. If you’ve read that but you’re still struggling for evergreen content ideas, look no further.

Here we go!

1) Annual Roundup Posts

We’re now in October, which means we’re almost at the end of the year. This means all the best new developments have likely already happened, leaving you in the perfect position for a year in review post.

These annual roundups are an invaluable source of evergreen content because you can help people reflect on the year they have had, and look forward to the year ahead.

This gives you an easy way to discuss the emerging trends, and get into detail on the best and worst changes the year has brought within your industry. It also allows you to summarize a lot of your other content and save time on generating new ideas.

This kind of article will remind people of things they used to care about and update them with what happened after the item fell out of the mainstream news coverage.

That way, you contextualize and enrich people’s understanding of the world they live in. This is inherently rewarding for readers, and they’ll thank you for it.

Best of all, annual roundups can become an annual tradition, and become a series very easily. Every year there will be changes and evolutions, and you can chart them with a yearly post on the same topic.

2) Interviews

Interviews are a great type of evergreen content and an energy-efficient way of generating traffic if you have the appropriate contacts. People are forever looking for expert insight and added value – an Obi-Wan Kenobi that can unlock them the secrets of the force.

Because it takes so long to become an authority, it’s highly unlikely an individual will cease to be an authority in the field in the months and years to come.

On the contrary, as your subject becomes more experienced, their profile is likely to grow, which will drive more traffic to your site.

When targeting someone to request an interview, it’s best to look at those who are doing disruptive work – the ones flipping the trends on their heads, and those creating a success out of seemingly nothing.

While this won’t necessarily be something people can replicate for themselves, the interview can give people an insight into the way a mind works, and the underlying ideas that informed the disruptive approach.

You can offer a look behind-the-scenes on someone successful. You can discover the secrets to their success. You can humanize an enigma.

A conversation with a person of influence is something many people would kill for, and if you have an interview that simulates how that conversation would go, then people will live vicariously through you, and your traffic will go up and up and up.

3) How-To Guides

No matter how an industry evolves, these questions remain fundamentally the same for anyone just starting out. This gives you a great opportunity for evergreen content.

A how-to guide is one of the best blog post ideas, as it will provide a solution to a problem people will never stop having.

Educational and informative how-to guides must break down the process into easy, actionable steps. If this is achieved, then the content will always be relevant to someone.

Remember, people are always at different stages in their journey, and those who need an introduction to a topic area are the ideal new visitors you want to be attracting.

Here at SEOPressor, we love a good How-To post, and we’ve created several in the past. Our article on how to write an SEO-friendly press release is one of the best articles we have for getting in traffic.

That’s because it’s a relatively little-known, but extremely effective way of generating a new kind of exposure for your website.

If there is a technique, a product, or an approach within your industry that you’ve used to great effect – something that has followed the 80/20 rule of investment and reward, then telling other people how to do it will be a sure winner as far as your traffic is concerned.

4) Case Studies

The great thing about case studies is that they are already a reflective analysis. As such, you’re unlikely to get new developments and evolutions, so the content will stay relevant for years and years.

A case study will be an invaluable reference for anyone doing deep research into a topic, looking for the best (or worst!) examples from within an industry, or trying to find a process to follow.

A case study is also a great opportunity for you to reflect on your own practice. By taking data you already have about what you’re doing, reflecting on it, and sharing it, you can level with your audience while giving them a more valuable understanding of how much work you put in for their benefit.

This saves you having to hunt down a specific person or product – you are a first-hand witness to your own case, so writing the study should be easier.

We undertook a similar mission when we looked at how we could use meta descriptions to improve click-through rates. We were doing this for our own benefits, but we shared what we learned in a case study. This has since got us great traffic.

5) Product Reviews

Product reviews are one of the most popular evergreen topics. They offer a great way for you to have your say on the current market.

Even better, if you don’t fancy testing every product yourself, you can create a round-up of user reviews and comments on the products in the market and identify on behalf of your users the main advantages, disadvantages, and unique selling points.

This will allow you to establish authority within your niche. To keep it evergreen, however, you do need to keep your finger on the pulse and update these kinds of articles.

Writing reviews well will do a lot for your image: your insight and expertise will be evidenced, as will your unique perspective and the value you can add on behalf of customers. You can even repurpose your content in a video format like this:

If your product reviews can become influential, people will come to rely on you to do most of the thinking for them before making a purchase.

This is the power you can put to use later in your strategy should you come to market anything of your own.

6) The History Of Something

When something hits the headlines, people often wonder how it ever got to this point.

Providing the history of a subject, a product, or even a whole topic area can be a great way to generate traffic. Also, because you’re writing history, it will be evergreen, as history is unlikely to change.

A great example of using evergreen ideas would be the history of climate change comic published by XKCD. The comic offers people a guided tour through world history and the major developments in humanity while keeping track of the global temperatures at the time these events happened.

The conclusion is frightening because it shows the huge difference in historical temperature changes and current temperature changes. This is content that is only going to get more relevant as time progresses.

As another more niche-related example, we have posted on the history of keyword research strategies, which has helped people understand every technique used up to the present day, and how best to use them to maximum effect.

7) Beginner’s Guides

Beginners can be intimidated by the detail in many how-to posts because they are usually pitched at people who already have a certain degree of knowledge on the topic area and are looking for new solutions.

This is where you can spell out what is now obvious and easy to you but could be revelatory for someone new to your niche.

We have created the beginner’s guide to SEO, which introduces the most basic fundamentals of what we do, so that people can get the hang of those, then come back to us for more detail once they’re on top of the core practices.

It’s worth pointing out that the more general the question is and the more broadly applicable the answer will be, the more people you’ll have searching for it.

8) Lists, Top Tips

Lists! Here we are in a list, talking about lists. That’s because lists, like this very list, can easily become evergreen.

It’s worth pointing out that ideas are evergreen. The examples in this list will never change from being evergreen because they are ideas. List your ideas, and it can remain in place forever.

When it comes to a list like this, where inspiration is the idea, you have to cover every base to ensure someone can take away at least one idea from the list that will have value for them.

Lists like this also become a constant resource for people. They will keep coming back to your website to check on the content, so they don’t have to study and memorize it all. This will build the habit of coming to your site, which is incredibly valuable for customer retention.

We produced a list on a series of tools to make money from blogging. Once people have tried one, they may come back to pick the next one they want to try, and so forth.

9) Best Practices, Your Success Story

Bearing similarities to interviews, case studies, and how-to guides, the story of your success (if you’ve been observably successful up to now) can be invaluable in establishing your personal brand, authority, and unique value to the reader.

If you haven’t had a great deal of success, you can get evergreen story ideas from the success story of someone who inspired you, what you learned from them and what practices you took away from your understanding of how they work.

People need to finish reading an article like this inspired to do things differently. We shared our guide to the lessons we’ve learned through trying to master content marketing, which summarizes years of trial and error.

In that way, our readers can stand on the shoulders of giants and skip a lot of the mistakes and wasted effort.

10) Checklist

Checklists are invaluable tools that can make sure people are covering all their bases, and do things in the right order.

Sometimes when you are working on an ambitious project, it can be incredibly difficult to remember everything you need to do.

A checklist helps people understand a process, and is again a reference tool that people will keep coming back to again, and again, and again. What processes do you undertake and in what order? Codify that into a checklist, and you have valuable content.

11) Recycle Content

Recycling old content can be a great way to breathe new life into blog posts that are no longer performing, without having to put in the same amount of mental resources and time you would have to use to generate brand new content.

You can update your content with added experience and knowledge, new evergreen news stories, or simply change the medium the content is in.

We’ve created a comprehensive guide on repurposing your content to make sure you’ve wrung all the performance you can from every idea.

Extra Tip: Use Content Intelligence by BiQ to check and improve your content performance.

Content Intelligence will show the content’s readability, sentiment, SEO scores, and more. But what I love the most about this tool is – it gives you a list of optimization that can be done to increase the content performance. 

Other than that, you can see each paragraph has its own analysis. It tells you the relevancy of the section to the target keyword, sentiment, and readability. You may want to modify those paragraph that has lower relevancy so that it can better match the user intent. 

Try Out Content Intelligence With This Link

12) Definitions, Glossaries, Acronyms

Someone can work in an industry for years and still not master the number of terms, acronyms, and buzzwords that are evolving more rapidly than they can be learned. A lot of this comes from office shorthand.

Not knowing this information can create a barrier between your readers and the knowledge they need. As such, generating a guide to the key terms people need to know within an industry can unlock a lot of understanding very quickly, and have a transformative effect on a reader’s confidence.

The result is that you will look like an expert, and the readers will feel you have just welcomed them into your exclusive club.

The importance of speaking the same language in establishing trust is obvious. If there’s anything you want to know about SEO, you can find the 50 terms of SEO that every marketer should know right here.

13) Series of Tutorials

There is something for everyone in this content, no matter the level they are starting at. What’s more, tutorials allow people to get only in the knowledge they need to achieve their aims while acting as a trail of breadcrumbs to the big payoff that lies beyond the next knowledge barrier.

SEOPressor has a step-by-step guide to help our users to get started with SEOPressor Connect: a tool that helps integrate numerous SEO best practices into the simple function of posting new content to a WordPress site.

The tutorials help people make the best of the tools on offer while demonstrating how flexible and powerful they are.

14) Strategies

As long as an aim is common enough, everyone will want to know the surest route to achieving that aim. Personal trainers can be considered ‘body strategists’, as they help people take the necessary steps to get fit.

Practical strategies for common aims will never go out of date. Detailed, specific advice on the execution of a strategy is needed, however, to ensure that people get what they came for.

We developed a Pokemon Go marketing strategy based on the best evidence available. Nothing about the game has changed since to make this strategy any less effective.

Again, the broader the issue you can tackle, the better. If you can give people guidance, you give them confidence. You take away the fear of the unknown and the frustration of the uncertain.

15) Reference Books In Your Market

There is a book about almost anything. No matter the market you’re in, reading books published in your market will help you get better at what you’re doing.

Even better, you can save your audience time by sharing what you have learned from the book.

Personal recommendations, rather than reviews, help you demonstrate your own knowledge of the field, but also allow you to share human details of your personal learning journey.

This makes you seem more accessible – this knowledge hasn’t come to you from the divine intervention. You’ve worked for it, and they can too.

How To Write These Ideas Well

Evergreen content is an essential part of your game plan, but you need to make sure it is excellent in order for it to perform as well as can be expected.

Here’s a checklist of what every piece of evergreen content needs to be:

• Hooked
  Your content needs a hook to make sure people will read it in the first place. You need to make sure you set up for success by choosing the right topic or idea to explore.
• Comprehensive
  It needs to be in-depth. People want to know all about the subject at hand. What’s more, you can insert more LSI keywords to boost your SEO performance, use reliable sources, and establish a foundation of trust and authority.
• Current
  If something new changes the nature of your evergreen content, get it updated. Readers will thank you for it, and Google ranks articles based on freshness. Outdated information will see your article sink without trace and your effort is wasted.
• Enticing
  Free, downloadable content can reward people for having read your content. We offer a free blog offer at the end of every blog post. Whatever your call-to-action, make sure it’s emphatic and make sure your readers can’t miss it.

Done this way, evergreen content adds value for months and years to come, and can better position any brand for evergreen content marketing success online.

By making sure evergreen stories speak to your audience, it can be an invaluable tool in your arsenal and an essential part of any content strategy.

Have you tried any of these 15 evergreen content ideas for your blog? If you have more evergreen content ideas that you’d like to share it with us or you have different perspectives on what is evergreen content, leave a comment down below!

This post was originally written by Joanne Chong and published on Oct 17, 2016. It was most recently updated on May 18, 2020.

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Updated: 24 April 2024