Have you ever looked back at your old blog posts and thought, “wow, that really needs an update”?
If you have, then chances are your post was not of the evergreen variety.
Evergreen content is an important part of any content marketing strategy. It’s not only a way to deliver helpful and relevant content to your audience, but it also significantly reduces the amount of time you spend on updating old content.
So, where should you begin?
Fortunately for you, we’ve analyzed all sorts of evergreen content and search engine queries to find the most successful types.
Before we get into all of that, though, let’s discuss more in-depth exactly what evergreen content is.
The Basics of Evergreen Content
Evergreen content is content that is relevant and fresh no matter when it’s being read. It doesn’t rely on trends or time-based events.
Evergreen content is the nonperishable food of the content marketing world. It’s fresh and ready to be consumed, whether that’s today or decades from now. It doesn’t even need to be updated, though refreshing your content every now and again is never a bad idea.
There are many types of evergreen content, but a few examples include:
What We Found About Evergreen Content Success
To determine which types of evergreen content are the most successful, we performed 10 queries with varied verbiage, including how-to, best, what is, vs, switching from, common mistakes, etc.
We then analyzed the top three results for each query, which fell into one of five evergreen content types:
- How-tos: Basic guides that deliver “how-to” information in sections, steps, or other easy-to-digest ways.
- Listicles: Long-form content that serves to offer a lot of ideas (e.g. gift ideas, travel locales) in one article.
- Standard blog: A conversational, yet informative, blog post that offers high-level information to curious readers.
- Product comparisons: A page that directly compares the specifications and features of two or more products (physical and digital)
- Content guide pages: Content pages that are typically part of a larger “hub” of data. Think “Help” articles on a website.
Out of the 30 URLs analyzed, we considered the following metrics:
- The number of organic keywords
- The estimated monthly traffic (for the page as a whole, not just based on our specific query)
- The number of backlinks acquired
- The domain rating
- The word count
Now that you understand our methodology, let’s dig into the details.
What We Learned From Our Data
That’s a lot of information to parse, so let’s break down the main takeaways.
Of the ten different searches conducted, the top three ranking positions were analyzed. Among those 30 URLs, we found that:
- 9 out of the 30 URLs were listicles
- 6 out of the 30 URLs were how-to articles
- 6 out of the 30 URLs were guide/hub pages
- 6 out of the 30 URLs were product comparison pages
- 3 out of the 30 URLs were standard blogs
If we’re looking at a metric like estimated traffic values, then the most successful types of evergreen content were how-tos, standard blogs, and listicles.
It’s helpful to know the best evergreen content types if you’re looking to build a successful blog from scratch. The greatest takeaways from this data, though, are related to backlinks, word count, and keywords.
Backlinks are an important ranking factor, but they’re not the be-all, end-all that many marketers make them out to seem. How so? If they were one of the most important ranking factors, you would expect 100% of first-ranking results to have the highest backlink profile of the top three URLs analyzed. That’s not the case, though.
In fact, only five out of 10, or 50%, of first-ranking results had the highest backlink profile of the top three URLs.
Furthermore, there is this idea that the more content you can cram onto your page the better. Our data indicates that’s not the case.
We analyzed blogs with 3,000 words, or even more.
The average word count for the 30 URLs we analyzed was 3,183. Only four of the 10, or 40%, first-place ranking results had the highest word count of the top three URLs. This shows that having more words does not necessarily mean better content.
And how about keywords?
Our data suggests that ranking for more keywords on one page than your SERP competition can help, but it does not ensure you a 1st position ranking. In fact, only 40% of first-position ranking URLs had more keywords than their competitors.
All of this to say, Google takes many factors into account when ranking URLs. While certain things can give you a slight edge (e.g., more backlinks, a higher word count, more keywords), they’re not a guarantee. You should focus, first and foremost, on providing helpful and quality content that answers your reader’s queries.
FAQs
Do you have more questions about evergreen content? Here are the answers to the most frequently asked questions on the topic.
What kind of evergreen content is the most successful?
This will depend on your topic and niche. If, after a bit of niche research, you’re not sure, then listicles and how-to articles are both easy to produce and helpful to a wider audience. This is backed by our own data above.
Can I have too many pieces of evergreen content?
There’s no such thing as too much quality content. You shouldn’t post content, even evergreen content, just for the sake of posting. Your content should be helpful and relevant, whether it’s evergreen or timely.
Should I only post evergreen content?
There are certainly successful websites that only post evergreen content, but timely content also has a time and a place (pun intended). The 80/20 rule seems to strike an ideal balance. That is, if you’re looking for a guideline to follow, 80 percent of your content should be evergreen and the remaining 20 percent should be timely.
What makes a piece of content evergreen?
Evergreen content is content that says relevant and “fresh.” It’s not tied to a specific time period or event. Instead, it’s something that people can find helpful whether they come across it now or 2 years from now.
Conclusion
Evergreen content isn’t objectively better than timely content. It really depends on your niche, your audience, and your content marketing goals.
The same can be said for evergreen content types. While listicles, how-tos, and standard blogs were shown to be most successful in our data, that doesn’t mean they will be most successful with your audience.
So, take our learnings, especially as they relate to backlinks and word count and keyword variety, but experiment with the different types of evergreen content. You never know what will jive with your audience until you give it a try.
What percentage of your current content is evergreen?
