The Long SEO Game: How to Create Content That Outlasts Trends

Plenty of digital marketing trends come and go, but creating evergreen content remains relevant over time. This type of content not only serves to strengthen your brand authority, but also helps you generate sustained, organic traffic.

Since it takes time, effort, and money to create content, it makes sense to produce as much evergreen content as possible. Think of it like this: If you’re always trying to rank new content based on current trends in your market, it will fall out of favor fast -and you’ll have to start all over again.

Ranking evergreen content allows your web pages to continue building momentum in the search engines without falling out of favor. When your goal is to create a consistent source of traffic to your website, evergreen content is a must.

But how do you create it? How can you know what topics will stand the test of time? In this article, we’ll explore how to identify evergreen topics, how to produce this content on a regular basis, and how to keep it ranking.

How to identify evergreen topics

Evergreen content addresses topics that are always of interest to your market. Some examples include how-to guides, tutorials, troubleshooting guides, and other information that helps people accomplish a task. Other examples include core concepts, common questions, timeless advice, and basic knowledge with new or often-overlooked perspectives. It may sound too simple, but you’d be surprised how many people need the basics.

The key is to present the information in a way that is easily accessible, clear, understandable, and provides real value. For example, if you’re a plumber and you write a DIY guide for clearing drains, you can enhance the value of your content by providing good photos of each process, writing your content with personality, and having a beautiful website that makes people want to stay and read.

How to write evergreen content

The first step in writing evergreen content is creating a list of your specific topics. Once you have the topics, you’ll create article titles, write the content, add media, and publish it to your website.

• Come up with your topics: Spend time searching for content related to your market as if you were a customer and see what other companies are posting. You don’t need to copy all of their content, but look for posts that cover timeless topics and add those topics to your list. To get more ideas, put yourself in your ideal customer’s shoes and think about what you would want to know if you were just starting to look for information.
  Depending on how complex your industry gets, you can publish content aimed at beginner, intermediate, and advanced audiences. It’s also a good idea to cover common topics from a new perspective when possible and address points that other companies have left out.
• Create article titles. Once you have a list of topics, feed them into ChatGPT or Claude.ai to get some title ideas. AI can come up with some great titles that would take you a long time to come up with on your own. If you’re stuck on topic ideas, ask your AI app for suggestions.
• Write your content. After you have your topics and titles, it’s time to write the content. While you can ask ChatGPT to write your articles for you, it’s going to carry a robotic feel. Try asking for ideas instead, and use them to rewrite sentences if you get stuck. AI content will rank, but content written by humans will maintain user attention.
  If you don’t want to write any of the content yourself, a full-service marketing agency like SEO.co can do all of it for you. When you work with an agency, a team of experienced writers will come up with topic ideas, titles, and write all the content for you with a fast turnaround so you can start publishing and ranking faster.
• Add media. While irrelevant stock photos should be avoided, make it a point to add relevant photos and videos to your content. As a general rule, if an image doesn’t directly contribute to conversion or instruction, leave it out. The most engaging photos will always be ones you’ve taken just for the content.
• Publish regularly. There’s little agreement on exactly how often you should publish articles, but just about everyone agrees that consistency is key. Whether you publish content weekly, every other day, or even just once a month, make sure to do it on a regular basis. This will tell search engines that your site is active and relevant.

Evergreen content equals sustained success

The last thing you want to experience is having your best-ranking web pages disappear because the topic is no longer relevant. By focusing on timeless topics and optimizing evergreen content for SEO, your content will continue to reach your target audience, and you’ll get a consistent flow of organic traffic.

It’s a smarter, more sustainable approach to growth in a world that constantly changes.