The Magic Ingredient in Evergreen Content

This morning I was using Google Search Console to check up on traffic to our sister site South Downs Tech and two things struck me.

1. I really should write content more often, because practice what you preach and all that.
2. The majority of the traffic I get from Google Search is from two posts that I wrote years ago.

How is that possible? Isn’t Google supposed to like fresh content as it is seen as more relevant?

Well, yes, but also no. It depends on the content. If it is time sensitive content (like a news story about a road being closed), then it obviously helps if it is fresh. Sometimes, when time isn’t so much of a factor and when something is genuinely useful, it will stand the test of time. In fact over time that content can potentially gain more prominence as it is referred to again and again and shared by others, thus strengthening its SEO credentials and becoming evergreen content.

What makes content ‘evergreen’?

Is it a particular topic? No. Is it a particular writing style? No. Do you need lots of really good pictures? Wrong again (although good pictures are a good idea). Do you need a minimum amount of words to make it evergreen? Absolutely not.

Give up yet?

The magic ingredient, the seed that all evergreen content grows from, is looking at you every time you look in the mirror.

It’s you.

If you don’t put in the effort to write content, you will never have evergreen content gracing your website. If you find writing a struggle, or you have a lack of time, then that’s fine. You can work around that with very little effort. Start small and write short blog posts, but be consistent and try to write as often as you can. If time is a problem, then don’t sweat it. You don’t have to write a blog post every day, or even every week. You don’t even need to write it all in one go either. In fact, some of the best content on the internet has taken the writer a long time to create. Especially if it is a subject they have had to research, maybe doing surveys or some other data gathering exercise along the way.

Don’t fret if you are unable to produce anything that you would class as ‘evergreen’ straight away. It takes time and there are so many factors involved it makes it almost impossible to know beforehand what will stick and what won’t. The point is the more you write, the more you increase your chances that you will create something that will stick.

Now, I’d better go and heed my own advice and write some more posts…