Evergreen content , sometimes referred to as a summary of green content , is one of the most common and well-known terms in the world of SEO and content creation .
As you can guess from the concept of the adjective evergreen, this term is used for content that does not become outdated quickly and retains its meaning and meaning and application for a long time.
I have dedicated this article to review the characteristics of evergreen content and its place in content creation activities.
Definition of evergreen content
To better understand the definition of evergreen content , consider the following four texts:
The first text
The invention of printing revolutionized the world of media . Because it was the first tool that allowed one person to communicate with thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people.
For this reason, sometimes in reviewing the history of media, the term Gutenberg’s revolution is used to refer to the emergence of printing technology.
The second text
One of the common behaviors among our people is risk aversion in the form of going along with price fluctuations.
An increase in the price of any commodity, including cars and gold coins, encourages people to buy more of these goods, and an increase in demand leads to an increase in price, and the circle intensifies in this way.
The third text
During the last week, the price of meat increased by twenty percent.
Some experts say that this price increase is temporary and after some time, the prices will return to their previous level last month.
The fourth text
The stock price of company X is now Y tomans.
The first text has no expiration date. If you read it in five or maybe even fifty years from now, it will still be understandable and hold its value.
The second text is not as permanent as the first text; But it is not in such a way that it loses its value and meaning in a few weeks and months. The story of rising prices and increasing demand and standing in line to buy has been our concern for the last few years and maybe in a few years, it won’t matter much. So maybe for a few months, maybe even a year or two, it will be a valuable and interesting text.
The third text will become outdated in a few weeks and will not be attractive to the audience, except for the few who, years later, will search and find the concerns of our Iranian people through the news archives.
The fourth text has become outdated after reading it for a few sentences, and the price of the company’s stock in question is probably something else now.
Evergreen content is not a black and white feature and you cannot say that this content is green and that content is not.
We can consider a spectrum where one end is green content and the other end is ephemeral and momentary content.
Most of the content we deal with is somewhere on this spectrum.
The advantage of producing green content
Evergreen content production has several advantages. For this reason, content producers have always paid special attention to this type of content.
Here are some of the advantages of green content production, and I emphasize that the list of advantages can be longer than those mentioned here:
More audience
The most important advantage of green content is that it will be used by a larger audience during its lifetime.
Let’s say you have a blog that has a hundred visitors a day. When you publish an article that will lose its value in three days, the article you presented can have a maximum audience of three hundred people.
But an article whose useful life is four or five years can have thousands or even tens of thousands of visitors on the same blog.
The opportunity to correct and fix bugs
When your content loses its functionality within a few days or weeks, it’s naturally not worth spending time to complete and fix it.
In other words, you have to accept all the weaknesses and flaws of your content and move on to the next content.
Have you noticed that many social network users do not spend much time correcting their dictation and writing mistakes?
To some extent, we can give them the right. When a story is going to be deleted tomorrow or a few new posts will appear on the previous Telegram channel post, there will be less motivation to correct errors and weaknesses.
But evergreen content is supposed to work for you for months and years and attract new audiences. Therefore, no matter how much time you take to complete and refine it, it will still be justified.
The possibility of optimization
When your content expires quickly, the experience you accumulate from it will only be used for future content. But in the case of evergreen content, you can use the accumulated experience about a content to improve the same content.
For example, when you use the direct interaction of visitors in the form of comments or their behavior with the help of Google Analytics or Google Search Console or shortened links or any other tool, you find out what are the attractive and unattractive parts of the content or the satisfaction and dissatisfaction factors of the audience. Improve and optimize the text based on your findings.
Content that is not green, due to its short life, takes away the opportunity for these types of optimizations.
Increasing the reliability of search engines
When the search engines examine the behavior of users , they examine these behaviors in the form of a statistical sample.
As the number of visits increases, their confidence in the calculated behavioral indicators will increase. Because of this, usually in the first days of publication of an article, you will see the most amount of changes in its rank inside the search results page, and gradually, it will become more stable.
Your competitors cannot simply compete with a content that has been viewed tens of thousands of times and the audience has shown their satisfaction towards it.
In the case of content that is not green and expires quickly, there will not be enough time for search engines to collect data and stabilize the position of the content, especially competitive content.
Evergreen content production rate
Note that not everyone, all the time, and everywhere is just going to produce evergreen content.
If we want to use an analogy, evergreen content compared to seasonal and ephemeral content can be considered similar to the production and supply of stationery versus dairy.
No one can say that the production and supply of dairy products is wrong and it is better for everyone to go for stationery and other similar items.
But we also know that the operational challenges and complexities of producing products with a short lifespan are many, and from capacity management to pricing and distribution, it has its own troubles and costs.
In addition, you should also consider that some content delivery platforms have less capacity to supply and provide content with a long life.
For example, Instagram stories, regardless of highlights, have a short life and using green content for them does not make much sense.
Also, in many social networks, old content is buried under the mass of new content, and few people visit them. Therefore, you can have an estimate of the useful and usable life of each content based on the volume of content production and the characteristics of the space you use to provide the content , and based on this, you can decide on the extent of greenness of your content.
Bloggers may consider a specific share for green and non-green content based on the taste and needs of their audience.
These types of questions and decisions about them are in the field of expertise of a content strategist .
Types of evergreen content
Glossaries, beginner’s guides and guides, interviews with different people, history reviews of different topics, book introductions and reviews and summaries are good examples of evergreen content types.
In your opinion, what business models are formed based on ephemeral content and being evergreen does not create an advantage for them? We are happy to share your views with us.
