Usually, evergreen content is comprised of somewhat lengthy, informative articles. These articles focus on findings from various sources such as blog posts, and often combine information and learnings. They are instructive pieces of content, and generally offer well-researched and thorough insights into all the essentials of a certain topic.
Even though these are not short, sales-y articles, they should be written with your target audience in mind. Evergreen content or cornerstone content should reflect your mission and support your company’s brand while providing helpful or informative articles.
Related: Get Fastest SEO Results
Why is evergreen content so important for SEO?
First off, evergreen content performs a huge role in any SEO strategy. Sometimes it can be challenging to rank for very popular search keywords, but an evergreen approach can assist in taking on those common search terms easily. We can help you with our SEO keyword research service.
For example, if you write many articles on a single subject, like coffee roasting, you need to send a signal to Google to let it know which of these articles are more important, so they will turn up in search results. If you don’t follow this strategy, you’re losing out on a lot of traffic. By offering the right internal structure in your posts, you can let Google know which of your coffee roasting articles should show up first.
Related: 10 Best Free Keyword Research Tools
What is the link structure for evergreen content?
Evergreen articles should be easily seen on your website. Your homepage should link to all your evergreen content, and it should be accessible and clear. When you have similar topics that relate to each other, for example “How to roast your own coffee” and “What types of coffee beans are best to roast at home” then these two articles should link back to each other.
As your website grows, you may write many new blog posts about coffee roasting from different angles. Each of these new posts should link back to the original evergreen article. This type of strategy helps cornerstone articles rank higher in Google searches.
For example, if you link highly competitive blog posts on a website’s main menu, it will have a higher priority on Google compared to normal published posts.
How can I optimize my evergreen articles?
Although evergreen content can increase your search results quite effectively, it does involve some work. Here is a quick five-step strategy to help rank your cornerstone content on your website:
1. Consider your keywords
You have to choose the fundamental keywords you want your site to rank for. Evergreen articles should be optimized to contain the “head”, or most competitive, keywords. It’s best to do your research and figure out what keywords are right for your company. There are professional tools that can help you with this.
2. Pick your best article
Go through your articles and choose one that is already or nearly optimized for keywords, then reinforce it with the most important keywords throughout the post. Examine your content and ask yourself which post is the best. That article will be your evergreen.
3. Revise it
Look back through your evergreen article and revise it to make it even better and optimized for SEO. When writing a cornerstone article, you need to pay extra attention to readability and accessibility. Make sure you use a lot of headings and images/infographics, and an index at the beginning of the post is always a good idea. Expand on what you can, and double-check that everything is current and up-to-date. Don’t forget to review, edit, and update regularly!
4. Optimize other articles on long-tail variants
The other articles you have on your website that are similar to your main topic (coffee roasting), like “What do I need to start roasting my own coffee?”, can assist your evergreen post to optimize for long-tail variants of the head keywords. These posts are where you can help boost traffic to that original cornerstone article.
5. Linking from tail to head
Now that you have your evergreen article ready to go, you need to inform Google that your new cornerstone post is the most important article on that topic (coffee roasting) on your website. Make sure you don’t forget to link from all long-tail blog posts to your evergreen post.
With this five-step strategy, you can start optimizing your website and widen the reach to your target audience.
