3 Reasons Why Evergreen Content Is the Gift that Keeps Giving

Have you met someone at a social gathering and asked them about their business? How often has the response been either too simplistic, too long-winded, or simply confusing? Your first instinct is probably to bail. Maybe, because you are in person, you hang in there. You ask additional questions to help you understand. On the Internet, when someone types in your website or does a search, they are looking for an answer. When your content lacks the appropriate keywords and metatags, it is invisible. If your content is visible, but poorly written, most surfers, given anonymity, type a few keystrokes and move on to your competitor. But with high quality content, there’s engagement. The visitor might read additional pages, visit your About Us page, consider your services, like or share your content. Good content then:

1. Helps you be discovered by relevant prospects looking for a solution
2. Demonstrates your thought leadership in your field, thereby burnishing your brand
3. Lives forever, gaining links over time bringing you additional visitors

Good content enriches your site and generates traffic. These site visitors are well qualified since your content (1) appeals to like-minded individuals interested in learning or (2) attracts prospects with a problem looking for solutions for which your product might be suitable. How do you go about producing a piece of content able to attract such an audience? Here are the things you first need to determine:

• What keyword phrases do you want to rank for?
• How much volume and competitiveness is there for that and related phrases?
• Where does your site currently rank for that phrase?
• Why do the sites that show up on the first page of a Google query rank so highly?
• Who can help my site and my content rank as well?

To start, pick a keyword phrase that someone who does not know your brand might discover your services by posing such a query. Say you are an employment attorney, then select “employment lawyer near me.” Type that phrase into a Google search. Do you show up on the first page? Are you on the map? While that creates some awareness, is being a dot on a map going to distinguish you from the other nearby dots? Can you appreciate that the sites with paid ads, Google My Business listings, reviews, or content (organic listings) might attract more clicks from searchers? Continue to the following pages to find your listing. If your site hasn’t displayed by page 10, you do not rank in the top 100 listings for the term in question.

Suppose your site ranked 75th for this term, placing you roughly on the 8th search page result. The likelihood of you getting a click is a fractional percent, maybe even lower than 1 in 10,000. This means that if this term generated 2,000 monthly searches, you could expect a click once every five months. By comparison, if your site ranked 9th for this term, you’d be towards the bottom of the first page of results. Experience informs us that while 30% of searches go to the top organic listing, slots # 7 – # 10 each get about 3% of the clicks. That calculates to about 60 monthly visitors (or 3% of 2,000 searches) for the 9th ranked listing. How much more business might a company be doing with 300 site visitors over a five-month period compared to 1? The graph below is from a study conducted by BackLinko.com.

Looking at the first page, there’s also a section entitled “People Also Ask.” This is an indicator of related searches or terms. While not exhaustive, you could conduct those searches and continue down the rabbit hole of compiling each additional similar question as a “related term.” This step-by-step approach is “free,” but costs you time; there will be plenty of errors of omission as well. For example, how will you determine whether “employment lawyer near me” gets more searches than “employment attorney near me?”

You could deploy software, free or paid, that would make your research more efficient and accurate. If you are serious about generating leads online, you need this effort to translate to actionable steps towards producing content that begins attracting you qualified traffic. Remember, professionals hire professionals. Locate a competent digital marketing team. Your job is hard enough without adding additional tasks of getting up to speed on producing effective original content – all while the industry is constantly evolving, potentially reducing the effectiveness of your efforts.

Let’s define “evergreen content” as: tips or insights that are long-lived, work year-round (or come back seasonally) and remain relevant for a long while. One piece we authored entitled “How Soon After Getting New Tires Should I Get an Alignment” generated monthly traffic of 23 to 62 page-views during the first 5 months of 2020 for our client who has a local business. Over the past quarter, the post’s monthly traffic has averaged 600 visitors and topped 1,000 visitors in its best month.

The more traffic garnered, the more links attracted, and the more the site’s overall authority increases. The links and the content have compounding positive brand and SEO impacts. The one-time investment of researching this topic, writing about it, and optimizing on and off page elements has paid itself over time and again. It will keep delivering value for a long time. Interested in producing similar results for your site? We love meeting business people with interesting stories to see if we can add value to their operations. Book an appointment or contact us about your project if you are considering SEO or other digital marketing services.