Building Traffic with Evergreen Content

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Evergreen content is a powerful tool for building traffic, earning links, and improving rankings. If you want to create a successful website, it should be part of your content strategy.

What Is Evergreen Content?

The term “evergreen” comes from the world of plants. It describes those plants that don’t lose their leaves with the seasons and instead stay green all year round.

That is also what evergreen content is: content pieces that continue to be relevant long past their publication date, regardless of what’s happening in the world. While all content stays around, the evergreen variety stays on top of search results for months, years, even decades.

How do they do that? By revolving around topics that people are always interested in, such as:

  • Vacation hotspots
  • How to train your dog
  • Recipes
  • Weight loss advice.

Non-evergreen topics would be topics like local or celebrity news, seasonal/holiday content, the latest iPhone release, etc.

Basically, evergreen topics are perpetually important while non-evergreen topics only have temporary significance and will go away.

A well-running radio station website will have lots of relevant content to keep bringing in visitors. An article that gets lots of attention one day can be completely out of date a week later. This makes it much harder to build sustainable traffic.  If you don’t continually publish new stuff, your stream of visitors tapers off.

On the other hand, you’ll write an evergreen piece of content once and it will continue to bring in traffic without you having to do much of anything. Sure, you might have to update it here and there if new information comes out, but the bulk of the article will always be relevant and helpful to readers – who continue to look for, share, and link to it.

Do less and potentially get more traffic!  It’s the perfect content plan.

Google loves evergreen content too. So, if you can create something that their algorithm sees as a valuable resource, they are happy to give your website top spots in their search results.

Here are some tips for creating evergreen content

  1. Choose your topics and make sure they qualify. Brainstorm topics and enter them into keyword research tools like Google Trends to get variations. These days, it’s harder to rank for topics that are very broad as a lot of content already exists for that. With a narrower approach, you can better concentrate on the reader. Instead of “deer hunting” think “the best time of day for deer hunting”.
  2. Create content that’s in line with your station brand. If you’re a top 40 station, with a younger audience, you’re not going to post articles on your website about the places to get the best senior citizen deals. Write for your audience.
  3. Avoid non-evergreen angles and dating your content. You might write an article that’s about “12 Pandemic Activity Ideas to Stay Upbeat”. Hopefully, the pandemic will finally end and with that, so will the appeal of your content.  Also, never mention references that would date your content in any way, like “the Trump administration announced last week” or ever putting a month or year in the title.  Keep in mind that most times within WordPress, keywords become a part of the permalink, so even if you change the title later, the permalink will still contain the year or month.
  4. Update your content occasionally, if necessary. Some of your evergreen articles may include statistics or studies that might become obsolete or irrelevant in the future. Check occasionally your articles and verify should they need updates. Operate these updates as soon as possible in order to keep them actual and valuable over time.

Here are some types of evergreen content

  1. Tutorials and “How to” Guides. This is the main type of perennial content.
    – How to find the best Air B&B deals in (town).
    – How chefs pick the best vegetables.
    – Picking the perfect pet for your new family.
  2. Problem-solving. Go to places like ask.com or Google Answers and do a keyword search for towns in your area.
    – Solved: Navigating the new round-about intersection with ease.
    – Tiktok edits that ensure your videos get more shares.
    – What really determines whether he/she really likes you.
  3. Lists. Whether you like list posts or not, there is a lot of data that proves that they simply perform better. There was a study of headline preferences, and, numbered headlines came out on top — way on top.
    – 5 Questions you must ask during your next test drive.
    – Top 10 ways to get more gas mileage.
    – 4 Must-do things to do before bed each night to ensure sound sleep.

Here’s one tip you can implement right now for your radio station to start your evergreen content journey.

Have your general manager send an e-mail to all of the nearby town visitors bureaus asking them to send in an article that details the top 5 best things about their town/area.  Let them know you’ll include links to their bureau and credit them as the author, BUT that they cannot include any events like a fall festival, Christmas parade, etc.  Nothing seasonal.  It has to be filled with aspects that your listeners can use right now no matter the time of year.  I’m sure they will appreciate the article promoting their town and you’ll get evergreen content that should bring new visitors to your site over time.

Use Evergreen Content to Market to Advertisers.

These have been ideas for your radio station listeners on your website.  You could also fill a group or market-type website with evergreen content that targets advertisers.  Visit https://www.markettheme.net for a reference.

– 5 things to ask your radio advertising rep about.
– How to craft the best radio ad.
– Top 3 things to mention in order to get more Tiktok video likes.
– How to create evergreen content for your website.

I hope you can see that evergreen content has the ability to consistently bring in traffic over long periods of time. It takes some more thinking and preparation to figure out, however, in the long run, the work that you need to put in results in better performance and less maintenance over time.

Now you know what goes into creating evergreen content. Now it’s just a matter of putting it into practice and making it a part of your content strategy.

We want to help your radio station grow and succeed online.  That journey starts with an amazing website that keeps visitors coming back often.  Reach out to us to start your path to online success, or book an appointment to see our tools in action.