An evergreen content strategy is critical. Is yours?

Content is the new online currency.

Search engines reward brands that produce great content across a wide range of locations online. That’s what it takes to build a brand, to get found online, and to be valuable to customers and prospects.

Although time-sensitive content has its place in a content strategy, evergreen content (content that is still relevant months and years after it was written) has much more value over the long term.

Here’s why developing an evergreen content strategy, and including this type of content in your marketing, is a good idea.

Extended Relevancy

Time-sensitive content is great if you can get it out first, or if you can offer a new perspective on the topic, or provide additional resources that no one else is offering. However, once the buzz around that story goes away the audience moves on to something else, and you have to start all over.

Evergreen content lasts longer than time-sensitive content, so it compounds over time. Every evergreen post you put up creates another way for someone to find out about your brand or business from that point forward, while every time-sensitive post can become old news in as little as a few hours.

Content that is relevant for months and years after publication also provides the opportunity to keep new readers engaged using internal links.

For example, if you write a blog on coffee and post about how to make an incredibly strong cup of Joe, you can then link to this blog post in every subsequent post about dark roasts, or about how to make coffee, or every time you review a new roast.

These Internal links allow your new readers to discover your older posts, and as they “fall down the rabbit hole” of long-term content you’ve created they become more connected with your brand every step of the way. Using internal links can also improve SEO if you use keywords as the anchor text, which brings us to the next benefit…

It’s great for SEO

In addition to helping you create internal links, evergreen content will help your site get more backlinks.

Backlinks, also known as inbound links, are a crucial search engine ranking factor. Each backlink is considered a “vote” in the eyes of the search engines, a credibility indicator that says your website offers valuable, quality content to your audience. These links need to be earned (buying them or exchanging them can get you in trouble with search engines, possibly blacklisting your site), and the best way to earn them is by creating remarkable evergreen content that others want to link to because of the value it provides.

As you continue to post evergreen content, you will accumulate an increasing number of backlinks to your site, raising its profile in search engines.

Exponentially Grow Lead Generation

Nowhere is the compounding effect of evergreen content more profitable than when generating leads for your business. If, at the end of each evergreen post, you include a call to action that captures the contact information for potential customers, that means each evergreen post you put up becomes another touch point for new prospects to find you.

Because the topic of evergreen posts is relevant for an extended period of time, it will continue to come up in searches and be shared by new first-time visitors to your site, and if you have a call to action on each post all of this attention will drive more leads into your pipeline. Plus, as you continue to post evergreen content, you will start weaving these posts together until you have a massive net of content related to your field capturing new leads for you all the time.

Just think about how rewarding it would be to find out that a post you wrote two years ago is still generating substantial revenue for your business to this day – talk about a long-term investment!

Producing evergreen content is exactly how you can go about accomplishing this, and some sites even get to a point where their catalog of posts is deep enough and has enough hits that it can sustain the company’s lead pipeline without there being any new posts at all!

Get off the content treadmill

It’s time to get off the treadmill of chasing short-term attention and start incorporating evergreen content into your editorial calendar.

Instead of investing your time creating a post that will be irrelevant in a few days at best, start working on material that will continue to pull in new business for years to come!