How to Use Evergreen Content to Increase Traffic

How-to-Use-Evergreen-Content-to-Increase-Traffic

The benefits of using evergreen content for your website are well-documented. Unlike news or trending content pieces, evergreen content is content on your site that remains relevant to readers for a long time, it has an “evergreen” type lifespan. Some evergreen pieces can even remain important and relevant for decades on the web.

If used well, evergreen content can, therefore, help you build a strong link foundation and significantly boost your search engine ranking. The content can also help sustain social media conversations and thus increase your social media traffic and leads.

Ways to Use Evergreen Content to Increase Traffic

The following are five proven strategies to help you use evergreen content to generate more traffic and leads;

1. Create a “Start Here” page/section

There are two reasons you need a “Start Here” page. First of all, the page will serve as an inventory for your pillar content. All of the crucial blogs, articles, lists, and videos, will be listed in this repository so that you don’t lose these vital content pieces.

Secondly, sometimes web visitors fail to convert because they don’t know where to find the information they need. Perhaps they’d like to learn about the history of a particular service. However, since you have so many content pieces on your site, they get lost along the way. A “Start Here” page serves as an entry point for new site visitors, and a hub to go back to.

2. Have a “Top Posts” or “Similar Posts” section

The “Top Posts” section works best when permanently situated within a sidebar or at the bottom of your blog or website. This way, everyone who arrives at your site will see the posts. A “Similar Posts” section can also appear within a sidebar or at the bottom of blog posts. Or, you can have two or three relevant topics listed right within the post (in-between paragraphs).

All of these approaches increase crawl depth by introducing additional internal linking. Moreover, they increase the click-through rate since interested readers will click through to discover more information on the given topic.

3. Link to the content as much as possible

The more you link to a piece of evergreen content, the easier it becomes to reach that content piece. So, once you determine that a particular article generates plenty of traffic for your website, it becomes imperative that you link to it as often as possible.

Whether you’re creating new content for your website or blog or submitting a guest post on a community blog, where possible, link back to some of your evergreen content pieces.

4. Promote the content aggressively

Social media is a great place to start promoting your evergreen content. If there’s a great video about your success story that you’d like everyone interacting with your brand to watch, how about pinning it on Instagram or Twitter. The same applies if it’s a short checklist or listicle that you’ve identified as a top traffic generator.

Aside from pinning, you can also promote evergreen content with paid social media ads. Begin by optimizing the content for conversions. Then, promote it on Facebook, YouTube, and other social networks.

5. Update older content periodically

There are two broad categories of evergreen content. The first kind is content that remains relevant regardless of time and changes in society. These often include how-to guides and the history of something. The other type is content that requires updating to remain relevant. This category may consist of product reviews and interviews.

For the latter category, create a schedule to update the posts from time to time to keep the information relevant and fresh to the current climate and audience.