Creating engaging content is important for your brand—but if people don’t see it, what good does it do? 90% of content on the internet today has been created in the last two years, but 91% of content on Google gets zero traffic. Your content may be engaging, but if it isn’t showing up, your brand could be missing out on website traffic and clicks.
However, this does not necessarily mean you need to create new content. Instead, your brand might benefit from leveraging strategies you already have and putting a fresh new spin on existing content. Here, we’ll discuss the importance of evergreen content for your marketing strategy.
Boost Your Traffic with Old Content
Content that is evergreen is sustainable, relevant, and long-lasting. Like an evergreen tree, evergreen content is never-ending; it isn’t affected by trends or seasonal timelines. Though a lot of content online remains online, evergreen content typically grows past its publication. The traffic it generates grows over time and doesn’t become outdated. Normally, news articles are not considered “evergreen” but they still have value and publishers should aim for a 60/40 balance.
For instance, if you publish news content, balancing 60% news and 40% evergreen content will resonate more with your audience than posting 60% evergreen content and 40% news.
Steps to Refreshing Evergreen Content
Examine your site, analyze target keywords, evaluate your competition, and optimize on-page content.
Revamping old content requires multiple steps:
Step 1: Monitor Your Existing Content
You can start your evergreen content refresh by choosing keywords, topics, or main pages that need refreshing.
Whatever route you decide to start with, you need to identify your own competing pages that rank for target keywords. To identify ranking keywords, merge Google Sheets with research tool APIs to get your URLs and metrics organized all in the same place. Pages that don’t perform very well can be rearranged into content that stands out.
Step 2: Research Results
Your SEO depends on the characteristics of the content that you post. If you want your content to rank well, you need to make sure that you are surfacing the right content. To drop the right content, you need to map out a query for what the right content for your market is.
For example, there’s a different search intent between “how to pack a suitcase” versus “best carry-on suitcase.” Understanding the intent behind each search can help you decide what content works best for your audience.
Another great way to create more evergreen content is to utilize Google’s “People Also Ask” or PAA box. This can help you identify the questions people are asking, and give you more in-depth coverage of your topic.
Step 3: Know Thy Competitor
If you’re looking to freshen up your old content, you need to know where your other competitors rank. One method to help you identify gaps in your content marketing is by conducting a term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF). This SEO tactic helps determine must-have terms as well as related content that should be included in your evergreen content.
Other clues to help you determine how your content ranks: publishing date, content presentation, and length.
Step 4: Optimize Your Content
After you refresh your content, it should be made up of at least 30% new material. Your optimization should include a new title, introduction, publishing date, and new internal links. Once you have updated your evergreen content, you need to look for linking opportunities to let Google know that this is newly refreshed content, such as through email and social media.
During your content refresh process, your newsletter signups or affiliate links might have been affected. If so, it would be ideal to polish them up and then implement them on your updated page.
Step 5: Publish New, Refreshing Content
Once you have optimized and polished your content, it’s time to publish. In general, optimized content should last you at least a year, but if traffic starts to decline, it would be a good idea to run a new round of refreshes, just to stay on track.
Quality content doesn’t happen overnight, it takes a considerable amount of work and time to achieve. But when you find ways to recycle and re-enhance old content, you boost your chances of success with the content that you do create, driving long-term traffic and keeping your content relevant.
Are you looking for more website traffic but have exhausted all of your marketing strategy efforts? Uptick can help! Contact us today.
