Your Guide to Evergreen Content for Ecommerce

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Would you prefer to create certain content just once and still get ever-increasing organic traffic from it? Sounds too good to be true? This is how evergreen content works, provided you’ve done proper research and created such a piece of content thoughtfully. So, let’s see how to take advantage of it if you run a small business and sell online.

Table of Contents

Your Guide to Evergreen Content for Ecommerce

What is evergreen content?

eCommerce evergreen content — What is evergreen content?

Evergreen content is content that is always relevant. You may think it’s hardly applicable to eCommerce since fashion, models, technologies, and designs come and go. But think about, for example, a guide on how to properly clean different types of shoes for a shoe-selling website. Such a guide can stay relevant for years.

Why is evergreen content effective?

Typical content which is not evergreen has the disadvantage that people lose interest in the topic over time and the traffic stops coming. Apple throws in a new iPhone model, there is a new trend on social media, or Asics launched new sneakers – surely, the content will be hot initially, and every eCommerce site in the related industry will try to publish some content piece on it, but in a couple of years, nobody will have the slightest interest in this.

When you create content that will stay relevant for years to come, two extraordinary benefits will happen:

There will be less work: you don’t have to update evergreen content too often since, you know, it’s evergreen.
Organic traffic will grow: if your evergreen content gets the deserved friction, it will provide a steady flow of traffic which will even grow over time as the content gets a better SEO ranking.

This is completely contrary to regular content which brings your small business new traffic while you keep posting. And when you stop posting, the traffic flow cripples.

The importance of evergreen content for SEO

When you post something trendy or newsworthy, it may give you a spike in traffic, but it will always fade with time, sometimes very quickly.

While short-lived content may have a reasonable part in your SEO strategy, you may also consider bringing in more stability by focusing on stabilizing the in-flow of traffic to your site from organic search. This can be driven exactly with evergreen content.

Also, a successful piece of evergreen content gets backlinks continuously, which is also great for SEO.

So, in the end, evergreen content is super SEO-friendly. It answers the important questions the audience has, gives searchers useful info to read which improves time spent on the site and other user engagement signals, it also helps with link-building, and ranks well, bringing traffic over the years.

How to create evergreen content

As with any endeavor to succeed, evergreen content creation starts with research. Don’t oversimplify this: since you will be investing in content creation, it is important to make sure the topic is right. Follow these steps:

1. Topic research

First, you need to get the ideas for topics to write on. Identify typical points of interest around the product or service you sell online which may fit within typical content formats discussed above.

Start with your CRM data or any other sources your customers often ask. Your sales reps or customer support, or the floor staff (if you have an offline branch of your small business) might have great ideas about what typical questions/problems they hear from customers.

Browse through product reviews on your site and on review sites for your and competing products, as customers may quote some typical issues they’ve had. If there are some established forums or Facebook/LinkedIn groups in your industry, you may find some ideas there.

Google Analytics/Google Ads/Google Search Console will show the search queries people use to find your product and you may also pick some topic ideas there.

2. Keyword research

Now that you have some ideas on what interests your customer in relation to your product or industry, you need to do more detailed keyword research to better understand what content may fit and what keywords it should be aimed at.

This is where you need a specialized SEO tool like Keyword Suggestions tool by SE Ranking or any other of such type. Professional tools are needed since there is only limited information in free Google tools. This feature can help you pick the best and well-performing search queries including long-tail keywords that will keep bringing you lots of traffic over time.

First, enter your topic ideas into the keyword research tool to check for the potential volume.

The ‘difficulty’ that is shown here is the aggregate estimate of how hard it would be to get a new page ranked within the top 10 results for this keyword on a scale of 0 to 100.

In some tools, you may see it called ‘SEO difficulty’ or ‘keyword difficulty’, but it is still the same and all systems use their own internal algorithms to weigh-in the quality of the current ranking results and their linking profiles.

Your best choices for evergreen content are keywords with high volume and low difficulty.

The history of the search volume is also shown. In most cases, you want to use keywords that do not fluctuate from the season, year, etc., to get a steady influx of traffic no matter what.

Similar and related keywords will help you better choose the targeted keywords for your content.

Also, you need to check what pages are currently getting traffic for the selected keywords. By checking competing pages you’ll understand the level of content you need to create to overcome them.

3. Check for a steady trend over time

One of the ways to ensure your content will serve long is to check if the topic is not time sensitive. Google Trends can help with that.

Select a relatively long timeline, 5 years at least. The peaks mean the spark of interest in the topic. Check how steady it is generally. Avoid topics that are spiking only for a relatively short period of time and being silent most of the time.

4. Create content

Ok, you have a list of topic ideas, they promise great traffic, and you understand what type of content you can create for those, so it is time to start doing it. Remember the following tips:

Create great content: it should probably go without saying but truly, you need to rank well and mediocre efforts just won’t. Google is what it is today because it gives people the best possible answers. Check which competing pages rank for your keyword/topic and produce content better than theirs.
Кeep the ‘ever’ part in your evergreen content: write about reliable, time-proven topics which are not going to change in a year or two. Don’t use any short-term topics like fashion, trends, or news. Also, avoid dates like ‘now, in 2021’, but still, you can use the year in the headline (according to Backlinko, such content has more chances to become evergreen), just don’t forget to change the year in the headline to keep it current.

Don’t get too technical/expert: most evergreen content is geared for beginners. All those how-to’s are normally well-known to professionals in the field, and they don’t Google answers for it. Avoid too technical language, offer more basics and definitions when reasonable.
Keep a narrow focus: don’t go over too-wide topics like ‘how to clean shoes’. You’ll drown in all possible materials, tools, and chemicals. The above example like ‘how to clean white leather shoes’ is exactly the type people will look for when having this problem.
Cross-link related content: this works great for SEO, so if you have several articles/posts/guides on similar topics, link them.

5. Maintain evergreen content for better SEO

Producing great pieces of SEO content is not something of ‘fire-and-forget’ type. You need to track its progress and help it grow if there are signs of trouble:

Track rankings: if it’s stuck on some rank and not going higher or even goes down slowly, it may indicate problems with the content. It may be lacking quality (check bounce rate/time on page), or some technical problems (check Google Search Console or any professional SEO tool like SE Ranking we’ve already mentioned).

maintain evergreen content — Track your rankings

Review/Update: while one of the main benefits of evergreen content is less-required maintenance, you still need to check sometimes the validity/robustness of what you’ve posted earlier, or maybe refresh it with newer information/research.
Backlinks: it is very difficult to outrank competitive pages if nobody links to your content, so make sure your team works on link building, too.
Page load speed: ensure your evergreen pages load reasonably fast; you analyze it with multiple tools, free and paid.
Promote: your new content needs to be shown to the world. Share it on socials, set up email marketing if appropriate, or try to run a PPC campaign.
Repurpose: when you have a successful evergreen article, try to repurpose it into some other form, like YouTube videos, infographics, etc. People look for info on different platforms and it may help them find the same sort of answers there.