Evergreen Content and Its Importance to Link Building Success

In link building, one of the best ways to succeed in earning backlinks and ...

In link building, one of the best ways to succeed in earning backlinks and driving organic traffic to your website is to create original content that webmasters view as timely, informative and an asset to list on their site. But that can vary based on the webmaster’s personal preferences and your industry or market, making the creation of consistently linkable content challenging.

That is why it's important to create content that has longevity, on topic relevant to readers no matter what may be happening in the world or the time of year. This type of content is commonly referred to as "evergreen content."

Why evergreen content is helpful for link building

Evergreen content is an informative, in-depth resource that will open up researching avenues and offer long-term value to webmasters. Finding relevant opportunities to reach out to can be one of the most challenging aspects of link building, especially when your content is too niche. Furthermore, consistently producing linkable assets can be time-consuming, and having content to update with information can save time and help the content retain value.

What type of information is considered evergreen?

Ideating evergreen content can be a challenge, but information with an overall value that retains its relevance over time is an excellent place to start. For example, your content can include information such as stress management, eating healthy and money management techniques, depending on your industry. These topics are relevant to a broad audience on some level and can be updated regularly as new strategies and tactics are discovered.

Link-building for a client – let’s look at the numbers

Here is an example from an Investis Digital client, Senior Lifestyle. We created a piece of content, published in early 2020, on the seven best exercises for seniors and some that could be hazardous to their health. The article has an attention-grabbing title focused on content relevant throughout the year (exercise) and an original e-book available for download with more pertinent information on seniors' health and wellness.

Here is a view of how the resource ranks in organic search courtesy of SEMRush:

The article ranks as high as first and no lower than fourth for relevant keywords and phrases used in search queries centered on seniors' workouts and exercise tips. In turn, this resource has become the site's most viewed blog post. We earned authoritative backlinks with that content

We built 15 links to our client’s website for this resource. While looking through this report, several backlinks appear to be naturally built. Here is a glimpse backlink profile of the article, pulled from Ahrefs:

Some of the domains include government websites for cities in California and South Carolina. Additionally, educational domains like the University of Concordia-Chicago are included in this report. All these sites have a domain authority of over 50. The City of Monterey Park in California has the highest DA at 92.

This demonstrates that having informative and valuable content helps earn links from authoritative and high traffic university websites despite the topic and advice being relatively low-level. These websites are looked at more favorably by Google over less authoritative websites such as guest blogs due to their age, scholarly content and high traffic rates. Building links to even just a few of these authoritative .gov websites can go a long way in increasing your website’s traffic and visibility.

Why were we so successful with evergreen content?

We were able to quickly find relevant opportunities for outreach by leveraging the backlinks of similar content. We found it easy to discover this content by pulling backlinks from other senior exercise-related information. The relevance of information has allowed for clear research opportunities for more than a year as senior fitness is relevant for a broad audience.

Also, since the content addresses seniors, there may be many government and university websites with pages dedicated to helping seniors live a healthy lifestyle. While there may be more timely blog posts to research for, this piece will always have relevance in the webmaster’s eyes due to its overall helpful and informative nature. This type of resource link builders can fall back on if they were struggling to acquire backlinks for other pieces of content that may have been published more recently but are not as helpful or applicable.

The difficulty of leveraging niche content

To truly understand why evergreen content is unique and helpful towards link building efforts, you need to look at the analytics of other blog content that is not considered evergreen and compare the difference in organic traffic and keyword ranking over time. Using the same client's blog, we found an article that was not as broad or applicable to many people. We pulled the analytics to see its position for keywords since its publication and the number of backlinks accumulated.

This same client published an article during the onset of COVID-19 regarding plans for senior living options after the crisis. This resource does not rank well for relevant keywords, has one backlink and most importantly, is not driving as much organic traffic to the client’s website compared to the senior exercise resource This is a testament to the exercise resources’ wide relevance of information and overall longevity. Additionally, content focused on life events like the COVID-19 pandemic are only useful for the duration of the said time. Eventually, this crisis will end, and the resource will be effectively useless to everyone..

So, what’s the difference?

As we can see here, this article is not ranking in organic search nearly as well:

These two topics could not be any more different in terms of strength as linkable assets. First, senior fitness and exercise is a concept with much more long-term relevancy to a larger group of people than the COVID-19 pandemic is. A simple “senior fitness resources inurl:links site:.org” Google search command would yield several outreach opportunities while allowing you to gather competitor backlinks from these sites and run them through your preferred SEO tool for analysis. Attempts to find opportunities for “Planning after COVID-19” do not yield as many immediate opportunities for outreach, and many of the backlinks available to analyze are too broad to allow you to narrow down any specific sites to focus on.

Tying it all together

Link building is a process that is time-consuming and tough to predict. This can make planning out how many links are attainable to acquire during your campaign difficult, but it will be strenuous to reach your goal if you don't have evergreen content at your disposal.

Final tips

Remember the goal

The key is to earn backlinks, so try to make your content as relevant and useful as possible.

Write topics that can be easily updated

This is one of the easiest ways to keep your content fresh and useful. Conducting and gathering your information each year to edit articles can lead to higher retention of your backlinks and allow for you to discover new backlink opportunities.

Present information in a graphic

If you can help it, one of the most effective ways to present information for SEO is in the form of an infographic. Creating your own shows creativity and looks professional, influencing the webmaster's decision to link to your content.

Achieve link development success with Investis Digital

Do you need assistance with your link building campaigns? Download our free whitepaper, "How to Build Quality Backlinks That Impact Organic Search Visibility". Or, reach out to Investis Digital today. Our team of SEO pros would be happy to discuss how we can help you build high-value links that move you up in the SERPs.