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I’m often asked, what is the best way to get more traffic to a website? While there is no silver bullet answer – successfully creating evergreen content is one very effective way of doing just that, because of its usefulness and an ability to rank well for long periods of time.

What is Evergreen Content?

Evergreen content is content that people will continue to want to read about and use, long after the content was created. Simply put, it’s about creating content that will remain relevant for customers and readers.

Which content will continue to be of interest?

It may be impossible to accurately predict what’s going to continue to be relevant in 50 years – but most of us can think of subjects that will continue to be of interest in 5 years or even 1 year.

For instance, “How to get more traffic” has the potential to become an evergreen article because people will continue to want to know:  how to generate more website hits for at least the foreseeable future.

Related: 10 Kick Ass Content Marketing Ideas

How to create Evergreen Content to get more traffic?

# Step 1: Do Keyword Research

When planning to create evergreen content – you MUST do keyword research.

1. Find out which keywords your target audience are searching for
2. Examine how competitive these keywords are?

This is the critical first step because it will help you to identify where your evergreen content opportunities exist.

# Step 2: Use Long Tail Phrases (Keywords)

One mistake people often make when choosing content is in taking on topics and titles that are too broad and not useful towards generating traffic.

In the example above, I’ve purposely chosen: “How to get more traffic”.

While this may be a good idea for an article – it remains too broad to cover anything specific or in-depth.

Better titles include:

• How To Get More Traffic By Using Online Video Testimonials
• How To Get More Traffic Through Guest Blogging At These Sites.
• How To Get More Traffic: 3 Steps To Create More Evergreen Content

The plan here is to ensure that your content is:

1. Narrowly focused,
2. Keyword rich
3. And provides lots of value, information and/or instruction

Around a specific:

• Topic,
• Question
• Or challenge.

Related: Ten Proven Blog Post Ideas And Examples To Smash Blogger’s Block

# Step 3: Update and Re-Purpose

Creating a timeless article is virtually impossible so as soon as new information becomes available, you will want to update your content – so that it remains relevant and for as long as possible.

This should be a proactive, rather than a re-active process!

• It is up to you to spend the time putting in the research,
• Find out what has changed and/or what needs to be added
• And continually update what is outdated.

What can Evergreen content do for your Website and your Business?

While it’s not easy to successfully create evergreen content, it is clearly well worth doing – even if you only succeed every once in a while.

The analytics report above relates to an article here on TweakYourBiz.

You can see how it has grown over time and how it is continuing to send us lots of traffic every month:

1. This article has grown with the site,
2. Is now ranking better and driving more traffic than it did in 2011
3. And continues to get social shares and receive comments

Many of us fall into the trap of creating content that has either:

• Too short a shelf life,
• Or too broad an appeal.

Planning, creating and maintaining evergreen content will help to ensure your content is delivering the best possible result – for you and your business.

Related: Pimp Your Business Blog With Headlines, Structure, Formatting, Images And Research

I’ve created this article at the request of some of our contributors here at TYB but I hope that our readers will also find it useful. We welcome your opinion or suggestions. 

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