Why is it worth publishing evergreen articles on a company blog?
Posted: Mon Dec 23, 2024 10:26 am
In 2012, I wrote a guidebook on choosing the best font for a company website . And there would be nothing extraordinary about it, if not for the fact that this article attracted the most users to the company website until the beginning of 2019. During this time, the text on choosing the best font for the website was in the TOP 5 for the phrase "what font for a website" and generated organic traffic. In 2019, I scraped out other texts, including on the correct naming of graphics and creating ALT descriptions for images , which dethroned the text about fonts in the rankings. This does not change the fact that being the undisputed leader in statistics for almost 7 years is something you cannot ignore.
Currently (February 2020) the text about fonts is in third place and gives me 8.54% of the traffic to the site. Also quite good. Interestingly (which I admit with a certain amount of embarrassment), the text itself is not one of those groundbreaking ones. Just a guide text with a few classic tips. I remember that I wrote it at the time with only one goal, to generate traffic from the search engine. As you can see, the goal was achieved 100%.
What was the advantage of this advisory article? Without a doubt, the fact that the information contained in it did not lose its relevance for a long time. People who entered it in 2015 or 2017 received basic knowledge that they could successfully use. At the beginning of 2020, I finally decided to update the article on fonts. What was the effect? You can read about it in the text: How and why to update old content on a company blog? However, there are articles whose topics never become outdated. Once written, they can work for us for many years. These articles, like evergreen plants, do not change their color regardless of the season and constantly generate organic traffic in the search engine. We call them evergreen content — evergreen, evergreen.
See the statistics of views of the article "What font for a website"? Since 2012, the article's visibility has been constantly growing or remaining at a similar level. It was not until 2019 that a clear architect email database decline in popularity occurred.
Article views "How to write a good alternative description for an image (ALT)?" in 2019. A classic chart that shows that good content can do a lot.
Evergreen content - what is it?
Evergreen texts, evergreen articles, evergreen content - this is a term for content that is and will always be interesting to readers. Intrigued?
Evergreen content is content that attracts users to the site all the time. Evergreen articles do not lose their relevance long after the publication date, and search traffic does not decrease, but grows over time (take a look at the statistics of the article "How to write a good alternative description for a photo (ALT)?" above). Admit it, it sounds quite surreal, a recipe for a content marketing perpetual motion machine. Unlike this hypothetical machine, evergreens are not a pipe dream and they really exist. And they work! What is the power of this type of text?
Why is content always green?
To answer this question, you need to recall how the search engine indexes new content. Of course, for the purposes of this article, I am presenting it in a much simplified way.
1. Crawling.
At this stage, the search engine sends robots to websites to scan and discover new content. Let's say they've landed in a health food store. They scan the blog's how-to content and the product range, including the "Rice" category, including "risotto rice."
2. Indexing.
Robots that have scanned the site (and blog) thoroughly are now collecting information about the content, graphics, links, and keywords that appear on it. In this case, they saw that the site had a pretty interesting and frequently visited article about risotto rice. In the next step, they recorded this information in the search index.
According to Google, their search engine index contains hundreds of billions of web pages and is over 100,000,000 gigabytes in size. It is somewhat similar to the index that is placed at the end of a book. When a site is indexed, it is assigned to the index according to the words it contains.
3. Displaying results.
At this stage, the search engine responds to the user's query. It separates the most relevant and most relevant queries - content, articles, graphics. These do not have to be the latest articles, but they are always the articles that best match the query.
People who wonder “how much does risotto rice cost at Biedronka” need to know the current answer to this question – the current price of the product in a specific store. And in such a case, the search engine cannot “spit out” data from 2015, because it is way out of date.
But when asking “what rice for risotto” the user does not want the most up-to-date answer to this question, but the most relevant answer to this question . If this question is best answered in an article from 2017 on one of the popular portals, such an answer will be the first in the search results and will probably fall into the answer box.
The information about the price of rice in Biedronka in January 2020 will quickly become outdated, but the phrase "what rice for risotto" will be asked all the time by Internet users who love Italian cuisine. And risotto rice is not subject to seasonal fashion. Most of it has been produced for hundreds of years, including in northern Italy. Italians will not suddenly change 150 types of risotto rice and will not give up the production of Arborio, Carnaroli, Vialone Nano, Baldo and Roma. Therefore, the text "what rice for risotto" will always be up to date and the person looking for the best answer to this question will always find it. The article about risotto rice is our perpetual motion machine, i.e. evergreen content.
Currently (February 2020) the text about fonts is in third place and gives me 8.54% of the traffic to the site. Also quite good. Interestingly (which I admit with a certain amount of embarrassment), the text itself is not one of those groundbreaking ones. Just a guide text with a few classic tips. I remember that I wrote it at the time with only one goal, to generate traffic from the search engine. As you can see, the goal was achieved 100%.
What was the advantage of this advisory article? Without a doubt, the fact that the information contained in it did not lose its relevance for a long time. People who entered it in 2015 or 2017 received basic knowledge that they could successfully use. At the beginning of 2020, I finally decided to update the article on fonts. What was the effect? You can read about it in the text: How and why to update old content on a company blog? However, there are articles whose topics never become outdated. Once written, they can work for us for many years. These articles, like evergreen plants, do not change their color regardless of the season and constantly generate organic traffic in the search engine. We call them evergreen content — evergreen, evergreen.
See the statistics of views of the article "What font for a website"? Since 2012, the article's visibility has been constantly growing or remaining at a similar level. It was not until 2019 that a clear architect email database decline in popularity occurred.
Article views "How to write a good alternative description for an image (ALT)?" in 2019. A classic chart that shows that good content can do a lot.
Evergreen content - what is it?
Evergreen texts, evergreen articles, evergreen content - this is a term for content that is and will always be interesting to readers. Intrigued?
Evergreen content is content that attracts users to the site all the time. Evergreen articles do not lose their relevance long after the publication date, and search traffic does not decrease, but grows over time (take a look at the statistics of the article "How to write a good alternative description for a photo (ALT)?" above). Admit it, it sounds quite surreal, a recipe for a content marketing perpetual motion machine. Unlike this hypothetical machine, evergreens are not a pipe dream and they really exist. And they work! What is the power of this type of text?
Why is content always green?
To answer this question, you need to recall how the search engine indexes new content. Of course, for the purposes of this article, I am presenting it in a much simplified way.
1. Crawling.
At this stage, the search engine sends robots to websites to scan and discover new content. Let's say they've landed in a health food store. They scan the blog's how-to content and the product range, including the "Rice" category, including "risotto rice."
2. Indexing.
Robots that have scanned the site (and blog) thoroughly are now collecting information about the content, graphics, links, and keywords that appear on it. In this case, they saw that the site had a pretty interesting and frequently visited article about risotto rice. In the next step, they recorded this information in the search index.
According to Google, their search engine index contains hundreds of billions of web pages and is over 100,000,000 gigabytes in size. It is somewhat similar to the index that is placed at the end of a book. When a site is indexed, it is assigned to the index according to the words it contains.
3. Displaying results.
At this stage, the search engine responds to the user's query. It separates the most relevant and most relevant queries - content, articles, graphics. These do not have to be the latest articles, but they are always the articles that best match the query.
People who wonder “how much does risotto rice cost at Biedronka” need to know the current answer to this question – the current price of the product in a specific store. And in such a case, the search engine cannot “spit out” data from 2015, because it is way out of date.
But when asking “what rice for risotto” the user does not want the most up-to-date answer to this question, but the most relevant answer to this question . If this question is best answered in an article from 2017 on one of the popular portals, such an answer will be the first in the search results and will probably fall into the answer box.
The information about the price of rice in Biedronka in January 2020 will quickly become outdated, but the phrase "what rice for risotto" will be asked all the time by Internet users who love Italian cuisine. And risotto rice is not subject to seasonal fashion. Most of it has been produced for hundreds of years, including in northern Italy. Italians will not suddenly change 150 types of risotto rice and will not give up the production of Arborio, Carnaroli, Vialone Nano, Baldo and Roma. Therefore, the text "what rice for risotto" will always be up to date and the person looking for the best answer to this question will always find it. The article about risotto rice is our perpetual motion machine, i.e. evergreen content.