Everything you need to know about Evergreen Content

What does it mean for content to be “evergreen”?

There are many different approaches to measuring the value of a particular piece of content – views, time on page, shares, and many others. These traditional engagement metrics typically focus on the intensity of interest. That’s important, but what about the duration of interest?

For example:

Source: Google Trends

Here we see the phenomenon of fidget spinners enter the public consciousness in early 2017, at one point generating twice as much interest as guitars. Fidget spinners then rapidly fell out of favor as a hobby in mid-2017. Guitars have much more staying power. We would say that guitars have evergreen interest, while fidget spinners did not.

Similarly, content can also be evergreen, based on interest in a particular topic. If you ran a content publishing platform in 2017, a writeup about fidget spinners could have instantly netted you many clicks. However, a single well-crafted guitar guide would have generated much more traffic over time. That’s the power of evergreen content: more traffic over time with fewer articles.

Why is evergreen content useful?

• Know what type of content to publish.
  • If your business model relies directly on publishing content, identify trends for topics that are evergreen and will generate more engagement over time.
  • If you use content for marketing, find the topics that continually drive leads to your site.
• Optimize your content recommendations.
  • Recommend content that reliably drives interest over time instead of trendy subjects that may have recently become irrelevant.
• Improve site traffic projections and forecasts.
  • In the introductory example, forecasting the number of page views for articles related to fidget spinners would have been nearly impossible in early or mid 2017. Forecasting interest in guitar-related content was, and remains, much easier because evergreen content delivers much more predictable engagement. If you depend on advertising revenue from your website, reliable forecasting benefits you and your advertisers.

How can evergreen content be analyzed?

Thanks for asking! Softcrylic has recently developed an evergreen content analysis solution, looking at three different metrics for each of your individual content items:

1. Evergreen Status: Is a previously published piece of content considered evergreen?
2. Evergreen Probability: It’s impossible to know if recently published content will be evergreen. Who could have known in March of 2017 that collecting fidget spinners would not become a time-honored tradition? Our proprietary models predict, within days of publication, whether content will become evergreen over time. This allows you to pivot your content strategy much more quickly.
3. Evergreen Character: It is expedient to create “evergreen” and “not evergreen” categories, but there is really a spectrum of how strongly evergreen content can be. We call this evergreen character. The evergreen character metric helps you fine-tune your evergreen analysis and rank articles by the strength of evergreen character instead of merely categorizing them into binary evergreen/not-evergreen statuses.

The inputs our solution relies on are simple – page views by content item. Outputs are also simple, with each content item being assigned values for each of the three metrics above. The outputs can then be passed into your web analytics platform for analysis. Alternatively, we are happy to build a custom evergreen content visualization based on your needs. The entire solution is automated and hosted in the cloud, requiring very little oversight or maintenance.

We have more… content… planned on this topic, but we recently launched this solution and couldn’t wait to announce it. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us if you’re interested in learning more!