20 [CREATIVE] Evergreen Content Ideas for Small Businesses

Because evergreen content transcends trends, remaining relevant months – and even years – later. For this reason, it needs to be a focal part of your businesses’ content marketing strategy. If evergreen content isn't a part of your strategy yet, this guide will help you change that; and enable you to strong-arm your competition!

What Is Evergreen Content?

In a nutshell: evergreen content is content that remains relevant for long periods.

“Evergreen content” isn’t another buzzword. The word originates from principles taken from the evergreen tree. The evergreen tree’s foliage doesn’t wither in winter but remains green in all seasons. Similarly, evergreen content isn’t seasonal. It can survive hype. It's also the content with the most consistent number of searches, as it isn’t as volatile as seasonal content and isn’t subject to the peaks and lows all seasonal content endures. Making it is a steady source of traffic for your website and allowing you to acquire leads regularly.

However, for content to be classified as evergreen content, it needs to meet the three fundamental characteristics synonymous with evergreen content. These are:

1. Enduring: Solving a Persistent Problem or Answering a Common Query

Not only should evergreen content solve a critical problem, or answer a popular question, it should provide solutions and answers to these problems and questions. The more frequent or persistent the problem or query is, the more relevant the content you create will be.

2. Definitive: Providing Clear Guidance, Information, and Instruction

A great example of evergreen content is the content on Wikipedia. The sole purpose of Wikipedia is to inform the reader. Accordingly, the content on Wikipedia never becomes redundant. However, to ensure it remains topical and relevant, Wikipedia updates it frequently. Likewise, you need to base your evergreen content ideas on providing information or giving instruction and guidance for it to be considered evergreen content.

3. Engaging: Interesting and Shareable

Evergreen content needs to be well-crafted to reach your intended audience and become impactful. When someone interacts with your small businesses evergreen content, they need to feel compelled to act because of the quality of the content. Therefore, your use of keywords and formatting will not only help you improve your search engine rankings but will make your content easy to navigate.

How Do You Create Evergreen Content?

Evergreen content is an excellent source of passive income, as it's an indefinite source of web traffic. Therefore, spending a few hours a month creating well-crafted content (that will appear on search engines for years to come) is a worthwhile use of your time. Even if the keyword you're targeting only has 15 monthly searches, consider how many leads, clients, and customers that would be over 5 years? A lot. But, the question remains, how do you create evergreen content?

Follow these 3 easy steps to create evergreen content.

1. Think of Your Target Audiences Problems

For your content to have the characteristics of evergreen content, it needs to solve a problem or answer a question. Conducting in-depth market and search engine research is best, however, you can also put yourself in the shoes of your audience and think about a problem they’re facing, or a common question they have. You can then do keyword research to find out how they’d ask that question before creating the article.

2. Answer That Question/Solve That Problem

This is self-explanatory. If you provide a streaming service, your biggest competitor could be Netflix. If you’d want to convert an audience to your streaming service, a common question this audience would ask is how do I cancel a Netflix subscription, or, cheaper alternatives to Netflix? If you create content showing them a step-by-step process of how to solve this problem, you would just have created evergreen content.

3. Update Your Content Frequently

Evergreen content usually remains relevant for between 1 to 5 years but will need to be refreshed every so often so that the information presented in the article isn’t irrelevant.

The best part about publishing well-crafted evergreen content is that search engines won’t penalize you for updating the content, and in many cases will display the date content was updated instead of the original post date, giving your audience the idea that this is the most recent and relevant content on the subject. Don’t overdo the updates, however, update it when it’s necessary, or go through old posts once a year.

20 Evergreen Content Ideas Every Small Business Can Use

1. Annual Best of Lists

Best of lists are very popular. The public and search engines love them. Possibly because many autocomplete searches end in a date.

To optimize your annual lists, publish yours between November of the previous year to the 10th of January, and secure yourself constant web traffic for the next 12 months.

2. Case Studies

Showcase your superiority as a small business with case studies. Case studies are the ideal way to build trust with your audience as they display your expertise.

3. Best Practices

In the age of digital, many consumers are trying to avoid fads and find solutions that actually work. Becoming known as an authoritative source of best practices and advice will help you cultivate an audience that will share your content with their inner circle.

4. List of Tools

Convenience is a commodity. Therefore, there’s no better way to add value to your audience's life than by helping them simplify the process of finding tools that will help them save time and money, and make their jobs and lives easier.

5. Product Reviews

Many don't consider product reviews to be evergreen content, thinking the review is only appropriate while the product is relevant. That’s not true at all. As long as the product is still being sold, your product reviews will continue to get regular traffic.

6. How-To’s (Step by Step Guide)

People use Google to learn, to find solutions to problems they’re facing, or questions they have. It’s because of this, that visual step-by-step guides and descriptive “how-to's” always dominate search results.

7. Checklists

Checklists are another convenient way to increase productivity. They are always popular and are one of the least labor-intensive forms of evergreen content to create. All you need to do is create a list worth downloading, and voila, there you have it!

8. Cheat Sheets

Like checklists, cheat sheets enable users to reduce the time they would spend getting information, by putting all the information they need onto a page or just a few pages.

9. Data Analysis

You don’t have to originate the data for it to be useful to your audience. Simply reporting on it, and giving insight into what it means and what businesses can do about it, is enough. More often than not, businesses and people will use the data analysis of raw data instead of analyzing the raw data themselves.

10. Myth Debunking

Conspiracy theories are oh-so-popular, cash-in on their popularity by debunking common myths in your industry or myths about your business or line of work.

11. Listicles

Listicles are a pre-optimized form of content. They're the original method to rank higher on search because of the ease-of-use layout.

12. Detailed Guides

Similar to “how-to” articles, detailed guides give guidance on a particular subject but without the step-by-step process, and act more as an explanation for the components involved.

13. Explanation of Features/ Tutorials

Help your audience understand your products or services better by explaining its features, this way, every time you acquire a lead you can point them to these resources.

14. Quick Guides

Detailed guides are the in-depth version. But for those tl;dr people, quick guides will be far more beneficial.

15. Whitepapers

Whitepapers are far more detailed than a blog post analyzing data. Businesses usually restrict these golden nuggets with a paywall or a request to subscribe to their blog which works well at qualifying leads. Whitepapers also have the most longevity because of how detailed and thorough they are.

16. Templates

Templates add value to qualifiable leads if used correctly. Not to mention templates are convenient for users, and will almost always bring constant traffic to your website.

17. Data Reporting

If you do have proprietary data that you can utilize, create a detailed report. These reports highlight your businesses' value to potential and existing clients.

18. Starter Packs

Starter packs work as a powerful incentive to get “lurkers” to subscribe to your businesses' email list. They’re the ultimate form of evergreen content and usually include templates, guides, ebooks, and whitepapers.

19. Frequently Asked Questions

FAQs serve two purposes: they allow you to educate your audience about your business while being a building block for your website. Therefore, whenever someone has a question about your service, product, or website, you can point them to the FAQs page, saving yourself so much time.

20. Quizzes

User-generated content is becoming the king of content marketing. As a result, the demand for quizzes has expanded. Quizzes also represent the perfect opportunity to increase your leads, as you can use the quiz as a list builder, by asking users to provide an email address to get their results.

For evergreen content to be truly effective there needs to be a variety of content types. For a well-rounded content marketing strategy try several evergreen content ideas and remember the 80/20 rule.