Creating Evergreen Content That Drives Traffic

Key Metric:

Number of evergreen posts published per month.

Why it Matters:

Evergreen content that is optimized for search engines will drive consistent, focused traffic to your site. This allows you to generate more predictable traffic compared to spiky content.

Final Result:

Predictable, high-converting traffic to your site.

What Makes Content Evergreen

Evergreen vs. spiky content

Evergreen content is designed to rank highly on search engine results pages (SERPs) and being mentioned in AI Overviews and AI chatbots, thus attracting traffic over a long period of time. This content aims to be timeless, useful, search engine optimized, and regularly updated as information changes.

While spiky content (covered later) helps drive a lot of awareness in a short period of time, most of the traffic it generates is fleeting. Evergreen content doesn't typically come out of the gate with a big bang, but traffic to each evergreen article grows over time as your site builds up domain authority and you get more backlinks.

Evergreen content will drive significantly more focused and predictable traffic for your business, so you should start investing in it early. As mentioned before, especially for evergreen content, consistency is key. We talk about how to stay consistent in your content production in our eBook "How to Set Up a Content Marketing Engine in the Age of AI".

To see the effect of spiky vs. evergreen traffic, here's a graph showing unique users visiting a blog. We can clearly see when articles were published that created traffic spikes:

There were a few spikes in the given time frame, but an especially successful one was created mid-August, with that article reaping in over 15,000 page views in one day, but as you can see, the traffic to this article quickly died off.

On the other hand, here's a graph of a piece of evergreen content from our Draft.dev blog blog that was created with SEO best practices in mind:

Ever since the article was published, its organic traffic has grown, and to this day it consistently brings in around 1,000 page views (between 600-800 unique visitors) per month.

Traffic patterns and growth curves

Now imagine having 20, 50, or 100 such articles, and you can see how the numbers add up. A consistent traffic source to your blog is great for driving awareness for your business, but it also provides you with a predictable top of the funnel.

If you had 20 blog posts bringing in 200 unique visitors per week, that's 16,000 unique visitors per month! These 16,000 visitors see your calls-to-action, and a subset will convert into deeper stages of the funnel.

The beauty of evergreen content is that once these blog posts are live and consistently generating organic traffic, you don't need to spend much more money or time on them.

Of course, you'll have to keep the articles up-to-date and refresh them every now and then. You will also consider spending time building backlinks, attracting social media traffic, and investing in other promotional tactics as this will help drive more traffic to your evergreen content.

Evergreen Content Production

Topic discovery methods

Creating evergreen content involves multiple stages of research: from content discovery via internal interviews, to community research, to keyword research that help you recognize topics that go well together, to defining specific content clusters.

Just like the other concepts mentioned in our books and webinars, content discovery is a science, not an art. To discover suitable content ideas, look at keyword volume, keyword difficulty, content that competitors or other relevant players in your space published, and more.

Content clusters and interlinking

"Content clusters" are packages of articles that are produced in a specific way to help you achieve strong SERP (search engine results pages) placements for your most important keywords. They are composed of an "umbrella article" and multiple "sub-articles."

Each of these evergreen articles can link to all other articles in the content cluster (the "sub-articles"), while your main piece (the "umbrella article") will be the overview that links "down" to all other sub-articles. These, in turn, link back to the umbrella article.

This system of intentionally interlinking articles helps readers discover more of your content and move further down the funnel. It also helps search and AI engines understand how content on your site is related and can help improve topical authority and can help boost each individual article's rank on SERPs.

Because evergreen content generally covers content higher up in the funnel it can often be outsourced to a third party. If you don't have internal content contributors available or lack the specialized expertise to produce specific content, working with freelance writers or a content agency is a good option. Draft.dev specifically specializes very narrowly on content for software developers, written by subject matter experts who are practicing software engineers in the industry.

Your team may want to cover certain key pieces, but many businesses lean on external production for the bulk of their evergreen content.

SEO best practices for the AI era

While search engine optimization is another big topic, there are a few basics you should pay attention to when producing and publishing evergreen content:

• Your post must not be too short. Very short articles (less than 500 words) are seen as "low-quality content" by Google and will typically not be ranked highly.
• Your main headline and sub-headlines should be keyword optimized.
• Your focus keyword should be mentioned in the first paragraph.
• Include an image in the first third of your article (here are some places for free stock photos).
• Use "alt" tags on images to help search engines understand them.
• Make sure your article is readable (paragraph structure, emphasis, bold, headlines, etc.).
• Link to helpful, external resources that are not on your domain.
• Utilize meta-tags that can help Google's crawler better understand what your page is about.

By regularly publishing SEO-friendly content that follows EETA (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) principles, and following the above best practices, AI and search engines will start to see your site as a reliable source of information.

Maintaining Evergreen Content

Content refresh cycles

The value of each piece of evergreen content compounds over time as you add more content, so you should be publishing it much more frequently than spiky content.

Early on, try to publish an evergreen article every two weeks, but increase that cadence to once per week (or more) if you can. Remember though, you need to maintain a buffer of content that's ready to publish, have the capacity to work on more topic discovery, and have enough time to publish and promote each piece of content.

Here is a screenshot of the Trello content calendar shown in our eBook "How to Set Up a Content Marketing Engine in the Age of AI":

In this calendar, the team is prepared to publish three to four articles per week. Don't expect to get to that kind of output early on - it takes time to build a buffer like this - but the predictability and peace of mind it provides are well worth it.

Keeping evergreen content relevant

Over time, even your best pieces of evergreen content will start to lose traffic. Usually, you can fix this by updating them when information becomes outdated or incorrect. Doing regular content audits of your existing content can help you identify articles that need to be refreshed, content interlinking opportunities available, and new gated assets that could be a good fit for a specific article.

Performance monitoring

Evergreen content is targeted to specific search terms, so when a visitor finds a piece of evergreen content, they are likely proactively searching for that topic. Such visitors are, therefore, more likely to be part of your target market than visitors drawn in from spiky posts.

Take the spiky traffic example from earlier. Is it possible that the business got some new customers out of the mid-August spike? Sure, it's possible, but they probably get much higher conversion rates from users that use search terms specific to their product or problem space.

With evergreen content, your call to action can be much more direct. You can push readers to start a free trial, schedule a sales call, or download an eBook. Because these users are actively searching for something and your article answers that query, it is much easier to connect the content to the actual product or service you are selling. We will be talking more about steering your readers through the content funnel and nudging them further "down" towards your product in the next section.

Evergreen content also helps you manage your content funnel and content mix better than spiky content.