We at Cheap Simple Living are pleased to announce a new category on our website about the best practices of Blogging & SEO. We hope this new section of our blog, where our team of writers will share their expertise and insights about the world of content marketing and search engine optimization, can help aspiring bloggers craft their marketing strategies, identify their target audiences, and decide which aspects of their own knowledge expertise can provide the most value to their platforms.
One of the core principles of Cheap Simple Living’s content strategy is the production of “evergreen” content. If you’ve never heard this term, from the name itself, you can get an idea of the underlying principle. What makes evergreen trees different from deciduous trees? Evergreen trees keep their foliage year-round, whereas deciduous trees shed their leaves in the fall, only remaining green during spring and summer.
What is Evergreen Content?
Evergreen content, in terms of blogging, is information or expertise that some reader, somewhere, is likely to be searching for at any given point in time. Evergreen content is content that is not dependent upon a particular moment in time for its relevance. To better understand the concept of evergreen content, it’s easiest to focus on what it is not. There are many great blogs out there that focus on things happening right now, this week, or in the coming days. Blogs that focus on hot deals or sales fall into this category. One such blog that comes to mind is I Heart Publix. If you live near a Publix Supermarket, you may follow the I Heart Publix blog to be alerted of great sales and coupon deals going on right now at Publix stores. But even though sites like these can attract lots of readers when established and maintained well, maintaining this blog is inevitably very time- and labor-intensive, as every week, the writers must scour the weekly ads and coupon offerings to keep the content on their site relevant. With this model, nearly all the content produced becomes obsolete within a matter of days.
The Domain Authority Factor
Besides its obvious practical benefit of staying relevant to your readers, evergreen content offers benefits to your websites performance in search rankings. One of the early struggles of starting a new blog is building up what SEO strategists call “domain authority” and getting your website to rank in search results. Search engines like Google assign scores to websites based on domain authority and those scores factor into their ranking of your website in search results. Factors in domain authority scores include age of the registered domain and subsequent indexing of the website, internal linking across the number of web pages within the websites, and links from other websites.
Web pages themselves also have authority scores, which SEO experts call “page authority”. The longer a page sits online and gets crawled by search engines, in general, the higher its score. If you subscribe to a search engine marketing insights tool like Moz, you can get readings of your domain and page authority scores that estimate the algorithms used by Google. So that means that the longer your blog posts exists, the more likely it is to rise in the rankings.
So if you write an article that’s only good for the days and weeks that follow it’s publishing, you don’t get to capitalize on the organic traffic a post could receive from Google over its lifetime.
One of Cheap Simple Living’s top pages in terms of organic search traffic is “Girl Scout Cookies Year Round?”, which informs readers of the delicious store brand imitations of Girl Scout cookies offered by Dollar General, Family Dollar, Dollar Tree, and Walmart. This was one of the earliest blog articles written by our founder and therefore has a very high domain authority. In fact, if you conduct a Google search for “Dollar General Girl Scout cookies”, this post is likely to be one of the top results in both the webpage and image search results, ranking among newspaper websites that have also reviewed these dollar store knockoffs. The longer the page remains active and regularly crawled by Google during its spider’s routine crawls, the stronger the page becomes in the eyes of Google, and more likely to appear in similar search results.
One of the main reasons this blog post performs so well for Cheap Simple Living is that people think about Girl Scout cookies all year long, but they are only available from Girl Scout troops in the spring. The blog posts satisfies a question and a craving that readers are prone to have at all times of the year. No matter the time of day or year, someone, somewhere in the United States, is thinking about their favorite Girl Scout cookie. Our post helps them find something that’s just as good.
You may be approaching blogging with some arduous time commitments on your hands, like a day job or a family. You need to make the time you devote toward writing count for the long-term. If that sounds like your situation, then evergreen content is for you. When you’re thinking about content for your blog, consider the value of readers throughout the calendrical cycle and into the foreseeable future. If your blog is new, a few evergreen content posts can help build its domain authority and elevate your platform to reach more new readers down the road.
