Creating timeless content is something all SEOs should aspire to do. Why? When placed in front of the right audience, amazing content is highly likely to generate ongoing interest, engagement, links, and traffic, leading to increased sales/conversions and brand awareness. These results tend to make all but the most difficult client quite happy.
Image by Dominic Alves
In 2012, I decided to undertake an evergreen content experiment. I created a piece of content that I planned to update regularly over an extended period of time. I was in this for the long haul — I wanted to keep working on this content for at least a year. The aim was to see if putting ongoing effort into one page on a website would prove more efficient than spending time planning and creating multiple pieces of fresh content.
Common content performance patterns
Many creative content campaigns produce spikes of interest when they're released and then dwindle in popularity. If you're nodding your head in agreement, this might look familiar:
Creative campaign referral traffic spike, taken from Google Analytics
When shared, you see a brief spike in traffic, and then visits decline. This example is taken from the release of a well-received infographic that saw a lot of visits when it was shared on Reddit.
A spike isn't always a bad thing. At the last count, this example generated over 35 decent quality links (ranging from DA 30 to DA 82) and thousands of social shares. This is a good result, but I wanted to try and create something that saw continued growth in traffic, engagement, and links over time rather than a spike.
Evergreen experiment
So I could share the results openly without contravening any client confidentiality agreements, I decided to conduct the test on my personal website. I write fiction, and I originally created my website to showcase my short stories. I launched the site in October 2011.
Image by Rose Craft
I'm not famous. No one knows who I am. No one found my writing, because no one was searching for it. Aside from friends and family, few people read my stories. Boo hoo.
In an attempt to gain an audience, I decided to try and make my website useful to the short story-writing community (people who write short stories also like to read them). I'd spent a LOT of time researching short story competitions to enter. I'd found a few decent resources, like Booktrust, that listed some writing competitions, but none of the lists or calendars were exhaustive or kept very up to date, and many of them didn't list the full range of details I was interested in (closing dates, prize money, word count limits, genres, publishing opportunities etc).
So I decided to create an extensive short story competition list on my website.
Research
I was fairly certain, given the amount of competition lists in print magazines and the amount of writing websites I'd found, that there would be an audience for this type of content. To be certain, I did some keyword research.
There was an audience. Further research showed there was a large amount of long-tail keyword opportunities.
So I created the page, initially listing details of approximately 50 writing contents. The list went live during April 2012.
Page content
The page format is fairly simple. I started out with two tables, one listing regular writing competitions (monthly, quarterly, triannual and biannual) and another listing annual contests. Over time, I've added more tables so the resource is as easy to use as possible.
At the top of the page I openly invite users to contact me to have writing competitions listed. I also invite users to let me know if any of my details are incorrect, out of date, or if they find any broken links.
Use of outbound links
Again, to make the resource easy for writers to use, I've linked to all the competitions I've listed. I've read all sorts of discussions regarding outbound links and whether it's best for them to be follow or no-follow, as well as discussions about how many links you should have on a page alongside concerns about the quality of the sites you link to and whether that has any impact on SEO.
As there doesn't seem to be a definitive right or wrong way to do this, I decided to ignore all these concerns and just link to the most useful page on the different competition websites for the user. The only exception is when I link to a competition website that updates its URLs each time it updates the competition details. In this instance I link to the homepage to avoid excessive administration and maintenance of the page.
All links are followed.
Page maintenance
Image by Abhisek Sarda
From the day the page went live, I decided that I was going to display the date the content was last updated prominently at the top of the page. I wanted users and search engines to be able to see that the page was cared for and updated regularly.
I've read many arguments against using dates. This is usually because time constraints mean webmasters can't update content regularly and the date often has the opposite effect, showing how out of date the content has become. But as I knew I'd be updating the page regularly, this wasn't a concern.
I update the page at least twice a month, sometimes as frequently as twice a week, depending on how much time I have available.
On average, one competition contacts me a week, asking to be added to the list.
I respond to the vast majority of comments, either privately via email or as a comment, depending on what seems most appropriate given the subject matter.
Technical notes
My website is pretty basic. From a technical standpoint, I have ensured that the menu structures and URLs made sense and that my authorship has been setup correctly. Aside from that, all I've done is generate content. I've purposely kept the amount of pages on the site low, only adding new pages when I have to. At the time of writing, the site has 36 pages.
No linkbuilding
While undertaking this experiment I haven't done any active link building at all. Any links the website has gained have been natural. Likewise, I haven't undertaken any outreach. I have only engaged with writers and competition administrators that have approached me directly.
I did this to see how well the page could perform naturally, with internet users initially finding the content via organic search. Over time, this has led to natural interaction through comments, social sharing and links (and the unavoidable plethora of spam comments in my inbox). But I haven't actively pushed the content. The results have come from natural content discovery and users outreaching to me.
Results
Traffic
This first graph shows the growth in traffic to the entire site from all mediums since launch in October 2011:
Traffic from all mediums to entire site from October 2011 to May 2013
Below is a breakdown of the figures from the different mediums:
The second graph shows the visits from all mediums to the short story competition page from its launch in 2012:
Traffic from all mediums to short story competition page from April 2012 to May 2013
Since its launch, the short story competition list has accounted for 67% of all the visits landing on my website (total entries to all pages are 77,374 — page entries to the competition page are 51,861). Full details of growth in visits to the page from all mediums can be seen below:
Visits have increased substantially since the competition list was launched. The dip we can see in April and May seems to be due to seasonality. The page still ranks well for a wide variety of long-tail phrases, and the New Year and autumn are seasonal peaks in writing-relating searches — admittedly, this is a generalisation, but as the site only launched in 2011 I don't have a great deal of data to work with.
If patterns follow those of last year, I'd expect to see a rise in traffic in September.
Amount of search terms
10,728 search phrases have been used to find the page through organic search.
Most popular search terms used to find the short story competition page
Given that ‘(not provided)' accounts for 30% of these searches, it's safe to assume that the figure is actually substantially higher, so there is a lot of long-tail search involved here.
The large word count of the page copy contributes to this. At the time of writing this post, there were 11,632 words of copy on the page, of which user comments account for 3,463. At the time of writing this post, there are 66 comments on the page, some of them replies from me.
Social shares
The total amount of social shares to date is 127:
Details generated using Shared Count
I find that writers will often share the page on Facebook and Twitter, as will administrators of the competitions I list, if they run social profiles. Since the beginning of 2013, I have seen the share counts rising more rapidly, which I would expect given the large increases in traffic the page has seen when compared to last year.
Links
You can see details of the links that have been attracted below:
Data taken from Majestic SEO
Results from Moz's Open Site Explorer
The volume of links isn't huge. But this project is aimed at slow growth, and I haven't actively asked anyone for a link. I want links to be entirely natural, only coming from those who think the content is worth linking to of their own volition. The only exception I can think of is me writing about the experiment.
As the resource becomes more widely recognised, I would expect the amount of links to increase accordingly. Recently, I have received my first university (.ac.uk) link, and started to receive correspondence from university lecturers who are involved with creative writing courses, asking about writing opportunities for their students (which led to me adding the ‘Writing Competitions for Young Writers & Children' table to the page). This bodes really well for the future, as relevant university website links are likely to help the site's performance greatly. And this kind of natural link building should make my backlink profile Penguin-proof long into the future.
I guess the key point here is that it's taken almost a year of developing this content to start gaining links of this quality. Now that a handful of lecturers have found the site and started using it, it'll be very interesting to see how the link results fare over the next twelve months.
Hmm, I feel another blog post coming on in the not so distant future…
There are a couple of other points to bear in mind:
- I've done this work in my spare time, around work and other commitments. If you had the time to focus fully on projects of this nature you could probably generate these types of results far more quickly.
- The links generated have been entirely natural as I haven't actively asked anyone for a link.
Does this type of content help conversions?
Due to the growth in traffic to my website, I have increased my audience and engagement with my site. I'm beginning to be recognised as a thought leader (and a brand, I guess) in my niche area. Users have started to approach me with all manner of queries. I also receive frequent requests to proofread other writers' work. If I had more time, this is a paid service I could consider offering in the future. So producing the content has revealed business areas I could expand into.
Ultimately, all the extra traffic has led to a rise in the number of people buying the book I sell through Amazon and Lulu. I now sell a few a week, compared to one every couple of months.
So, in answer to the title above, ‘Yes.' I am getting what I wanted — a wider audience for my writing.
Amount of referrals other sites receive
Below you can see the amount of referral visits my page generates to other websites:
Referral traffic received from my competition page between January 2013 and May 2013
One of the writing competitions I list was kind enough to share this data with me. They were first listed on my site in January 2013.
A breakdown of figures can be seen below:
The highly relevant traffic I can offer writing websites makes being listed appealing to most competitions. From speaking with the administrators of the competition in the example above, I know that the traffic also converts well into competition entries, so they are very happy with the results related to me listing them.
This means that when I receive enquiries I can be confident in the value my list offers.
Summary
So far, this experiment has proved that investing time in creating content that is updated regularly can bring excellent results. In 2013, the page attracts between 6,000 and 9,000 visits a month, 22% of which return to the page time and again.
All you need to emulate this is some vision and common sense:
- Find something your target audience wants
- Give it to them
- Keep the content fresh with regular updates and improvements
- Listen to user suggestions and make changes accordingly
- Listen to user suggestions about other resources they might find useful, and create them
That's a content strategy that is likely to keep me busy for the next few months and generate excellent results.
Keep it simple
One of the more common mistakes I've seen SEOs make is developing content no one is interested in. You might end up creating something sexy based on an amazing concept, but will it actually gain you the result you or your client wants to see? Sometimes the more mundane ideas, like generating a useful list, can work far more effectively. It might not be sexy, it might not look awesome, but it is useful and can appeal to a community.
Keep it simple.
I believe you can learn more from those three words than you'd like to believe. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments.
Very impressive! One thing I love is that you never linked to your contest. I am sure that was extremely difficult and to be honest it is actually very relevant to this article. This just proves that you aren't out fishing for links and it forces us to go an search for the terms you were trying to rank for and see if we can find your page. I hope people don't just go out an copy this idea, because you showed that it can work. Although that is what I am afraid people will do.
More impressively I like that you are trying to rank for something that will ultimately drive traffic to your site and be a resource than to game the system.
Thanks Tim :-) I'd hope people don't copy the idea directly, but use it as inspiration to come up with something relevant to their own niche!
Keeping the content unique, latest, informative, creative and writing on the topics which are in demand is what matters.
Great reading! Thank you Christopher!
For this type of performance content must drive the motivation of the visitors. I think motivation, urgency and the way we represent the content, play the major role in the overall content performance. I have seen many times people represent something useful content but not get satisfactory results as they were expecting, so they way we tuned our content is important, we should focus on the tone of the content and make it interesting. For getting high results, content must be enjoyed by the audience..
Christop your case study on evergreen is excellent.. however, there are some industries, which doesn't have much information to update regularly on a page.. For example i have a website, which offer ecommerce solution services.. what type information i can update on my page.. because i don't have any new information to update on a page regularly.. Hope you understand my question and will answer breflly...
Hi Brianna
That's a good question. I'm sure Christopher will come up with some better answers, but may I also make some suggestions.
I took a look at your website and I thought that maybe you could consider doing a page on "The Top 10 best eCommerce sites", which you can update monthly. So you could look around the web and choose ten sites that you think do a really good job and give them the Perception System, eCommerce site of the month award. That way you could do regular press releases, contact the winning sites and have them display the award and link back to your site.
Or it could be an award for the best mobile optimised site.
Or you could do a page listing the top 50 best tools for eCommerce, and update it regularly as new tools get launched or old ones get updated. Or the top 50 attributes of a great ecommerce site.
Just my suggestions, I hope they help.
Andrew
Hi Brianna - looks like Andrew has given you some pretty good ideas already, but there are lots of different angles for e-commerce sites. You can create buying guides, or offer advice on the latest products in the field you specialize in, for example. If you're offering e-commerce solutions, maybe advice on the perfect checkout or something of that nature might work nicely for your target audience?
Thanks Andrew and Christop for wonderful reply... I will follow these step in my web page 100%....
Summary: update your blog regularly and write for readers, not for you :-)
Absolutely :-)
Great post! Almost had the same experience! Updating content definitely works!
Before we started to update our content, we always had a few competitors which were outranking us, though their content was quite old. So we decided to add more and more useful content to our main content pages (not only text, but also some pictures, videos, infographics and so on).
For some parts of our main content we wanted to get a lot more into detail, so we wrote some related posts and set an internal link to our main content.
Now that we are updating and adding quality content to our pages, we are outranking our competitors with our main content pages. And the related posts we wrote are doing great, too!
Thanks Matthias! That's good to hear, as it's a further indication that regular updates work.
In fact, Google updated their advice in May, to say "In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by creating high-quality sites that users will want to use and share," where as previously they said "In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages."
So even they are telling us this methodoligy should work!
My general rule of thumb is if its time sensitive throw it in a blog and if it isn't make it into a resource (webpage). I love content that is not time sensitive and going back to continually update it and keep it relevant every once in a while isn't a bad thing either :)
Sounds like good practice to me Ryan :-)
Interesting take on including the date at the top of the post. One company I worked for struggled with including dates, because the content was so old. I think including the date challenges you to keep your content fresh and even update older content. Great post - will definitely keep it in mind for future ideas.
Thanks Vicky. I agree. It also shows the user that the content is cared for and updated regularly which helps with engagement.
Thanks for pointing that out. Chances are your evergreen content is still going to be 90% accurate but small changes are bound to happen overtime. Very few industries are completely stagnant. But providing the majority of your content is still relevant (albeit with a few tweaks) why not let valuable content keep working for you? The best content is the kind that keeps bringing in readers over time.
Absolutely, Vinay. If you keep content updated, relevant, interesting and useful, it should always perform well for you.
Best one of what I read today. You just gave me an idea for my blog. Many bloggers start their blogs and they do make some evergreen kind of posts there, but where they miss out, is updating it on regular basis with new updates and news (which is a crucial thing and your study proves that).
Thanks Praveen - totally agree, regularly updated content can work really well, for performance with users and search engines.
Brilliant post, clear on the methodology and transparent with the numbers. This should be promoted to the main blog.
In your opinion, is the short stories space competitive from a ranking perspective? Are there strong sites there that you're managing to compete with? What I'm asking is how much of your success are you attributing to simply filling a vacuum of desperate demand?
(Oh and you're doing pretty well for that not provided keyword I see :)
Thanks very much, I am ever hopeful :-)
The short story space can be fairly competitive in certain areas, for generic key-phrases like 'short story competition' for example - I guess that's where the money is. I don't rank for phrases like that (yet) as I'm up against Booktrust (who are affiliated with the BBC) and a lot of other well established websites who offer amazing writing competitions. However, I do rank well against more established sites for phrases like 'short story competition list' and a lot of other longer-tail keywords and phrases. While these don't command as much traffic, there are an awful lot of long-tail searches being conducted as there are so many people interested in writing across the world, a lot of whom target English language publications.
So I don't think I'm filling a vacuum as there are other lists out there. I'm just providing a useful resource that's more regularly updated and more comprehensive than most of the competition. And I've identified a large audience that are interested in the content and given them what they want. That's the key I think.
Hope that answers the question!
I am hundred percent agreed with your case study and i also think the same and your case study prove that quality content always remain evergreen and give a long term advantage. the only need is to maintain the content on a regular basis and keep your conversation going on with other followers and follow their suggestions which best suits your content. It's a great tip for all SEOs and thanks a lot for such an informative an interesting case study post.
Wonderful recap of your approach. I was particularly interested in your original goal of trying to get more recognition via the listing of writing competitions. I'm curious as to what percentage of organic traffic is now based on searches for your brand (your name, your book title, etc..), rather than for writing competitions. Also, what is the breakdown of traffic (percentage wise) of branded vs non-brand organic search traffic... when it comes to conversions?
The branded traffic from organic search queries is actually very small. Of 8,816 organic visits to the site over the last month, only 55 have come from branded search phrases, although the wonderfully helpful '(not provided)' accounts for 3,708 of those visits. Still, based on the other figures, you'd have to assume that branded search terms hidden within (not provided) are relatively small. The vast majority of the search terms are medium to long-tail competition related searches.
That said, direct traffic is continuing to grow. So returning visitors are increasingly arriving via this medium. To give you an idea, over the last month, I've seen a 13% increase in direct traffic. Initial discovery via organic search must be contributing to this.
With regards to conversions, I've found direct traffic converts better. But once you start digging into how a visitor first finds the site (via organic search, for example) then how they return and visit the site for a second time (via Facebook referral, for example) and then what medium they actually convert from (via direct, for example, on a 3rd visit to the site) you open yourself up to an entirely new blog post regarding user journey and conversions! Maybe one day, in the future... :-)
Christopher, You might get more insight into the "Not Provided" keywords via the Webmaster Tools reporting. I don't put much faith into the "Visits" totals, but it's interesting to see what keywords they see as being most popular... in comparison to what's shown in the GA Organic reporting. But it's the conversion metrics that steers most of my business decisions and so that's why I was asking. Thanks for the article!
Great, thanks :-)
Hi Chris,
I know you said you didn't do any traditional link building or outreach, but did you do social sharing of any kind? Also, do you believe you could have more non-search engine referrals right now if you did some outreach? I ask this because there's this idea some webmasters have that you can't do any promotion of your content (that which doesn't ask for a specific anchor text), but that's not what Google is saying.
Thanks,
Mike
Hi Mike,
To start with I didn't do any social sharing at all - all the shares were natural, from users who wanted to share the content. I did this as I wanted to see if the content would perform in it's own right, naturally, without me pushing it. From the results, you can see that, over time, it did.
Over the last month or so I've started tweeting when I add new competitions to the list. I've found this does help, as I can @ the competition who approached me and they like the fact that I'm promoting their website. Through doing this, I've gained a few more natural links (not many, but a few very relevant ones) without asking for them, as the competitions seem to link back to me more readily. So social sharing definitely helps. I'll be doing more of it moving forwards, to see how much impact it has. I'll probably end up writing another post in a year or so, to let people know my findings.
And yes, non-search engine referrals would almost certainly be higher if I did more outreach and actively promoted the content or asked for links. Again, the only reason I haven't is for this experiment. Once I've finished experimenting with the social impact on the content's performance, I'll look into experimenting with more outreach.
Hope that's helpful!
Cheers, Chris
A great help. Thanks!
This is great advice! I've been suggesting to clients and our content writers that we focus on choosing somewhat a timeless subject in content creation. Its smart to focus on creating content that has staying power. Employing “evergreen” content means that our content will always be relevant to the audience, compared to topics that may change over time. Things may go viral by tailoring it to current events and trending themes, but news today will fade out tomorrow. For example, users will always want to know “How to Find the Perfect Hairstyle for Your Face,” because this topic won't change much, but they will probably not be as interested in a dated version, like “How to Get Hair Like Justin Bieber,” which may become less relevant as teen pop culture icon JBiebs phases out.
Also great use of enticing and informational charts and images here, they really enhanced the content of the posting! Thanks for sharing!
Thanks very much :-) And yes, I agree with you re employing evergreen strategies. They can really make all that initial work pay off. Still, there will always be a place for 'relevant now' content. I wouldn't ignore it, just use it alongside more timeless content to ensure you cater for everyone.
How to know what audience wants. I did my analytics analysis and found keywords <question types like why ,where and how > but the visit from those keywords are low almost negligible. so simply how to know what customers want. Should i do survey or something like that ?
Hi Dorje - that's a great question.
For the example in the post, I researched where the writing community hang out both off and online and looked at what they needed. So I looked at print magazines, literary journals, writing websites, blogs and forums. I also looked at Twitter, Facebook and some Linked In groups. Just because there isn't much search volume, doesn't mean there isn't an audience. OK, obvious search volume through keyword tools helps identify good topics, but if you put a useful piece of content in front of the right audience it can still work well.
Once you've identified the thought leaders in the niche you are researching, you can approach them and ask them if the ideas you have might be useful. Quite often, they'll reply and help you out, especially if the idea is interesting to them and their audience. So there is plenty of research you can undertake before creating this kind of resource.
Hope that's helpful, and best of luck with your content!
Bookmarked first :D
Nice breakdown, thanks for sharing! I'm glad I'm not the only one who opts to include the most recent edit date.
I love using those edit dates ! Works really well :-)
It's always a pleasure to read case studies like this one. Thanks Chris.
You're welcome :-)
Hi Chris,
Great post and thorough. One of my favorite things in SEO and inbound marketing is an actual case study! The only observation I'll offer was partially brought up in comments earlier. That is, the viability of this across all verticals and industries.
In your example, you basically built an authority site from a hobby, but made it a resource for others = very cool. But, many businesses aren't going to have the inherent interest in their service or products that a resource or hobby type site will.
There are obviously exceptions (like the site we are on), but my initial thinking is that your success and strategy is in part, directly related to your niche. Not to take away anything from your execution or planning, but I'm thinking that the effectiveness of it isn't just a matter of applying this to any niche or industry with sufficient creativity, it's also a matter of industry and the relative audience.
Yes, I totally agree.
However, I would argue that most businesses will have something of interest that they can provide to their target audience. It's finding it that's sometimes the most difficult part of the process - defining who the audience is, what they want and then if / how you can provide it for them.
Obviously you'd have to look at this on a case by case basis, and there will be exceptions, but in most cases a brain storming session or two will give you enough ideas to begin some research and find the right areas to concentrate on. Sometimes a resource like the one I've built won't work, but maybe running a competition or offering expert advice will. Something to think about... :-)
Good content will always be valued by audience. Christopher great study here.
Thanks very much :-)
Inherent in this story is the alarming rate that you're showing linking behaviour. At first glance it appears you're receiving 1 link per 10,000 visits to the page. That's alarmingly low for the usefulness of the content in an industry where I'd imagine a greater share of your demographic has blogs and websites. Inherent flaws with linking as the primary measure of ranking.
True, BUT, bear in mind that I haven't actively asked for links or done any outreach and at the time of writing had done almost no pro-active social sharing. This was an experiment to see how content could perform on it's own. If you were to undertake all these activities alongside content creation, you'd be likely to generate a lot more links!
Fabulous post Chris!! Totally agree with your case study!! An original, unique and quality content always work as a base for good SEO strategies. Nothing can beat it. I also keep an eye on quality content. Thanks for sharing amazing examples of quality and informative content.
Welcome :-)
wow! thanks a ton for the well-researched and experimented set of thoughts. I also had these things in my mind but I was afraid of Google's panalty. But, after going through the insights of your blog, i got a whole new set of thoughts. I am suring going to implement these things on my website. Thanks once again for your wonderful idea, now I am also gonna make my website's content evergreen! A lot of thanks @chris,
i have a question here ,Can we applied this same idea for any type of websites content ? Please help
Good Case Study! Regarding your case study, we should not need more link building, just updated regular contents in your site. Can you tell me how many blog post in site per week?
Good Case Study! Regarding your case study, we should not need more link building, just post regular contents in your site. May I know how many contents have you updated in week?
Great post. Slow and steady sure does seem to win the race, particularly the race of 'long-term success'. It requires that hard-to-come-by virtue called patience, though!
Thanks Josh. And yes, it certainly does require a bit of patience :-)
Fantastic post, Christopher! Thanks for sharing!
I wrote a YouMoz* a while back where I gave this type of content a name: "continually updated content." In hindsight I'm not a big fan of the name (suggestions welcome!), but as some evergreen content is created but then never updated following on from that, I thought it would be good to distinguish between the two. In my case study, I found that every time I updated the content and then subsequently tweeted about it, the content saw another jump in visitors - and I'm sure the same goes for the Moz and Point Blank SEO examples I shared in the post.
* Disclaimer: I've not shared it to self-promote but (obviously) because it's hugely relevant and ties in with a lot of what you've said!
Thanks Stevie. And great post BTW! Very relevant :-)
Great case study, Christopher! I've been mulling over evergreen content ideas for a while; this is a good reminder for me to actually write some now!
Thanks very much :-) I'm glad it's inspired you!
For SEO and Social Media, how long can the evergreen content be green? SEO and Social Media keeps changing every day and there are only a handful of optimization that will still apply. Tough industry :(
Evergreen content can be 'green' for as long as your audience is interested in the subject your writing about. You just need to maintain it, keeping it updated and relevant. SEO practices might change, but that doesn't necessarily mean your audience's 'wants' and 'needs' change with it.
I believe that keeping the internet user as your focus will help prolong the life of any content you create. Optimization and keywords will always have their place and shouldn't be ignored, but the page content itself is where the future lies - amazing, useful, interesting content is what an internet user wants to find, so that's what the search engines want to deliver :-)
I like the direction content development is taking and that websites are being rewarded for keeping content fresh and relevant. It would seem that this trend would continue.
I certainly hope so. It'll make the search engine results better for the user, which makes everyone happy!
Christopher, what I love about your post is that it is very information-rich, but not "hyped-up". That's quite a rare combination. You just share your own story, without telling us how SEO should be done. You leave me with room to have my own insights an make my own decisions.
I'm inspired, thank you for that!
Excellent! I'm very pleased it's helped :-)
Christopher thanks for sharing this! Lot's of light bulb moments for me whilst reading this. I love the simplistic logic behind the idea, better still it is working.
If possible can you share the # of outbound links you have to competitions and how many have linked back to you?
At the moment I link to approximately 150 competitions (this number changes regularly, so sorry for not being exact). About 5-10% of these link back to me, so not a massive amount.
However, other writing resources have started to link to me as what I offer is useful to their audience. And more writing groups are sharing the resource via Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms. Through this, I've seen the sharing rise substantially, even since writing this post. I have also seen a couple of spikes in referral traffic due to this. Yes, one of the spikes is from Moz after writing this post, but the largest one is from Facebook after a writing group with a large audience shared the page with their members. So it's not just about gaining reciprocal links, it's about gaining exposure from the right audience and online communities.
Hope that's helpful!
I love that you look at your evergreen content as a growing thing and dedicate resources to encourage its growth. I think too many people see evergreen content as "set it and forget it," which is efficient but doesn't harness the freshness aspect of the algorithm. Great post. Nice work!
Thanks very much! Yep, totally agree. Although I think more and more businesses are beginning to embrace evergreen content now. I hope that will continue and make the internet an even more interesting place in the future.
Great job christopher. i shared with my team.
Thanks Larry
A pleasure reading your success story. Hosting such events have great potential for creating the buzz.
Thanks Salman :-)
Indeed your article give me some guideline but if you see this link. It shows more detail version as compared this post. I hope ChristopherFielden like this and give me feedback as well.In this blog author gives the deep information about how anyone get first position over Google search engine.
Very interesting! This is something that every e-commerce website can do.
Thanks Rachel - yep, any type of website can create this type of content
A case for evergreen content as a strong traffic generator! Keeping your new audience involved in the maintenance of such a huge resource is brilliant, plus you're getting to know them in a very organic way. Great job, Chris, and thank you for sharing.
No problem Gisele. Yes, I think interacting in such an organic way really helps with user engagement.
Great read, Christopher! A colleague and I were just talking about dates on posts this afternoon, very timely!
Really great post Chris!
Thanks WCR and Pay4ResultsSEO!
Thanks Christopher for this amazing post. All the time I do observe a peak in interest when the content is created then it is faded away. I will apply your advices to see whether my content will stay green... Thanks.
Welcome Arun, glad you found it useful :-)
Good Stuff Chris!!
Thanks very much :-)
Great post Chris. You have once again proved with immaculate and impeccable evidence that content that is original, unique and of good quality will always be the super strong foundation for any SEO campaign. Nothing beats it. I have always been a keen advocate of quality content. Thanks for providing all of us content advocates an awesome time proven example about the immense power of content which was, is and will be the King of the SEO World out there!!
Keep up the good job my friend.
Thanks very much, Devanur, much appreciated :-)
Hi Christopher - serendipity strikes!
I have been working on a very similar piece of content in a completely different field for the past few days and this has spurred me on to get it finished and posted. It has also made me realise that it needs to be a page, rather than a post, with a permanent link from the front page.
Thanks very much for telling us all about it.
Andrew
Welcome Andrew - best of luck with your content. I'd be very interested to hear how it performs in the future.
So the takeaway is that curating existing content could be successful in the long term, but so far, it's not yielding as much short-term results as new content.
No. If you push useful, interesting content, share it and put in front of the right audience, it can start to perform quickly. Having a long term plan simply keeps it relevant and keeps it performing and increases it's popularity. It also makes all the initial work you've put in more fruitful in the long run. The most time consuming part of generating anything like this is the initial research and content creation. So why not make that time spent all the more worthwhile by ensuring what you've created continues to perform for you?
The reason this particular piece of content started to perform slowly is because I wanted to experiment and see how long the words and idea alone would take to perform via organic search, and then how it would grow from there. If you emulate what I've done here within your or your client's business niche and push the content via outreach and social sharing, you will probably see much quicker growth. Then, if you maintain and update regularly, you'll see even better results.
Hope that helps :-)
I was never do content updation regularly, but after changes of Google algorithm I started updating content and I get much benefit since then. And Today, I read your post it remembers me again that regularly updation of content it performs well.
This was a great case study. The peaks in traffic is definitely something we noticed. Thank you for the great read.
You're welcome :-)
Awesome story, and really inspiring!
Thanks Steven :-)
Hey this is a great post. The graphs show that the content that was assumed to be evergreen can really burn out. The comment above about updates is so true. Continually going back and adding the industry latest information is critical to making a piece continually a source of authority. Thanks https://engagementringsnetwork.com/yellow-diamond-enagagement-rings/
Christopher great experiment. It shows again that good content (good means what a user wants) will always work as your most reliable marketing channel.
Thanks Ankit :-)
Its very common that most of the blogger keep updating their blogs by making post and they forget to keep update their old posts. Even i did it so many times. I am sure this post will help lots of bloggers to keep their blogs valuable by working on their old content as well. Its really an effective post as content is much important part of a website than earlier and we must know the basics of content optimization.
Thanks Nazre :-)
Great read, and case study, I've been considering something along these lines for a new site in a competitive niche, and was thinking if I can persevere with the very slow progress initially the natural growth may pay dividends in the future. I guess in the eyes of the search engines this is exactly the type of sites they'll want to be listing, you're providing content people want, it's regularly updated, and crucially all backlinks are completely natural.
Thanks, Greg, couldn't agree more :-)
Cool, I am also launching a site - with only generating content no link building and something like that. So its cool that someone did that allready. I expected a result like that, so I decided to take a pretty hard Keyword - but with longtile opportunities.
May Be next year I write about the results. I think I will go online after summer break here in germany/brandenburg - so in mid august.
Add: i think i will copy some of your strategies :)
Excellent, be interesting to see if it works for you too :-)
Good One ...
Thanks Harry