Evergreen Content and Expanding your Market

Gradually, the wider world of web marketing has been waking up to the value of what is being called ‘Evergreen Content’. There’s been plenty written about the enduring value of more heavily researched, in depth pieces that not only give value to your website visitors (which should always be an aim anyway, I’d have thought), but also continue to grow in usefulness to you by attracting links, better visibility, further visits, more links, and so on and so forth.

This is all well and good for standalone pieces, but doesn’t really look at the role of Evergreen Content in an ongoing website content creation strategy. The first step in any strategy is to step back and work out what your goals are. In the case of the content on your website, it’s one of two things; to supplement any weak spots in your current offering, filling in any gaps you might have in your core offering, or expanding your reach.

The latter part is the part which really interests me; as someone who works in search marketing, I’m always looking for ways to expand the visibility of a customer’s website. Taking existing pages and throwing more keywords onto them might sound like one way of doing it – after all, pages that already exist and are returned for search terms presumably have something going for them – but this can easily dilute the relevancy that you’ve carefully built up and end up, in the long run, being counterproductive.

It’s often the case, too, that if you have a blog, produce white papers, case studies, webinars or graphics that you have some content about a particular subject. To transform this into something that can actively help you out, creating a review or guide that brings together these disparate pieces into a focussed whole results in a page against which to build authority and create visibility for new key terms.

As a practical example, let’s say I have a website for my landscaping company in Bristol. I get great local visibility, both for people in Bristol searching for ‘landscaping’, and for terms like ‘Landscaping companies in Bristol’. That’s great, but because I’ve got a truck, I could have potential customers as far away as Gloucester, or Taunton, or even Reading. However, I don’t want to lose any of my core Bristol focus, and I don’t have an office anywhere else that I could feature in a local listing.

I do however, attend gardening shows in the area from time to time, I take photos, I write up case studies. This gives me a chance to create some pages like ‘The changing face of Landscaping in Gloucester’, wherein I bring together some of my writing, some photos, and any examples of my work in the area. Some careful on page optimisation, a little bit of link building, and I have some visibility for the term ‘Landscaping in Gloucester’ – a whole new market is potentially opened up to me just by doing a little writing and some clever deployment of content that already exists.

I’m sure that you can think of similar ways in which you can use these content nodes on your website – it doesn’t have to be a geographic focus (like SEO Hampshire ), but it could be an aspect of your service (‘Facebook marketing’) or a focus on a particular market or market area, like ‘e-commerce search marketing’.