May 4, 2015 Filament Content Specialist

How to Create Evergreen Seasonal Content

You might think at first that seasonal content and evergreen content are the antithesis of each other. Both are important parts of an effective content strategy. Evergreen content gives you a great return on your investment since it doesn’t go out of date, and seasonal content takes advantage of seasonal search increases that can deliver a lot of traffic. But can you create content that is both seasonal and evergreen? Yes, you can! We’re going to delve into a few ways that you can create evergreen seasonal content as well as ways to make your evergreen content work well with your seasonal content.

It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year. . . Again

Seasonal content includes content that refers to holidays, like Christmas, National Pet Month, Halloween, and the seasons—spring, fall, and so on. Holidays and seasons recur year after year, so it’s possible to create evergreen content for these times of year.

First, let’s look at the different kinds of evergreen content:

  • Testimonials
  • Interviews
  • How-To Guides
  • Historical Posts
  • About Us Pages
  • User Tips
  • Curated Posts
  • Personal Biographies
  • Industry Resources
  • FAQs
  • Tutorials
  • Glossaries of terms & phrases
  • Yearly posts that can be updated (e.g. Ribbons & Bows 2017 Edition)

Just by looking at the above list, we can come up with some creative ways to create evergreen content that we can recycle year after year, such as how-to guides, tutorials, and user tips that relate to each holiday or season.

Evergreen content can take different forms, too:

  • Written posts
  • Memes
  • Videos
  • Images
  • Infographics

Consider the owner of a retail business that sells, among other things, wrapping paper and ribbons. Someone out there will always be interested in knowing how to tie the perfect bow. This hypothetical business owner could create a how-to guide with instructions for tying bows on presents. The guide could take the form of step-by-step photographs—perfect for Pinterest, where you can illustrate how to do or make things and where people are going to look for such info. Or you could make a how-to video—or several how-to videos, each with holiday- and season-specific ribbons and wrapping to keep it relevant and inspire your customers.

Baking the perfect chocolate chip cookie, styling the perfect (holiday/wedding/party) outfit, how to get your tires ready for winter weather—no matter your business, the possibilities are endless. Just be sure to let your business and your customers dictate what types and what forms of evergreen content will be most useful.

Feelings, Nothing More than Feelings

Emotions get a response, and the seasons and holidays definitely trigger people’s emotions. Funny seasonal images, the ones we can all relate to because we’ve been there, are an excellent opportunity to build your brand through a personal connection without direct selling. You might have a meme that you bring out for the holidays in which you only have to change the text to keep it fresh and surprising, and you keep your branding on-point by using a consistent font and colors and your logo. This kind of evergreen content would fall under the category of “yearly posts that can be updated.”

Tell Me What You Think, What You Really, Really Think

Product reviews are a super smart form of evergreen content that you don’t even have to produce. Your customers will do it for you—if you invite them to and/or give them incentive to do so. Product reviews never go out of date—unless you’re no longer selling that item. Plus, they play well with your seasonal content by supporting it. You can also use reviews to create top ten lists of the most popular items related to each season or holiday.

As an aside, product descriptions are another great way to create evergreen content. You can update it to give it a seasonal twist, or you can offer it as is to educate and inspire your guests, and help them learn how your products and services will help them.

I Like The Way You Promote It, No Diggity

Whether your content is evergreen or seasonal, you can make the most of all the content platforms available to you—or, more importantly, all of the platforms that your current and potential customers use.

Remember that how-to video on how to tie the perfect bow? Well, our ribbon entrepreneur can post it on Vimeo and YouTube, and then share and re-share that content on other social channels. Or that step-by-step image on Pinterest could be made into a slideshow and posted on SlideShare. People go to these platforms to find answers to their problems. You provide the solution to their problem, and they’ll find you, too.

Use all the content platforms at your disposal to extend your reach and get more search and shares. But don’t stop there, be sure to link to your evergreen content from other articles, promote it on your site, and add plenty of internal links.

You might be noticing that there’s a third type on content that we haven’t yet mentioned: time-sensitive content or news. News is a great way to show your customer’s that you’ve got your finger on the pulse and cultivate trust. Posts that link some aspect of your business and your customer’s concerns to events in the news can help traffic your way.

Fresh, well-timed content indicates authority and relevance to search engines, which is essential to your SEO. At the same time, content that isn’t time-sensitive accrues greater authority and value over time. Your best bet is to incorporate both. How much of each will depend on your industry, your business and your audience. B2C sites tend to move more quickly white B2B websites can afford slow-growing content. We usually recommend that folks start with roughly 60 percent evergreen, 20 percent seasonal and 20 percent newsy content. Testing and observing how people to respond to your content mix will tell you how and where to adjust your content marketing strategy.

Get in touch with Filament if you’d like to start working on those percentages and filling your website with quality content.

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