Evergreen-ish: Durable content for news SEO
We’ve updated our evergreen guidance to include more on finding and updating stories, plus a look at “news durables'' or durable content — aka, evergreen-ish stories.
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Hello, and welcome back. Jessie here, back from a weekend of softball, crochet and Death Cab for Cutie/The Postal Service. If you’re wondering what the per cent of ageing millennials in early-2000s band tees in attendance? 100. Meanwhile, the sun was out, and the parks were packed with picnic blankets, pals and the most annoying guy you went to high school with on a slackline.
This week: We’re returning to our favourite type of trees (and perennial favourite topic) — evergreen. We’ve updated our guidance to include more on finding and updating evergreen stories, plus a look at “news durables'' or durable content — aka, evergreen-ish stories.
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Let’s get it.
In this issue:
What is evergreen?
Why it’s useful for publishers
What to know about “news evergreen”
THE 101
What is evergreen?
Evergreen is content* on a topic that is relevant to readers over a significant period of time and is not tied to a single, short news event. (*Yes, “content” gives us the ick, too. But it’s the best way to include all the types of journalism we create.)
To be truly considered “evergreen,” content needs to hit some key metrics:
It should drive consistent search traffic;
Answer who, what, where, when, why or how in the headline;
Be well-structured for easy updates;
Provide information that doesn’t change significantly over time;
Works as a secondary/sidebar to the main news or information.
A topic is evergreen if it has consistent reader interest and search volume over a long period of time. Content is evergreen if it covers an evergreen topic, and can be revised without changing the substance of the piece or search intent.
Evergreen topics might include:
Evergreen works in many different formats that vary length and structure. This includes:
Explainers or guides;
Videos or interactives;
Social content like TikToks or Instagram carousels;
Lists, checklists or timelines;
FAQs or glossaries.
🌲 TL;DR: It’s evergreen content if it covers an evergreen topic. The format and cadence of updates may vary, but that’s the basic framework.
Why is evergreen content important?
Evergreen content provides consistent traffic over time, which contrasts the patterns common for most other news content. When content is published, there often is an immediate flood in traffic — what Ahrefs call the “spike of hope” — followed by a steep drop-off to almost negligible interest — the “flatline of nope.”
It’s normal for news stories to have a short lifespan. But all publishers have archives of great content that is still helpful for readers. Optimized correctly and recirculated, this evergreen content can bring in sustained traffic and audience interest.
In recent years, publishers have almost universally experienced declines in social media (Facebook, Twitter/X) and search traffic, which has forced us to think about different ways to reach readers. Deployed in a smart way, evergreen content can increase internal traffic (and boost time spent on site) and counteract some of these external declines.
This is the appeal of evergreen: Continuous, quality traffic for little ongoing effort. And if readers are arriving from search, that’s often new audience, and what’s a better introduction than high-utility, high-value content like evergreen?
Here’s how The New York Times, the Washington Post and Mashable use strong art and good headlines to help drive new readers to evergreen content.
These curated packages of content on homepages and key section pages demonstrate the breadth of your coverage, and offer a secondary click, or counter-programming to hard news. People will become loyal readers for a variety of reasons, and it's rarely because of a lone breaking news story. Smart programming decisions can keep readers on your site.
With Google’s Search Generative Experience looming, it's likely the search engine will take more space on SERPs for itself — especially on evergreen queries. With SGE, Google can draw from various sources and paraphrase content, potentially offering a more robust response to a reader’s query. On more basic evergreen queries, it’s possible SGE’s longer, bigger response will satisfy readers, negating the need to click on a variety of links.
We can’t avoid this reality. But, the best defence against Google’s whims is a strong, loyal audience directly to your homepage and key section pages, while also staying engaged via push alerts, email and other efforts. Further, think about what your outlet can do that Google can’t, like 10x content (more on this later). Onsite evergreen is a chance for you to show off your value as a publication.
Evergreen-ish: Understanding ‘durable’ content for publishers
Yes, news publishers have lots of true evergreen content, but they also have plenty of evergreen-ish content. This means outlets have content that is “durable,” or is high-utility and relevant over the course of a planned/tentpole news event. Where evergreen content can be refreshed every six months (or longer), a news durable requires more attention, but less effort than producing entirely new stories.
What is durable content? A durable news story or explainer requires updates more frequently than true evergreen. For fast-moving news stories, that could be more than once per day. Durable content also has a shorter shelf-life than evergreen — days, weeks or, on the rare occasion, months — as it is often tied to a news event. This content is likely to lose relevance once the news cycle or tentpole event ends.
The benefit of durable content is that it’s less overall effort than a new piece, with the benefit of long-tail traffic. As Gwen Milder explains, news durables often lift content from a news story by fleshing it out with additional background information or useful content.
(Shout out to The Washington Post team for coining this phrase to distinguish true evergreen from news-y evergreen.)
Examples of a news durable include:
An explainer answering, “What is Brexit?”;
A guide tracking all of Trump’s (many) trials;
An list of the best songs of 2024, updated every week of the year;
A guide to the Best Picture nominees at the Oscars;
A timeline of the TikTok ban with links to reporting, and timely updates.
This content is often structured to serve two purposes: answering top-level informational queries (i.e., "what is …” questions), while keeping space for newsier updates and fresh information.
Evan Annett, The Globe and Mail’s excellent presentation editor (and all-around cool person), always explained the structure of durable content as having “hot” and “cold” sections. The “hot” section is reserved for today’s updates, where the “cold” section is true evergreen: the basics that don’t change. This framework makes maintaining news durables so much easier.
Durable content can emerge from breaking news (i.e., Brexit) or tentpole events (i.e., Oscars, Trump trials, Super Bowl) planning. It can also surface via rising queries in Google Trends for target keywords.
Publishers can tap into a rising query, write a breakout file — which answers phrases or questions in the headline — then keep it updated with new information and context, as the rising query becomes a main search term.
Lousia Frahm explains that breakouts can be an excellent resource for readers in the moment — and could work as a news durable in future coverage during the storyline. It might be hard to remember, but the question “what is Bretix'' was once a breakout/rising search term. Now, that NYT guide serves as a permanent answer to the question.
Meanwhile, a news durable like “best songs of 2024” is terrific for two reasons. Firstly, it captures audiences across 12 months. In December, when producing year in review content, the research of identifying the year’s best is mostly done. It’s a great starting point for a top 10 piece, for example. Or, the on-page language can simply be updated to say it’s an inventory of the entire year. It’s very team low effort, big impact.
This content is great for internal linking, too. In every individual song review, link back to the best songs of 2024 piece. And from the guide, there is a link to every song review. That internal linking can help build topic authority and drive internal traffic.
For news durables and evergreen, it’s always worth experimenting with refreshing the headline, meta description and image as you add new content to draw in a renewed audience.
🔥 Hot tip: Dateless URLs are helpful for evergreen and news durables. A dateless URL is cleaner and makes linking — and Google's ability to crawl and find your stories — easier.
A dateless URL:
A date-based URL:
If you can opt between dateless (newssite.com/smokepoint-oil) and dated (newssite.com/2012/02/04/smokepoint-oil), opt for dateless URLs for evergreen.
The bottom line: Evergreen makes use of the archive of content, and can drive internal referral traffic. News durables, or evergreen-ish content, can support your overall editorial efforts during breaking or tentpole news events. Plus: Trees are great — go sit under one with a nice bevvy and good book.
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Catch up: Last week’s newsletter
Have something you’d like us to discuss? Send us a note on Twitter (Jessie or Shelby) or to our email: seoforjournalism@gmail.com.
Written by Jessie Willms and Shelby Blackley
So! This is one I've been thinking about recently:
Here in Minneapolis we had a big global upheaval about four years ago, and our local paper the Star Tribune did some GREAT reporting. They won a Pulitzer for it! And individual reporting, or a summary story published last year, appears on SOME queries surrounding the event.
But the further I get from the word "minneapolis," say, with something popular but definitely indicating a bias, the popular search term "BLM riots 2020," the less I can find from official sources. And the less, by far, I can find from the Star Tribune.
Do you think news organizations have a responsibility to keep, in their digital archives, a topical landing page about major events optimized for a variety of topical search results? Or an easy gateway to factual content around major events?
I just want anyone searching for any term that clearly indicates they are looking for what happened following George Floyd's murder... I want them to find the paper's account and not some rando or the Washington Times or what have you.