An Evergreen Content Case Study

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By: Chris Fielden
July 3, 2013

An Evergreen Content Case Study

Content Marketing

The author’s views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

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.

Point 2 proves that detailed, focused content can work in its own right. You don’t have to outreach and link build to see some level of success.

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.

About Chris Fielden —
I run a popular writing blog. My website contains many free resources to help authors develop their short story writing and see their words in print. The site gives lots of practical advice based on real-life writing and publishing experience. It also contains lists of potential publishing markets for authors to submit to, including writing competitions and short story magazines.I’m particularly interested in creative content marketing and studying its long-term effectiveness, from increased traffic and engagement, right through to its impact on brand awareness and CRO.In my previous life, I was Operations Director at Fat Media, a multi award winning, full service digital agency.

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