Creating An Evergreen Content Strategy For News Sites

Ask an SEO professional to come up with an evergreen content strategy for a news site and they'll probably look at you like you have three heads. At least, that was my response once. And this: "News is news. It can't be evergreen. Otherwise it wouldn't be...news."

Even though evergreen content for a news site seems counterintuitive, it's not. You just have to look at it from a different angle. Instead of seasonal ("X Best Horror Films With Clowns") or topical ("How To Wear Pumpkin Spice Everything This Season") evergreen stories, news evergreen stories work best when they are news based.

The evergreen approach helps newsrooms create more content around a new idea or subject, and it can help sites rank for breaking news subjects without actually breaking the news.

The most straightforward topic for evergreen content is: Explainers.

Explainers are a great way to create factual, serviceable content about an event or person that informs your readers and creates background information about a person or event that you can link to repeatedly.

And before you dismiss the idea of doing explainers because "everyone knows about X thing", do a search of your site's content to see if you have ever covered X thing before. If you haven't, then ask yourself, "Why would I want my readers to go to another site to get this information?"

Here are some examples of evergreen news angles to get you started:

• Why Thing X Matters
• A History of Thing X
• What Thing X Means To You/A Certain Group of People
• Who Is X-Person, A Famous Person's Significant Other, Family Member, Business Partner, Etc.
• Who is X-Person? A Newly Famous Person For Some Reason
• A Family Guide To People In The News
• Relationship Timelines. These can be romantic, political, family centered, professional, etc. The point is to illustrate the significant moments of the relationship.
• 5 Things to Know About X-Person (Similar to Who is X-Person)
• How Many Times Something Rare Has Happened
• The Style Evolution of X-Person
• Origins of a Feud

While evergreen content should contain comprehensive and timeless information, people and events are neither timeless nor comprehensive. So it makes sense to update the evergreen article when new information is available (which will give the article a new timestamp and make it eligible for Google News again).