Topical Content vs. Evergreen Content: How Both Can Boost Traffic

It's great if you are receiving massive traffic to your blog or site. But, you also need to make sure that your potential customers stick around once they land on your site. Producing topical content and evergreen content can help you achieve this. Apart from boosting site traffic, it will help in making your site visitors stay longer on your website.

Both topical and evergreen content are proven to offer something valuable to your site visitors. Needless to say, producing both kinds of content will eventually help you boost sales for your business.

Now, to the more important question: Which type of contentātopical or evergreen, offers better results? Also, which type makes your potential visitors stay longer on your site? In this post, we'll discover the answer to these questions and learn in detail about these two content types.

Let's dive right in:

What is Topical Content?

Topical content (also called as timely or seasonal) is the type of content offering timely, relevant, and targeted information and is a great way of capturing user attention.

Simply put, this type of content pertains to any recently discovered information or an event that happened.

It can be event-based (St. Patrick's Day, Valentine's), or time-based (based on particular seasons such as summer). You can easily plan this type of content before time.

Now that you know what topical content is, let's discuss its example to understand more about it.

So far, we know that topical content focuses on current information or events to offer targeted and relevant content to its readers. Now, imagine you are a local roofing company. In case your city is hit by a storm, you can talk about wind damage in your latest blog post. This type of content will prove to be highly useful to your target audience as it will educate them about actionable steps to must take when faced with this kind of situation.

Here's another example of topical content (it's an instance of the discussion around the Fyre Festival):

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What is Evergreen Content?

Evergreen content is content created in a way that it will always be helpful and of interest to its readers. Let's put it this wayāthis content remains applicable and relevant for long periods of time. It is unlikely to be immediately dated.

The purpose behind producing evergreen content is to be easily found by search engines. This content is SEO-optimized to drive blog or website traffic. Here's an example of evergreen content:

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Note: Evergreen content must:

• Incorporate keywords to optimize for search
• Offer a resolution to an industry pain point
• Include references and citations to develop trust
• Offer value for your target audience

Examples of evergreen content include:

• Listicles
• How-to articles
• Tips

Topical Vs. Evergreen Content

As opposed to the time-based nature of topical content, which needs regular updation at your end, evergreen content always stays relevant. But this shouldn't deter you from producing topical content. Seasonal content is beneficial to capture the immediate interest of readers.

Topical Content Advantages & Disadvantages

If you wish to use topical content on your website, here are its pros and cons you should know about:

Pros

• You get to drive traffic from emails, web searches, and social media sites simultaneously to your website.
• To brainstorm topical content ideas, all you need to do is quickly review digital news outlets and relevant industry websites.

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Cons

• Topical content can make it hard for you to stand out from your competitors. This is because there is a high chance your competition might be leveraging similar topical content ideas for their business.
• Chances are, you may need more than topical content to turn your site visitors into buyers.

Evergreen Content Advantages & Disadvantages

If you want to leverage evergreen content, you need to know its advantages and disadvantages. Let’s begin:

Pros

• Evergreen content drives steady traffic to your site because it remains fresh for longer.
• Because there is always someone out there looking to learn about a topic or a new skill, you can use evergreen content to teach such beginners. Listicles and how-tos are great choices to go for at this time.

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Cons

• Once you have posted a generous amount of evergreen content, you may soon run out of ideas.
• With evergreen content, you can’t expect huge spikes in traffic over a brief period of time.

Tips to Use Topical and Evergreen Content

Both topical and evergreen content in liaison to boost your traffic. Here's in detail about how you should use both these content types for traffic growth:

1. Carry Out Regular Topical Content Refreshes

To ensure your topical content remains relevant, you need to schedule regular refreshes for it. The time duration can vary according to the type of content. Blog posts may require refreshes within 2 to 4 weeks. Social media posts, on the other hand, may require a refresh in less than a week.

2. Think About the Long-Term for Evergreen Content

When it comes to creating evergreen content, you need to consider its long-term traffic potential. Ask yourself these questions - Can it be updated if the market changes? Is the content valuable to your current site visitors?

3. Access the Correct Tools

Tools such as Google Trends and Google AdWords offer you valuable information that helps you devise a winning content strategy.

Google Trends lets you know when a specific event gains momentum, rises up, and falls. This way, you know the right time to post topical content on it.

Google AdWords, on the other hand, allows you to find certain queries about your audience and lets you segment information according to location and date.

4. Look for Seasonal Creativity

At first, a particular holiday or event may not appear to be apt for your brand. But, if you brainstorm, you might come up with content ideas that can perfectly pair your brand with the event.

Take this example for instance:

At first glance, you may not think that a car maintenance business could pair well with Valentine’s Day. But, if the business creates topical content on “How to prevent breakdown on your candlelight dinner date on Valentine’s Day,” it can definitely interest its audience.

Here's another example of how Oreo applied seasonal creativity during the Super Bowl power outage:

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5. You Must Update Evergreen Content Too!

So far, we have established that evergreen content lasts longer than topical ones, but you still need to give it a refresh when needed. Ensure you regularly update the studies and stats you cited in the content. Also, fact-check the photos or links you used in your evergreen content. See if they are outdated and make changes accordingly.

Tip: Apart from implementing these tips to use topical and evergreen content, you can also learn how to create a blog that generates continuous traffic and revenue.

DashClicks - White Label Content Marketing Services

If you are a digital marketing agency that wants to deliver enticing and unique content to your clients to help them generate more traffic for their sites, you can think about outsourcing. We recommend you hire reliable white label content marketing service from a trustable white label agency such as DashClicks.

When you partner with DashClicks, you get to deliver 100% unique content to your clients. Doing so will also help you grow faster, without the headache of doing all the work.

Conclusion

So far, it's safe to say that both evergreen and topical content are advantageous for your website. Evergreen content can help provide you with steady visitor numbers. Topical content, on the other hand, helps your website get discovered when your audience is looking for answers during certain events.

So, instead of choosing one type of content over the other, it's important to strike the right balance between evergreen and topical content. This is the only way your potential customers will stick around and keep returning back for more.