An effective way of getting long-term marketing value from SEO is by creating evergreen content. This is top-ranking content on search engines that stays relevant and attracts site visitors for a long time.
For instance, an article for the blog of a film merchandise website on the best horror films of this year, is not likely to be shown to searchers looking for the best horror films of the year next year.
On the other hand, an article written about the best horror films of all time could remain relevant and attract a lot of visitors for a long time because this content isn’t limited by the dates of the films mentioned in the same way.
Google wants to show users the most relevant and recent content. This is why content that has dates from previous years in the title will often rank lower than similar content with more recent dates or no dates at all.
The key to making your content evergreen is writing about topics that stay relevant and interesting to users for years to come.
Many marketers get around this problem by updating the dates on their content and adapting it to ensure that it remains relevant. With the best evergreen content topics, these changes only need to be small, but they can help business owners to hold onto their top-ranking results for many years, providing the marketer tracks the rankings of these pages and updates the content when needed.