Announcer: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to marketing school with your instructors, Neil Patel and Eric Siu.

Eric Siu: Hello and welcome to another episode of marketing school. I'm Eric Siu.

Neil Patel: I'm Neil Patel.

Eric Siu: Today, we're going the talk about how to identify evergreen content opportunities. Neil, you write a lot of evergreen content. What your thoughts about your general process around this?

Neil Patel: Sure, the easiest way I identify evergreen content is by looking at my competitors. I'll take their URLs. I'll put in Ahrefs and I see what they're consistently getting search traffic from because if they're continually getting a lot of search traffic, that means people are still looking for that information so even if that content was written five or six years ago, it means it's relevant or else people wouldn't be googling for it, right?
Maybe their content's not as relevant as a piece that would be written today but nonetheless the topic is relevant so that's the type of content that you want to end up creating. The reason being is you don't want to publish news-oriented content, it's a big hit but after a month it's dead and no one cares about it.

Eric Siu: Right and if you Google online marketing, for example, or even, well online marketing's a good start. So you can see neilpatel.com, he ranks for digital marketing or online marketing, right. Do you have digital marketing too?

Neil Patel: Mm-hmm (negative).

Eric Siu: He has online marketing. Pretty tough keyword but it is evergreen, right. You look at them, Hotspot does a lot of evergreen content too. If you look at ... I've been reading a lot of sales content around Clearbit and it seems like they have an evergreen content strategy going for them. But just to give you a refresher, evergreen content is something that just can stand the test of time, so, something like SEO is going to last for awhile, something like digital marketing, online marketing or even marketing is going to last for awhile too.
Like Neil mentioned, it's kind of the gift that keeps on giving and then you can break off that and build more pieces of content.

Neil Patel: Yeah, so, if you're going to write content books on evergreen unless you're a news website and you can use Ahrefs to figure out what's working for the people, you can also check out Buzz Sumo too. Just look at the older pieces of content and see if they're still relevant, but those are the main two sites that you should use to see ... Come up with evergreen topic ideas and see what's working for other people.
Because it's not just about writing evergreen topic. It's about writing evergreen topics that get traffic and Ahrefs and Buzz Sumo will show you that.

Eric Siu: Right, and then the one other thing that I can add to that is if you have your Google Analytics and your service console hitched up together, what you can do is you can go to a search console section, look at whatever is ranking number five to number 30 or so. Just shows the keywords that are within striking distance of you getting a top three position, and then you can figure out what more content you should be creating around it.
So you're generally ... I might look at it and say, okay, I'm starting to rank for these kind of themes, and then you might get some ideas there. You might create something that's better, because sometimes a lot of the stuff that you're ranking for is not particularly the best piece of content. It might mean that you need to upgrade something or just rewrite a whole new series of stuff to do.
Anything else to add?

Neil Patel: Yeah, one last thing is if you're writing evergreen content, the stuff that's ranking as Eric mentioned, you go to Google Search console. At least once a year you should update your main pieces of content. That way they continually drive more and more traffic. If you stopped updating, it doesn't mean the next of your traffic is going to go down. It still could go up.
But over time, it could be two, three, four, five years from now, whatever it may be, it is going to decrease, unless you continually maintain and update it.

Eric Siu: Great, so that's it for today, but before we go we have a one-year giveaway to tell you about this is Neil's heat mapping tool called Crazy Egg, which is really popular, and all you need to do to sign up for it is just go to simplegreen.com/giveaway, and you can actually get multiple entries to get in. We're giving away one of these every single week for the next year, so just go to that URL, and that's it for today. We'll see you tomorrow.

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