What Does ‘Evergreen’ SEO Mean?
The biggest problem with SEO is that Google continuously moves the goalposts. Whether you run an ecommerce business or promote your brand with a website, getting found in the first place is the ultimate challenge.
Organic search marketing experts increasingly advise businesses to take things back to basics. Rather than overcomplicating things with intricate SEO, the advice is to focus on the fundamentals.
More specifically, the kinds of ‘evergreen’ SEO activities with an indefinite lifespan.
The continuously changing SEO landscape makes it difficult to implement anything with guaranteed long-term value. Even so, there are some quintessentially ‘old-school’ approaches to SEO that have always proved effective.
Hence, before taking things to extremes with over-complicated SEO, these are the fundamentals that should be focused on:
Consistent, Original, High-Quality Content: The whole ‘content is king’ mantra may be more than a little cliché, but it remains as accurate today as ever. Google makes no secret of its preference for websites that continuously produce relevant, useful, authentic and 100% original content.
This allows any given website to differentiate itself from the competition. Not what you sell, but how you sell it – and how you go beyond the basics to offer something of genuine value. Evergreen SEO in 2022 begins and ends with abiding by Google’s E-A-T guidelines.
An Outstanding On-Page Experience: Google’s Page Experience further drove home the importance of an exceptional UX. Everything about your site’s user experience, from top to bottom, needs to be a picture of polished professionalism.
In particular, Core Web Vitals, mobile usability, and site security are proving instrumental in SEO. You need to ensure that each visitor you attract is suitably impressed to impress Google.
Backlinks of Genuine Quality: The idea that backlinks gradually lose their significance in SEO is completely unfounded. If anything, it could be considered dangerously misleading. In truth, the power and influence of high-authority backlinks have never been higher.
The difference today is that lower-authority backlinks are of no SEO value whatsoever. They will not necessarily cripple your SEO campaign but, at the same time, will not bring you any benefits. High-quality backlinks are not easy to acquire, which is precisely why they are of such high value, just as they have always been and will continue indefinitely.
Use of Low-Competition, Long-Tail Keywords: In today’s SEO landscape, the only keyword strategy that can succeed is one that focuses on low-competition, long-tail keywords. The more crowded and congested every online niche becomes, the tougher it will be to rank prominently for high-competition keywords.
Most web users today tend to conduct more detailed and conversational searches. Long questions have replaced short-form search terms, creating both challenges and opportunities for SEOs.
Detailed and Constant SEO Analysis: Last up, any business looking to mount a successful SEO strategy in 2022 effectively has a blueprint at its fingertips. Using analytics to monitor the performance of an SEO strategy continuously is the only way to ensure its ongoing optimisation.
With analytics, you can see what is working, what could be improved, and what needs to be abandoned entirely. It is no longer viable (or necessary) to make things up as you go along and hope for the best. Analytics holds the key to determining which aspects of your SEO strategy are truly evergreen and which may prove more finite in their value.