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

By pvaughan@hubspot.com (Pamela Vaughan)

Download Now: Content Promotion Templates + Kit

The more traffic your blog or site receives, the better. But drive-bys aren’t enough to drive user engagement and ultimately boost sales — instead, you need to convince potential customers that it’s worth sticking around. Topical content and its counterpart, evergreen content, can help you achieve this goal.Consider that 38% of people will leave your site if the content or layout is unattractive. In other words, if they don’t find anything of value ASAP, they won’t stay.

Of course, this raises an important question: When it comes to topical content vs. evergreen content, which delivers the best bang for your virtual buck? Which type drives more visitors to stay? Here’s what you need to know about boosting traffic with these common content types.

Topical content focuses on current events or information to deliver targeted and relevant content to visitors. For example, a local roofing company might use the event of a large storm rolling through the city or county as a jumping-off point for a blog post about handling hail or wind damage. This type of topical content is relevant to their target audience in the moment, offers actionable advice, and may help drive conversions.

HubSpot’s recent State of Consumer Trends blog is a good example of topical content. The statistics provided are timely, relevant, and actionable in the near future.

Like the evergreen tree, this type of content is always around and relevant. Unlike the time-based nature of topical content that requires regular updating to stay compelling, evergreen content has a longer-term appeal that lets you post it and (mostly) forget about it.

Common types of evergreen content include how-to articles, tips, or listicles that are broadly applicable. HubSpot’s list of 15 Customer Success Metrics That Actually Matter is a great example of actionable evergreen content.

Topical Content Pros and Cons

Considering using topical content on your site? Here are two pros and two cons to this approach.

Pro #1: Less legwork

Topical content is there for the taking. A quick review of relevant industry websites or digital news outlets can provide inspiration for your next post, meaning your team can cut down the amount of time required to find your next content focus.

Pro #2: Multiple traffic opportunities

Relevant stories can gain traction across multiple points of content. In practice, this means you can drive traffic from social media sites, emails, and web searches simultaneously to your site.

Con #1: It’s Not Just You

Interesting content is interesting to everyone. This means that other sites are also posting their own take on topical content, making it harder to stand out from the crowd.

Con #2: Trust is Built, not Posted

Just because you make a great post and get traffic to your site, it doesn’t mean that visitors automatically become buyers. Instead, it takes time to build up trust, meaning you’ll need more than just topical content to drive conversion.