Newsworthy Vs Evergreen – Striking the Balance

With thousands of studies having come and gone, we’ve pretty much come to trust the 15-second rule as gospel. That being that when a newcomer hits your website, you’ve got about 15 seconds to grab their attention or lose them forever. The long and short of it is that so many businesses and webmasters aren’t to any useful extent aware of the way in which the people on the ground read and interpret web content. The majority still see traffic volumes and hits as the most important of all metrics, when logic tells us that it should be page engagement and reading time that are considered with most importance.After all, what’s the use in getting a thousand clicks an hour if 999 of them head for the hills in seconds?    Of course, getting it right can be easier said than done as not only are you tasked with creating killer content, it also needs to be content that’s unique. If it’s anything samey, they’ll have read it elsewhere already…probably. And then of course there’s Google’s take on all of this to take into account, which tells you that duplication is bad, uniqueness is good and freshness scores points.So really, all of the above aPivotal up to one pretty obvious point – these days, newsworthy content has way more power and appeal than evergreen content. Or in other words, the stuff that’s current and to some extent ‘new’ has the potential to do your site more favours than the standard content that sits there on your pages day after day. Which is all well and good, but if you have a pretty sizeable archive of products for which you’ve already created great content that’s 100% unique, how can you keep things fresh and relevant? You’re not adding new products by the day, so how can you complement this evergreen content with newsworthy bites to help make sure the punters and Google both bite in return?Striking the BalanceWell, the simple answer is there’s no easy answer…at least as far as time and effort are concerned. No matter what line of work you’re in or what your site focuses on, there are two brilliant ways of keeping things newsworthy at all times – one being to create a blog and the other being to publish regular articles.In the case of the blog, you get to share industry insights, breaking news and pretty much anything else there is to say. You can get on your soapbox and rant until the cows come home – all the while you’ll be complementing your evergreen content with a ton of fresh, relevant and real-time content that’s loved by all.Article-wise, anything from ‘how-to’ guides to elongated news stories and really anything else imaginable that has the same effect. People these days live their lives online…almost literally…so it’s up to you to provide something that’s potent enough to hook their attention and hold it for longer than 15 seconds. It can be a full-time job in its own right, but it’s one that’s more than worth doing to avoid ending up another tragic statistic on the pile.If you can’t offer the right balance of permanent content and fresh snippets to boot, chances are they’ll head to someone who will...it’s that simple.