Video Transcript

00:00:00:10 – 00:00:26:20

Welcome to the GetNetSet SEO video series for tax and accounting professionals, where we talk about search engine optimization and marketing your business online. When it comes to SEO, we’ve reiterated multiple times that content is one of the most important factors. However, we’ve only talked about a couple of specific pages you could write. Since this topic is so important, we’ll be dedicating several videos to specific types of content and how they could benefit your SEO rankings.

00:00:27:01 – 00:00:45:28

While these videos focus on the SEO side of things, we do have some parallel videos that cover how to write content and what information to include, so we encourage you to check those out as well if you haven’t already. In this video, we’ll go over Evergreen Content, how to organize that content using siloing, as well as what is not evergreen.

00:00:47:17 – 00:01:11:06

So to start us off, what is evergreen content? Well, evergreen content is content that remains relevant all year long, preferably longer, just like how evergreen trees remain green all year long. We’ve actually already gone over some examples of evergreen content with our FAQ and profile videos. Both of those are pages that have lots of good content and only need to be updated occasionally.

00:01:11:25 – 00:01:40:00

The benefit of evergreen content in terms of SEO is that there is value being added to the site and that value can benefit you for years to come. To put this into perspective, if you were to invest money into pay per click advertising or PPC, you stop getting the benefits the moment you stop paying. On the other hand, evergreen content continues to provide value long after it’s written, and if you write it yourself, you can potentially get massive long term gains for a short term investment of time.

00:01:40:15 – 00:02:11:06

Since this is content that stays relevant all year long, the only time it needs to be updated is when the IRS or government changes a rule or law. Another major benefit is that when you write your service listings, the detail you put into them can allow for many potential keywords to naturally surface in your writing. By explaining the service in detail and providing correct, valid information that your clients and potential clients can actually use, you’ll find that keywords will very naturally flow through your writing and onto the page, allowing you more opportunities to rank.

00:02:11:20 – 00:02:37:24

This helps the relevancy portion of SEO. Please check out our SEO video on keywords to learn more about this crucial idea. Think of evergreen content and service listings as the meat and potatoes of your website. They’re the entree, while things like articles, resources, and blog posts are more like vegetables or mac and cheese as sides. When you write evergreen content, don’t worry about any specific word count– write until you’ve discussed the topic thoroughly.

00:02:38:12 – 00:02:57:23

If you’re not sure how detailed to get, take a look at your top competitors websites and see what information they have for the services you also offer. You’ll want to write enough to at least meet the same standards as them, and then you want to see what gaps you can fill in to exceed the information they offer. Remember that SEO is a game of relativity.

00:02:57:24 – 00:03:16:17

It’s not you versus search engines, it’s you versus your competitors. Search engines are more like referees than opponents. So by exceeding your competition, you have a much better chance of ranking higher than them. Now that we know what evergreen content is and that service listings are a type of evergreen content, how should we set these pages up on your Web site?

00:03:16:27 – 00:03:39:15

The answer is by siloing. Siloing is a top down organizational structure that starts with the most generic information first and then steadily gets more specific as you talk about your services. For example, you might start with a simple generic services page where you list your primary services and talk briefly about what they are like tax preparation services for individuals and accounting services for businesses.

00:03:40:06 – 00:04:13:00

Then you create two sub pages one for tax preparation for individuals and one for accounting for businesses. On these pages, you’d break these down into subtopics. For accounting, you might talk about bookkeeping, sales tax compliance, and financial statements, while for tax preparation, you might talk about federal and state tax filing as well as optimizing deductions and credits. Then you’d go another level deeper and dedicate a page or a section of a page to each topic specifically, such as a page for bookkeeping, a page for sales tax, and a page for financial statements.

00:04:13:12 – 00:04:34:25

This may seem excessive, but remember that each page can rank on its own for certain search queries. So having a page dedicated to each service can help you rank for specific long tail keywords due to the strong relevancy of the page. For example, think about the valuable information you could include on a sales tax service page. Basic calculations,

00:04:34:25 – 00:04:56:24

exemption opportunities, advice on multi-state compliance, table showing tax rates in various cities, counties and states, etc. Location specific information can also be a great way to target geographic regions that you want to rank in. If you haven’t watched our video and articles to add to your website, I highly recommend checking it out. To reiterate an idea from that video,

00:04:57:00 – 00:05:29:12

the goal is not to teach your clients how to be tax professionals themselves, but provide them with enough information that they feel confident and comfortable reaching out to you as an expert. Another thing to keep in mind here is that your top level generic pages will help guide people who land on your home, profile or blog pages, while the lower level specific pages will act as magnets that draw in more specific search traffic, who use more specific search queries. To simplify this concept, imagine each page on your website as a jar of marbles.

00:05:29:23 – 00:05:53:16

If you have a single jar that contains red, green and blue marbles, then that jar represents a generic page that has lots of services on it. This dilutes the theme of the page spreading your relevancy across multiple topics, ultimately weakening the page’s identity as a whole. However, if you dedicate each page to a specific topic, it’s like having multiple jars that have a single color of marbles.

00:05:53:23 – 00:06:21:01

So you’d have one jar of red marbles, one jar of green marbles, and one jar of blue marbles. This represents the specific page for each topic or service, which strengthens the theme of the page and improves its relevancy for search queries that talk about that specific topic. If you dilute the theme of a page by including several topics on it, it’s less likely to rank for specific search queries or long tail keywords, which we talked about and or keywords video and encourage you to check that out as well.

00:06:22:09 – 00:06:44:24

Making each page specific helps strengthen its theme, allowing more long tail keywords to naturally flow in your writing, which can help when searchers are looking for specific information. This is one of the biggest reasons why we here at GetNetSet encourage our clients to focus on content rather than technical optimizations. Most of what we’ve talked about so far has to do with service listings.

00:06:44:24 – 00:07:11:02

So what other types of evergreen content are there? We briefly mentioned your profile and FAQ pages earlier, but you can also think of any guides, articles, or how tos as evergreen content. Pages that talk about what your client should bring to their first meeting, information to keep track of throughout the year, or even pages on new programs can make extremely powerful evergreen pages. For example, FICA taxes, self-employment taxes and estimated taxes.

00:07:11:14 – 00:07:37:03

Each of these topics has rarely changed and are unlikely to change any time soon. FICA tax rates specifically have remained largely unchanged for decades, with the only regular update being the Social Security tax wage base limit adjustment for inflation. Since these topics change so infrequently and only through acts of Congress, pages talking about these topics make for excellent evergreen content that only need to be updated once a year,

00:07:37:06 – 00:08:01:24

if that. Basically if something is unlikely to change within the next 6 to 12 months, write a dedicated page on it. You can always update that page a few months later if needed, or even remove it if the program was temporary. Remember that making sure your website contains a wealth of knowledge about your services is incredibly important to building a connection with your website visitors and inspiring them to make that all important

00:08:01:24 – 00:08:23:02

first contact with you. So the last thing we’ll talk about today is what is not considered evergreen content. And really that would be anything considered temporary. Statistics, news articles, blog posts and anything else that is in flux or could be changed in less than six months. There is absolutely a place for this kind of quote unquote, temporary content.

00:08:23:12 – 00:08:41:12

But we’ll go over those in greater detail in another video. When you’re writing a piece of content for your website. Think about when this information is going to be out of date. Will it last for a year or more? Are there specific conditions that must occur for an update to be needed, like the IRS changing a procedure or form or the government changing a tax law?

00:08:41:29 – 00:09:05:20

Or is what you’re writing about more short term something that could change any day or time? Answering these questions is important when determining if something is evergreen or not. Just keep in mind that even if content isn’t evergreen, it can still be important and useful to include on your website. It just might give more short term benefit and long term, which is the primary factor in determining a piece of content’s evergreen status.

00:09:07:03 – 00:09:30:12

So to wrap up our video today, we talked about service listings and evergreen content for SEO. Evergreen content is content that will remain relevant and valuable for a significant amount of time, or perhaps may even be relevant forever. Service listings, your profile, FAQ pages, and even some articles can be considered evergreen and provide a lot of value to your website. When written,

00:09:30:13 – 00:09:53:02

evergreen content can provide benefits for months or even years to come with no or only minor updates, making them some of the most important pages to go on your website. We also talked about siloing or how to organize your content. Siloing is about starting with generic pages like a services page that lists brief descriptions of everything you do and then has more specific pages underneath.

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For example, you might start with a services page that includes several different services, and then you’d create a personal tax services page that only talks about tax services for individuals. This organizational structure helps strengthen the individual themes and relevancy of each page, while still allowing for more general searchers to easily navigate and find all of that relevant and valuable content.

00:10:16:11 – 00:10:41:10

There are several types of evergreen content, as well as more temporary content. All of it is useful and valuable for SEO. So when you write a piece of content, think about how long that information is going to be relevant for. If it’s only going to be relevant for a few weeks or months, it might be better to make it a blog post, but if it’s going to be relevant for a year or potentially more, making it a static page is probably in your best interest.

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We’ll go over more temporary content in a future video. If you’d like to learn more about how GetNetSet can help with your SEO, we encourage you to reach out to us here at GetNetSet.com. Thank you so much for watching and we look forward to seeing you in the next video.