Previously I mentioned how you could use surveys to get to know your audience better and identify evergreen content opportunities.

Today I wanted to share two tools that will make finding evergreen content a breeze: Ahrefs and BuzzSumo.

Disclaimer: I do have a BuzzSumo Pro account, but I am in no way affiliated to them. I just enjoy the product and believe it will add value to your content marketing efforts.

1. Use Ahrefs to Analyze Where Your Competition Is Getting Traffic From

Ahrefs lets you monitor and research your competition’s traffic and backlinks. You simply put your competition’s URL into the tool, and it’ll tell you where they’re getting their traffic from.

If your competition is constantly getting search traffic for a specific keyword over time, it means people are still looking for that information and that the topic is still relevant and worth writing about.

2. Use BuzzSumo PLUS Their New Filter to Find Examples of Evergreen Content

With BuzzSumo you can analyze the best-performing content for a specific topic by looking at the number of shares and links. For example, after logging in, clicking the Content Analyzer tab and typing in the keyword “mobile marketing,” I get this:

Another feature is their Question Analyzer which lets you find the most popular questions for specific keywords. It’s a fantastic way to identify the kinds of questions your audience is asking for a specific topic. Here’s what I get for the topic, “cloud accounting”:

There’s a total of 1,694 questions across 72 topics—all related to the main keyword cloud accounting. When I scroll down I can view all the questions per topic:

Finally, BuzzSumo recently added a new filter which helps you find good examples of evergreen content by topic and domain.  You’ll see this filter next to every post on BuzzSumo.

BuzzSumo looks at the number of shares and links the articles receive over time. The tool then assigns an evergreen score—with a higher score indicating the post is more evergreen than others. Any article that’s less than 40 days olds gets a score of 0.

Find Evergreen Content Opportunities by Topic

Type in your chosen keyword or topic.  For example, the keyword “visual content marketing” gives me the following:

See how the evergreen content score is displayed on the right?

Finding Evergreen Opportunities by Topic

Follow the same process as the above, but instead of typing in a topic or keyword, type in a domain.

The BuzzSumo team admits the “approach is not perfect, but it provides another perspective in the search for effective content examples. Thus rather than sort by total shares or links, the evergreen filter shows the top posts that consistently gain shares and links over time.”

The Bottom Line: Finding evergreen content doesn’t have to take hours and hours of research. If you use the right tools, you can quickly find new topic ideas to write about that will generate traffic for years to come.

I’m curious, have you used these tools? How do you find evergreen content?