Topical vs Evergreen vs Viral: Which Topic is Best for SEO?

There are a lot of different ways you can divide up “content” into different buckets. You can talk about niche versus general content. You can talk about transactional versus informational content. You can talk about short-form versus long-form content.

All of these different divisions have meaning, and it’s important to know what buckets your content falls into. When you write the wrong kind of content for a topic, you end up with a mismatch that can leave your post – and your site – floundering.

Another one of those divisions comes down to the kind of topic you want to cover. There are three main buckets here, which, as you’ve read in the title, span different kinds of interest. So, let’s talk about them, and which one is best for your SEO.

Topics Versus Content

Before we dig in, I want to make an important distinction for understanding the rest of this post. I’m specifically referring to topics here, not content. Yes, I used both terms in the intro, but this is Topicfinder, not Contentfinder, right?

Image source: https://www.seobility.net/en/wiki/images/6/6a/Cornerstone-Content.png

This is a small distinction, but it’s important. You can take a topic that has evergreen appeal, but cover it in a way that makes it no longer evergreen. Similarly, you can take a more topical topic and cover it in an evergreen way.

This mismatch is actually a potential point of friction, depending on the specific topics at hand and the way you cover them. If someone clicks on a post they think might be a little old but still good, only to find something outdated, they aren’t going to want to read more or browse more of your site. It hurts you in the long run.

So, for the purposes of this post, I’m talking specifically about your choice of topics. You can extend that to the content as well – assume you’re writing the right kind of content to go with the topic – but I’m mostly focused on the topic itself.

Now, let’s dig in.

What are Evergreen Topics?

Let’s start with the one you’re most likely to be familiar with, which is the concept of evergreen topics.

Evergreen topics are named after the kind of trees that stay green all year long, even in the dead of winter, when other trees have shed their leaves and gone dormant. Much like those trees, evergreen topics are topics that people consistently have some interest in looking up.

Think of something like “how to build high-quality backlinks” as a topic. That’s a fairly general, somewhat broad topic for marketing, and it’s something that has been relevant for decades, and will continue to be relevant for as long as Google continues to use links as a significant part of their search algorithm.

The goal of evergreen topics is to have coverage of topics that will bring in traffic for as long as the subject remains relevant, which reflects the life of a tree: a long time. There’s no defined expiration date, there’s no real seasonality; there’s just interest and traffic coming in.

Contrary to popular belief, evergreen topics are not immortal. Ideas that used to be evergreen might no longer be relevant, and can drop off either suddenly or slowly over time.

To use another marketing term as an example, think about keyword density. Keyword density was an incredibly important term in SEO back in the early 2000s, and while it still experiences some surges now and then, most people don’t think about it or care about it anymore, because it’s not a relevant part of modern SEO.

What are Topical Topics

Next up are topical topics, which might sound like a redundancy, but there’s a defined meaning here, I promise.

A topical topic is a topic that is generally seasonal. In fact, given my way, I’d probably rename them to seasonal topics, just to avoid the redundancy in the phrase itself. To continue the plant-based metaphor, deciduous trees, which surge in foliage for some of the year and go dormant for other parts of the year, fit the bill.

Topical topics are sort of like a midway point between evergreen and viral topics. They’re topics that have dead zones and surges in interest, often in a cyclical pattern.

Think of topics like:

• Best Christmas cookie recipes
• MLB playoff schedule
• Where to go for spring break

These are topics that surge once a year, and for a lot of the rest of the year, they have little or no real interest. But critically, they keep coming back. They aren’t one-and-done trends.

I tend to think of these kinds of topics as cyclical evergreen topics. I treat them like evergreen topics, but I recognize that the actual content will have upswings and downswings, and will likely be less relevant throughout parts of the year.

Note that some people consider evergreen to be one category, and the other category to be “everything else.” You can see this just by researching this entire topic itself; you see a lot of “evergreen vs viral” and “evergreen vs topical,” but nothing with all three.

I think this does the question a disservice. There are nuances to non-evergreen topics that are worth talking about. That’s a big part of why I’m writing this post at all.

What are Viral Topics?

Viral topics, as you can probably guess, are the opposite of evergreen topics. If you’re still thinking in terms of plants, the flowers you plant once, that grow once, and die off, are an example.

Viral topics are topics that show up, surge, and generally die off, often never to be seen again.

It’s a misconception, however, to think that they only show up for a short time. Viral trends can be topics that stay relevant for a few days, or they can linger for months.

Image source: https://trends.google.com/trending?geo=US&hours=168

There are all sorts of topics that fit this category. The latest news about the newest Samsung Galaxy, announcements of a product recall, the results of a local election; they’re all topics that only see interest once.

Every now and then, a viral topic will kick back up. This might make it look more like a topical topic, or even more like an evergreen topic if it keeps happening, but it’s still different, unique instances of the topic.

This is important because it is reflected in the user behavior in search. Users searching for evergreen topics generally don’t care as much about the timestamp on the post, and in fact might trust an older post more than a newer one. People searching for a viral topic want the latest information, often disregarding anything more than a day or two old if they can. For some topics, the hour can matter!

Which Kind of Topic is Best for SEO?

All of them.

Come on, you had to have seen that answer coming, right? While your site might specialize in one kind of topic, you’re not really going to be able to avoid using all three at some point. And, really, it all comes down to how you use them.

Viral topics are best for:

• Fast surges in traffic, even if it’s short-lived.
• Building your reputation as someone with their pulse on the industry.
• Building a social media following.

Topical topics are best for:

• Covering certain kinds of topics that are inevitably seasonal.
• Building a middle ground if you over-specialized in viral or evergreen.
• Leveraging interest towards sales-focused content.

Evergreen topics are best for:

• Building long-term reputation and authority.
• Creating deep pillar posts that build backlinks and site ranking.
• Building general EEAT metrics with authoritative content.

As I mentioned above, it’s important that you create content that matches the kind of topic you chose, as well.

The Downsides of Each Kind of Topic

One of the main reasons why you want to use a mix of all three kinds of topics is that they all have their own downsides as well.

Evergreen topics are slow to get off the ground and are often very difficult to rank for. Because they’re evergreen, you’re competing with everyone who has covered that topic in the past, and everyone who will cover it in the future. You have potentially years or decades of competition to outdo, and if the topic doesn’t change very much or very often, that’s a tall order.

Evergreen topics also have potentially low ceilings. I say potentially because some evergreen topics are among the most-searched topics in the world, but a lot of them tend to be mid-tier at best. The benefit comes from getting your share of that traffic all year, indefinitely, rather than getting it all at once in a gift basket.

Image source: https://seranking.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Keyword-Research-SERP-overview.png

Topical topics have potentially high peaks, but also low valleys. The dead zone between surges can be devastating. I know some sites that have 3x the traffic on their highs as they do on their lows. A lot of seasonally-focused sites and blogs are like that, like food blogs focused on certain kinds of cuisine most popular around holidays, or blogs covering those holidays themselves.

This downside can be mitigated by covering a variety of different topics that don’t overlap in their sine waves. That can be surprisingly hard for some topics, and easy for others, so it can depend a lot on your overall industry.

Viral topics, of course, have extremely high upsides, but when they fall off, they’re essentially dead content. You might not want to get rid of the posts because they still have valuable backlinks pointing to them, but they certainly get essentially no traffic at all.

How to Use Each Kind of Topic Effectively

You know the pros, you know the cons, now how do you put it all into practice?

Evergreen topics, to me, are the bulk of the content I want to make. They aren’t super-powerful individually, but once you have enough of them, your site obtains a sort of critical mass, and you can start to surge in popularity.

I generally aim for a pillar-and-support framework for evergreen topics. A central evergreen topic forms the pillar, and it’s usually one I don’t really expect to rank right away. Then I write a bunch of secondary content, usually evergreen but sometimes topical, that supports the main topic. Spin it out, buff it up, funnel link juice to it.

Other topical topics come up naturally. Sometimes you just want to talk about something that’s seasonal and is going to surge in the coming months, and if you get started now, you’ll have it up in time to capture some of that interest. I think every blog should have a healthy dose of seasonal content just to show that you’re not trying to be some blog frozen in amber, you’re a living site.

Viral topics are harder. You can potentially use them effectively, but I find that it’s difficult to have a fast enough turnaround time on content creation to be super effective with them. A much larger team with people dedicated to writing about Today’s News would be able to pull it off, though, which is why a lot of the sites that focus solely on viral topics are news sites.

If you happen to catch a trend as it’s starting, or use a tool like Exploding Topics or another trend-watcher, you can be more assured of capitalizing on those viral surges. The real trick is finding ways to capture that traffic and keep it coming back. If your viral topics can be linked into your evergreen topics, that works out nicely.

If you use a tool like Topicfinder to see what your competition and your industry are covering, you can get a decent idea of all three kinds of topics and how they’re currently being used. Why not give it a try?

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