Understanding why evergreen content is important–and knowing how to keep your content fresh, timely, and interesting over time–are key skills for both online marketers and content creators. In this post, I’ll talk about one of my favorite pieces of content/brands, analyze what makes their brand successful, and take a look at a few tactics I might use to improve the project even further.

Making Long Way Round Last Longer

Long Way Round and the sequel, Long Way Down, are two British television documentary mini-series that track the international motorcycle adventures of actor Ewan McGregor and travel writer Charlie Boorman. Both series are amazing pieces of content that everyone should see–and they are easily in my top 5 favorites for video content. I love these series for many reasons, including the adventure, the brotherhood, and the honesty.

Along with being incredibly entertaining to watch, the creators of Long Way Round have also done some excellent brand management. Top Left Design created their website, and I believe currently still handles all social media efforts. The website is now over ten years old, but the content still lives a strong life thanks to Top Left Design (Great job, guys!). 

Now let’s take a closer look at their online marketing efforts as well as a few tactics that I might use to keep the site and brand as strong as they deserve to be.

Further Possible Online Marketing Improvements

Adding Updated Content

The site was created in 2010 with a simple and easy-to-navigate design that has held up well over the years. I would update the content; it has not been touched in a few years. I would rectify this by adding new blog posts six times every year. I like how the site promotes its Facebook page and online store by using banners in the main header area. 

Improving the Online Store

The online store was created using Shopify. While the store is easy to use, it is localized to countries who use the Pound. I would update this to show multiple currencies.

Upping Social Media Posts

Whoever (Thinking Top Left Design) is managing the Facebook page for this brand is doing an exceptional job. I might post one or two more times a month (it is currently updated once or twice a month). I think the content and cadence is perfect, which has led to incredible engagement with thousands of likes coming in for each post, along with a minimum of 50-100 comments and shares. The page has almost 100,000 likes total and a very loyal following. Facebook is the big success story here, but they have also done a good job on Flicker, Twitter, YouTube and Vimeo.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Partnership Promotion.

The one area I see a lot of room for improvement is On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO.

On-Page SEO:

First and foremost, the Title Tags need to be reworked. Moving the name of the show to the end of the title tag, with the exception of the Homepage, and adding more relevant keywords to the title copy will greatly improve the SEO. If you look at the source code of the site, you will see the meta description tag is missing from every page of the site. The meta keyword tags are also missing from all the blog pages. Adding these descriptions and tags are easy fixes that can have a significant effect on the amount of organic traffic the site receives.

Off-Page SEO: To get links, you need link bait on your site. There is not much of that on this site besides the product itself, and products typically don’t generate a ton of links. Again, I would start creating content and forming link partnerships immediately. I would try producing content around adventure travel and reaching out to other travel sites about publishing and sharing this content.

Content Creation With Partners

I would also create more content around some of the companies that took part in the creation of this inspiring brand, such as www.bigearth.com, www.elixirfilms.com or www.explore.co.uk.  They all have their own interesting stories that will attract attention and links. You can learn more about link building at Moz.org.

I hope you are inspired to check out this wonderful project, and I hope that you found this post useful if you are a professional marketer. Long Way Round is an excellent piece of evergreen content that I can only assume is still making money and making people happy even though it is now over a decade old.  

I’ve read that the whole Long Way Around brand was inspired by Jupiter’s Travels, a book by motorcyclist Ted Simon.  If you are looking for a new book, It will make you want to hit the road tomorrow.