Marketing often provides a difficult challenge to tackle, especially for nonprofit organizations. Between your limited budget, resources and staff, marketing your mission does not typically fall high on your list of priorities. However, it definitely pays off in the long run when it comes to growing your cause and furthering your mission.

In the marketing world, content marketing especially has taken off recently, and is huge in garnering new customers and promoting an organization. For nonprofits, businesses and individuals alike, “evergreen content” on a blog has become particularly popular.

In terms of website targeting and search engine optimization (SEO), evergreen content is the perfect way to keep fresh, current content on your website blog for visitors to see. What is evergreen content and why is it so important? Let’s dive in.

Evergreen Content, Defined

Evergreen content refers to website content which is search engine optimized and continually relevant to website visitors. This means it stays “fresh” for readers, regardless of when they are reading it. Like an evergreen tree, evergreen content is in season year-round.

Maybe you are thinking, “Everything online should be evergreen then, right? If blog posts stay on the website, they are always accessible to readers.” The difference between regular website content and evergreen content, though, is evergreen continues to stay relevant after its publication date, rather than a dated, timely post.

Why Evergreen Content Is Important

Your nonprofit website should have evergreen content on it because it boosts your SEO rankings. Since evergreen posts never lose their relevancy, they often have no expiration date and generally use keywords which are searched for over and over again.

This results in search engines finding, categorizing and recalling the content more often, because it is still relevant to the searcher. Therefore, evergreen content continues to increase website traffic, even long after it has been posted. In other words, the organization gets more bang for its buck, because more people are drawn in through one single post.

What Evergreen Content Is Not

Now that you know why your website should have evergreen content, how about we get a clearer picture of what it looks like. First, here are some things to remember evergreen content is not:

  • Timely news articles. No current events, updated info or recent news information. Unless something is going to be around for a very long time, news is probably not evergreen.
  • Dated statistics. Numbers and statistics are great for content, but not if you want to post something evergreen. They can often change and become outdated.

Evergreen Content Ideas

If you need some ideas to get started on creating evergreen content for your nonprofit organization’s website blog, here are a few:

  • List articles. Articles with general lists about a topic, e.g., “Top 10 Ways Your Donation Makes an Impact” are a great way to appear engaging, while staying evergreen.
  • How-to tutorials. “How-to” articles are always helpful. To stay evergreen, make sure your how-to articles are relevant without being particularly timely. For example, “How to Volunteer with Us This Winter.”
  • Mission or cause information. For a nonprofit organization, fun or interesting articles on what your NGO does and why it makes a difference definitely boost evergreen content.
  • Stories. Stories provide a valuable wealth of content for your nonprofit to tap into for evergreen content. Whether it is your founding story, event stories or client stories, all of these can be used to share why your nonprofit matters and how it makes a difference.

While evergreen content should not be all of your website posts (you do need some timely articles, of course) it’s a great way to increase your SEO rankings and boost website traffic. Your nonprofit organization matters, so make sure your marketing reflects your mission. Give evergreen content a try to see how your marketing strategy can increase constituent engagement, draw attention to your organization and grow your cause.

Want to learn more about how to market your nonprofit organization through valuable and engaging content? Firespring is here to help! We offer useful webinars, materials and seminars on how your NGO can market itself to further its cause. Learn more by giving us a call at 877.447.8941 or email hello@firespring.com.