You know that posting fresh, new content often is essential to keep your site high in search engine rankings and bring back your audience for multiple visits. But you also need to create evergreen content for your college website. Here’s why.
What is “evergreen content”?
As the name implies, evergreen content (or static content) is content on your higher education website that stays useful for your visitors in every season.
Evergreen content is the content on your site that addresses the timeless questions your visitors will be looking to your organization to answer year after year.
When it comes to college culture or technology, there are always trends that come and go. These are great topics for dynamic content in your blog or newsletter.
But the main goals and challenges of higher education have remained the same for thousands of years.
So your college or university website should have pages, posts, and other types of content that devote themselves to these perennial concerns facing new college students and families.
Typical Evergreen Content for College Websites
“How To” guides naturally tend to be highly productive evergreen content because the process of how to accomplish something normally doesn’t change much over the years.
Some “How To” examples…
- How to Choose the Right College
- How to Find and Apply for Financial Aid
- How to Prepare for Campus Life
- How to Make the Most Out of Your College Experience
But “How To” guides are just the start.
Here are more examples of the types of evergreen content you can create for your college website:
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
- Tutorials
- Testimonials
- Glossaries of Terms and Phrases
- “History of” Articles
- At-a-Glance Pages Regarding Campus Stats
And as always, remember to use rich content such as videos, images, ebooks, and infographics when you begin crafting your static content.
Why Your College Website Should Have Static Content
There are many benefits to having well-crafted, strategic evergreen content on your college website for you and your visitors.
Evergreen content reinforces your brand.
Your brand should be seen as the authoritative source for everything a person needs to know in your field.
Because evergreen content gets to the heart of the higher-level questions that visitors have, it boosts your brand authority in a way dynamic content just can’t do.
The logic for a visitor goes like this: If they don’t know the big questions I have or can’t answer them, why should I trust them with my smaller questions?
For a parent visiting your site, the stakes are much higher when they’re choosing the right college for their son or daughter than when they’re choosing the right laptop for their child. Likewise, the stakes are much higher when searching for financial aid than the latest gourmet dish at the cafeteria.
When you answer these high-stake questions with evergreen content, you’ll build authority for your brand to answer the smaller questions site visitors have.
Evergreen content leads to higher conversions.
Many times visitors don’t click, submit their information, or call admissions simply because their big questions haven’t been answered.
If your brand lacks authority because you’re not answering the big questions, then why would a visitor give you more of their time or information?
If you’re not answering the big questions with evergreen content, visitors are likely to bounce from your website rather than stay on your site or submitting their info.
Evergreen content raises your site in search engine rankings.
Let me quote from Brian Clark from Copyblogger on this one:
Imagine with me for a second… someone has just arrived at your website, and this person has no idea what you’re talking about. And this is an important visitor.
Pretend further that this single visitor could make the difference between success and failure for your business. She has no time to waste poking around your site trying to figure out what you’re all about, so she immediately picks up the phone and calls you, demanding an explanation.
What do you tell her?
You’d likely explain by giving her the essential information about how you can help, and why you perfectly meet her needs, right? And I’m betting you’d want to explain it in the most compelling fashion you could, given what’s riding on the deal.
In a nutshell, that’s what Google wants you to do with the content on your site.
One of the reasons any search engine likes evergreen content is because your dynamic content (such as new blog posts) should link back to your static content often.
In the same article, Brian Clark calls evergreen content “cornerstone content,” because evergreen content is the information or ideas on which every other piece of content is built.
Your cornerstone content is the logical place where all your dynamic content should begin because all the small questions visitors have come from the big questions.
If you’ve got questions on your site’s content or performance, don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We’d be glad to help you achieve the same game-changing results as our other amazing clients!
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Featured image by Monkey Business via Adobe Stock
