If you’re looking for ways to increase your visibility in search engines, look no further than online communities! While posting quality content on a regular basis is a great place to start, building your own online community site can really help you with SEO.
Online communities have become an important part of the online landscape. They provide a space for like-minded individuals to come together and share their thoughts on all sorts of topics. And as internet users move away from a “me-centric” type of social sharing to a “we-centric” thread of conversations, online communities are only expected to gain more and more significance to users everywhere.
If you’re looking to grow your business, online communities can provide you with many different benefits, including a significant boost in your SEO rankings.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of becoming recognized by search engines and increasing your website’s ranking on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). It’s a long and ongoing practice that involves using business-specific keywords to optimize your site, create high quality content for your audience, and promote your page across different online channels. Ultimately, SEO efforts are focused on driving engagement, increasing traffic, and building brand awareness.
SEO provides a way of marketing your business on search engines. It allows you to tailor your content so that it appears higher up in searches for relevant topics. A high ranking on a search engine will increase your chances of reaching a wider audience, generating more website visits, and improving your sales. All the time you put into developing great content and optimizing your site for SEO improves its usability and credibility, and this creates a more seamless and positive customer experience.
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To improve your content’s visibility across SERPs, it’s essential to first have an understanding of what search engines look for. Several factors affect your SEO rank, including:
Having a good community management software will give you control over these important SEO factors, and improve your SERP placement. Here’s how.
With an online community built by users sharing their personal experiences and learnings, you get premium quality content that people won’t find anywhere else. Users will be more inclined to engage with your content because they feel like they’re part of the group that is talking about what you’re talking about. It increases your website’s credibility and turns the head of search engines.
Best of all, your users literally add hundreds of pages of great content to your site with almost no cost to you at all! Just make sure you have the right community management software and tools to maintain quality and safety across your site.
Since online communities thrive on user-generated content, your site will likely have more relevant user-defined keywords. And that’s exactly why online communities are a goldmine for SEO — because community members are creating new content for you everyday in a way that is relevant to other members as well. Online communities take the pressure off of trying to get traffic from other sources and puts it on engagement instead. The more engaged your members are, the more fresh content you have in your community.
Having an online community that’s crawlable and accessible to search engine bots is a superb way of improving the level of traffic coming to your website. Imagine having a site filled with user-generated content that answers almost every question that customers have ever had or discussed in your community. Since your users are the one creating the content, the overwhelming majority of new posts will surely be relevant. Even better, much of your site’s improved traffic will be returning visitors who have found your website to be helpful, interesting, and entertaining.
Relationships built inside your community will spread to give your entire website a warm fuzzy SEO feeling. Online communities are very popular today exactly because they allow people to have peer-to-peer connections and foster authentic relationships. This lowers bounce rates across your website, and increases its value as more and more visitors decide to “hang out” on your community and have meaningful conversations.
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Many brands and organizations today are choosing social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn to start their online communities. And while there are some perks with this option, it’s also important to remember that communities built on platforms specifically designed for communities provide a completely different experience for your members and your SEO.
If you have a good community software, your site should be able to automatically create URLs that align with SEO best practices. A good URL provides both humans and search engine bots an easy-to-understand indication of what the destination page will be about. This means that the URL should be created using relevant keywords or even the title of the post vs. using random slug.
A well-written and optimized URL will help:
Communities powered by Beam.gg are well-optimized for search engines. We do this by implementing the latest SEO best practices and keeping close tabs on guidelines from major search engines like Google.
Try beam.gg for free and get your online community up and running in just a few minutes!
