Posted by jennita
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More and more businesses and organizations of all sizes are realizing the importance of building an online community. I’m curious though, have you considered integrating SEO into your Community management, or even making sure you’re considering Community in your SEO tasks?
Now, usually when you think about SEO, you’re thinking aboutGoogle searches, building links, creating good content, getting your contentshared, keyword research, crawlers, bots, indexation, and so on. You probablyhave thought about the conversion funnel and getting people to buy your productor sign up for your newsletter. But have you ever thought about how using yourSEO can help you actually build a community?
When it comes to community, you think customer service, blogging, user-generated content, forum threads, interacting on social media, industry events, and casual meetups. Essentially it’s all about the people, right?
But I want to talk about these two areas can work togethernicely. Not only is it important to build a community because they will helpyou with your SEO, but you want to use your SEO to help find the community aswell!
Hello RelationshipBuilding
Combining your SEO and Community efforts means you’rebuilding relationships with people, not just ranking higher. You’re investing in your future by ensuring that youhave those brand advocates, link builders, content sharers, etc. for years tocome. Since it’s the people who promote you because they trust and like youand/or your service, they’re the ones to focus on.
Not only will building a community help your SEO, but you’ll find the opposite true as well. Think about it, your future community members are the ones searching for you. How often have yousearched for a brand name, rather than going directly to their website? In aprevious job, we did usability studies and asked people to walk through variousscenarios. At the end of each one, we asked them to go back to the home page.More than half of the users typed in the brand name in Google to get back tothe home page, rather than clicking the logo. INSANE right? But it happens.
Also, when you do your SEO right, you’ll attract the people who fit right into the community. For example, doing a search for “geeky family…” quickly brings up thinkgeek.com. That’s the *exact* type of person they’re looking for, and exactly what I’d like to see. 🙂
Who do you think is going to link to you? Yep, that would beyour community. They’re the “linkerati”, those folks who have blogs, owncompanies, and they tweet, pin and circle.
Mmm hmmm. Links, shares, tweets, likes, etc.
Use Your Community to Improve Your SEO
Ok, you’re going to tell me “Yeah, it’s called Link Building,Jen.” And you’re right! But the part that’s different is that you’re going tofocus on building a relationship with people. The content you create will bewhat your community cares about and really wants to link to. That means you’re probablygoing to have talk less about yourself.
One important piece in this is making sure you have someonein charge of the community. You probably already have someone focused on SEO,but what about your community? Kate Morris wrote a great post earlier this yeartitled, YourBest Link Building Tool in 2013: Community Manager. It’s so true! Getsomeone to care about your SEO, Social, Community, and Content together (just oneperson, or a team!), and you’re going to find that whole link building thingsgets a bit easier.
Following are some tactics to build a relationship with yourcommunity and get some great links from them at the same time:
Make it super easy toshare.
This sounds pretty straightforward right? I mean, you’dnever actually put up great content then make it difficult for people to share,right? Sadly, this happens more often than I’d like to think. It often occurswhen you have different people working on various aspects of a site. Forexample, I’ve seen times when the Social person assumes the Developer obviouslyknows to do this, and the SEO thinks the Social person will make sure it’sdone, and so on.
Or sometimes your CEO wants the only CTA on the page to be a subscribe to the blog via email button. ehem.
Not only do you want it to be easy, but also you want tofocus on sites that your community cares most about. I know I want a big easybutton to push, don’t make me think.
Focus your content onwhat your community cares about.
It’s cool and all to put together an amazing piece ofcontent, but if *your*community, the people who care about your brand, isn’t interested in it, thenyou’re not getting the full potential from that content.
Take Mint.com for example. They have online software to help you do your finances… boooooring. But their blog is extremely useful because they talk about what their community/users care about. They don’t *just* focus on themselves all the time.
This also isn’t something that’s *only* on your site. You want to to this with your social content as well. One of the best examples of this, is the way ThinkGeek plays to their community of geeks. 🙂 *giggle*
There are various ways to do find out what your people careabout, and one of the easiest ways is to simply ask. Set up a quick and easyform and ask people to tell you what they want to read about. We did this backon the blog several years ago and it shaped the content we wrote for the nextyear and a half (at least).
Feedback on the SEOmoz Blog: What Can We Do For You?
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There are also quite a few great tools out there that helpyou curate content and find out what the people in your community talk about.
Additional Reading:
Webinar with Gianluca Fiorelli – Social Content Curation:Why, How, and What
Give them data, orsomething else they want.
Again, this is one of those that seems like simple commonsense. But we all seem to mess it up. Whether you’re a job board, a datingsite, a webinar provider, an online store, or even a news site, you have data.You have information about the people who use your site, what they do on yoursite and how they use it. This information is extremely interesting and canmake for great content.
OKCupid blog – OKTrends
OkCupid did a great thing with their blog, they took the data gathered from use of their site, to create amazing content that get shared like crazy. Why do these posts get shared so much? They’re relatable and they use real data from real people. They’re not giving out names or private information, but they are using their data in super unique ways.
What information do you have that you can turn into interesting content?
Make it easilyembeddable
Please, for the love of all things grumpy cat, make it easyto re-use the amazing content you create. When your community loves somethingthat you’ve created, they’ll want to re-use it. Then make sure the embed code,has not only a link, but also the embed code.
Simply Hired
Slideshare does an excellent job of this. They’ve essentiallymade it so that their community is building links to them every day, over andover. When you embed a Slideshare presentation, it adds a link and an easy wayto embed the presentation yourself. Brilliant!
Using Social Analytics For Testing from Jennifer Lopez
This is a presention I gave last month at Interactivity Digital in Florida. Right after I finished the presentation, I uploaded it to Slideshare. It’s a really great way to get reach a new audience and they do a great job of getting users to create links back t their site. 🙂
Make sure they’resharing the way you want them to
Have you ever found a website or page that you were so excited about that you couldn’t wait to tell all your friends about it? But when you share it on Facebook, the page doesn’t look quite right. This happened to me when I found out about the Nutella Truck. All the excitement of thinking that a Nutella truck would come through Seattle got me all giddy. This is the page I wanted to share:
However, when I tried to share it on Facebook, this is what actually showed up:
Yikes! When you look at the code on the page, they did have a title tag. But they were missing a meta description and the image on the page was a CSS background image. The only text on the page that Facebook could find was the “No Purchase Necessary” mumbo jumbo which made for a bad sharing experience. The only good that came from this experience was that I now have a great example of what not to do. 😀
Open Graph tags
Make sure your open graph tags are set up correctly. DanaLookadoo wrote a great post that walks you through the importanceof the open graph tags and how to set it all up. Essentially having these tags set up will ensure that when your content is shared on Facebook and Google+ the way you want it to show up.
Facebook Debugger
Did you know, that the first time a link is shared on Facebook, it gets cached. Usually this makes perfect sense, but there are times when the first share of a page changes. Take for example, the open graph code we originally had on moz.com. It was all about the upcoming launch and talked about “Top Secret Project.” Obviously, on launch day, we changed all the information, but Facebook still had the old open graph information. So when people started sharing the new site, it still looked like this:
But no problem, we ran on over to the Facebook Debugger: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug, input the page, and it recached the page. After doing this, Keri then shared the page on her feed to make sure it looked right. Voila!
By running the page through the Facebook debugger, we recached the page which pulled in all the new information. So from that point forward, all new shares were correct!
Twitter Cards
Setting up Twitter Cards is a really great way to get a rich snippet of your content directly into the Twitter feed. So rather than having to click on the link to see what it’s all about, you get a nice preview. Here’s a good example of a post from yesterday at Search Engine Land:
Make your communitydo the work. [UGC baby!]
This sounds a little harsh, but I mean it in the nicest way possible. Your community members will write content in the form of blog posts, comments, reviews, etc. if you give them an easy way to do it. Here at Moz, we have YouMoz and Q&A that serve has the big areas for us where you, the user, are creating the content.
Another example I like to show off is ModCloth. What I like most, is the way they have their reviews set up. Not only do you add your commentary, but you also add your height, waist, bra, and hip sizes. Plus, buyers can add the size they bought and show pictures of themselves in the clothing! This is a really great way to show off the product and build up your community content at the same time.
Use your SEO to build your Community
“But this is what already I do!” you say. And it’s partially true,you’re working on getting your site/pages ranking for certain keywords. But areyou thinking about how they will become longtime community members and brandadvocates because of it? I want to walk you through a couple scenarios.
Let’s say that I was looking for more information aboutyoung people who get cancer and how they are coping with it. I might do asearch something like this:
Which would lead me to a site called StupidCancer.org, which just happens to be acommunity for young people living with and recovering from cancer and treatments.Because they’ve done a good job of targeting their site to the correct group ofpeople, I easily found their site.
Let’s try another scenario, where I would take my searchfurther than just getting to the site. In this scenario, I’m looking forsomething to do with my daughter this weekend, so I start to do a search.
Obviously redtri.com is doing a great job ranking for theterms I’m looking for, as they show up for both the #1 and #2 spots. Once I getto the site, I realize that they have weekly calendars with really great stuff forkids! From there I check out both their Twitter and Facebook pages anddetermine that Facebook is the right one for me and I “like” them.
I start getting updates about new kids plays in town and funthings to do over the weekend. So what do I do, I share them! I click on them!I take my daughter to do fun things!
Because of that very first search, I now visit the sitepretty much every week. I rely on them to tell me what’s going on in the city forkids. And I recommend the site, over and over again.
These are only two scenarios of using SEO to build yourcommunity, but there are tons more. I’d like to challenge you to work with your other team members, theperson who manages social, the dev who works on the blog, the SEO, etc. to seehow you can work together. What can you do to make sure you’re making the best peanut butter and jelly sandwich out there?
[ok, did I just take that PB & J think too far?]
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