Posted by jennita
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 about
Google searches, building links, creating good content, getting your content
shared, keyword research, crawlers, bots, indexation, and so on. You probably
have thought about the conversion funnel and getting people to buy your product
or sign up for your newsletter. But have you ever thought about how using your
SEO 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 together
nicely. Not only is it important to build a community because they will help
you with your SEO, but you want to use your SEO to help find the community as
well!
Hello Relationship
Building
Combining your SEO and Community efforts means you’re
building relationships with people, not just ranking higher. You’re investing in your future by ensuring that you
have those brand advocates, link builders, content sharers, etc. for years to
come. Since it’s the people who promote you because they trust and like you
and/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 you
searched for a brand name, rather than going directly to their website? In a
previous job, we did usability studies and asked people to walk through various
scenarios. 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 to
the 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 be
your community. They’re the “linkerati�, those folks who have blogs, own
companies, 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 to
focus on building a relationship with people. The content you create will be
what your community cares about and really wants to link to. That means you’re probably
going to have talk less about yourself.
One important piece in this is making sure you have someone
in 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 year
titled, Your
Best Link Building Tool in 2013: Community Manager. It’s so true! Get
someone to care about your SEO, Social, Community, and Content together (just one
person, or a team!), and you’re going to find that whole link building things
gets a bit easier.
Following are some tactics to build a relationship with your
community and get some great links from them at the same time:
Make it super easy to
share.
This sounds pretty straightforward right? I mean, you’d
never 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 occurs
when you have different people working on various aspects of a site. For
example, I’ve seen times when the Social person assumes the Developer obviously
knows to do this, and the SEO thinks the Social person will make sure it’s
done, 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 to
focus on sites that your community cares most about. I know I want a big easy
button to push, don’t make me think.
Focus your content on
what your community cares about.
It’s cool and all to put together an amazing piece of
content, but if *your*
community, the people who care about your brand, isn’t interested in it, then
you’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 care
about, and one of the easiest ways is to simply ask. Set up a quick and easy
form and ask people to tell you what they want to read about. We did this back
on the blog several years ago and it shaped the content we wrote for the next
year and a half (at least).
Feedback on the SEOmoz Blog: What Can We Do For You?
There are also quite a few great tools out there that help
you 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, or
something else they want.
Again, this is one of those that seems like simple common
sense. But we all seem to mess it up. Whether you’re a job board, a dating
site, 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 your
site and how they use it. This information is extremely interesting and can
make 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 easily
embeddable
Please, for the love of all things grumpy cat, make it easy
to re-use the amazing content you create. When your community loves something
that 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 essentially
made it so that their community is building links to them every day, over and
over. When you embed a Slideshare presentation, it adds a link and an easy way
to embed the presentation yourself. Brilliant!
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’re
sharing 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. Dana
Lookadoo wrote a great post that walks you through the importance
of 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:
Last year, AJ Kohn wrote a great post about how to implement Twitter cards. I definitely recommend checking out his post on how to set it all up on your site.
Make your community
do 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 are
you thinking about how they will become longtime community members and brand
advocates because of it? I want to walk you through a couple scenarios.
Let’s say that I was looking for more information about
young people who get cancer and how they are coping with it. I might do a
search something like this:
Which would lead me to a site called StupidCancer.org, which just happens to be a
community 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 of
people, I easily found their site.
Let’s try another scenario, where I would take my search
further than just getting to the site. In this scenario, I’m looking for
something to do with my daughter this weekend, so I start to do a search.
Obviously redtri.com is doing a great job ranking for the
terms I’m looking for, as they show up for both the #1 and #2 spots. Once I get
to the site, I realize that they have weekly calendars with really great stuff for
kids! From there I check out both their Twitter and Facebook pages and
determine that Facebook is the right one for me and I “like� them.
I start getting updates about new kids plays in town and fun
things 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 site
pretty much every week. I rely on them to tell me what’s going on in the city for
kids. And I recommend the site, over and over again.
These are only two scenarios of using SEO to build your
community, but there are tons more. I’d like to challenge you to work with your other team members, the
person who manages social, the dev who works on the blog, the SEO, etc. to see
how 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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