Search Engine Optimization

For Online Communities

SEO or search engine optimization is the practice of optimizing content to be discovered through a search engine's organic search results. When someone visits Google and searches for a specific topic, the results displayed are those considered most relevant to the user. Sites with a high SEO ranking appear in the unpaid, primary search results.

Would you want your online community to appear in the search results?

Having an online community for your members not only increases productivity and trust in the association; there is an additional element that tends to be overlooked, how it can help your association boost SEO rankings.

A great example of building SEO with your community is exposing some of the community to the public as a way to encourage them to become members and take interest. You can have a specific group for this purpose or create a member’s only exclusive area but allow teasers for users not signed in. This also gives the opportunity of multitiered memberships, like student membership, executive, seniors, etc.

When posting online, the creator usually wants others to view their post. Your association can take advantage of SEO practices to get more quality traffic and spread the word about the benefits of membership. It’s true that quality matters more than quantity. There are a certain amount of people who are interested in what your organization has to offer, so follow some of these techniques to acquire ideal members!

First determine what your SEO goals are.

Increase brand recognition, drive traffic to your website, increase memberships, improve sales through exposure, return visitors, and monetize with ads.

The Right Content

Content is the information that lives on the web. SEO content is created to attract web search engine traffic. Throwing words together may get some clicks, but to get your content in front of the right people, your website needs to provide specialized content. The content must be organized so people and search engines can find it easily and understand it.

User generated content is good for SEO

The launch of a website, group or online community can have a slow start, but with time and the right content, your audience and engagement will gradually increase. At the beginning you will want to have a designated person to post on behalf of your organization. Ideally he/she can initiate discussions, post news and announcements, invite to events, write about the association, create and engage your members. You want them to lead the way but the intent is to have members creating their own content. These are some types of content:

• Blog Posts: flexible and engaging; one of the easier ways to create content.
• Articles: news, interviews, feature pieces.
• Lists:  more likely to get clicked because it is easy to scan through; ie. “10 Ways to be More Productive,” “101 Things I learned in Business School.”
• Product/Event Pages: great for ecommerce and increasing exposure for your offerings.
• Guides: can be used as a way to get leads; ie. use a summary to get attention but require registration or membership (free or paid) to view full guide.
• Videos: tutorials or process related to your field. Younger audience prefers videos over text. Consider a transcript to optimize search results.
• Infographic: images, graphs, charts. Not readable as text.  
• Slideshows: like infographics, images or slideshows; index your title, image file name, image description, captions, etc. for SEO purposes.
• Glossaries: people look up definitions online; if you work in a specialized industry it can be a good idea to keep a glossary of terms.
• Directory: categorize links, resources, professional services. 

Increased Traffic

Grow traffic with your online community.

Inbound Marketing expert, Tom Schwab, conducted a beta test on the online community site connected to an ecommerce site. He observed that over half of customers found a site’s ecommerce page through their online community. 

A great way to get the right kind of people, the ones that will buy or become members, is to create member personas. Documenting a fictional character whom you believe is right for your organization, can help you understand how to reach out to them. Define their roles and responsibilities, motivations and drivers, at what point they are in their careers, what are their goals. A great starting point to create your ideal member persona is your current records, membership applications, AMS, or asking your existing members.

Natural Links

Natural Links naturally happen when other webmasters, bloggers or website owners link to your content (blogs, images, products, videos etc) because they think it is useful for their readers and adds value to their websites or pages.

Natural Long-tailed keywords

Long tailed keywords are those small number of words that are very specific to what the overall content is about. Try to predict the intent of naturally spoken questions.

Use language that is common, easy to read. Do not overstuff keywords to try to sound smart.

This does not mean to avoid terms related to your field of expertise. Just get to the point in a way most people will understand. With user created content, keep it natural, don’t be quick to point out all the misspellings or bad grammar, usually the reader won’t mind. Search engines are indexing these words nonetheless. If one person spelled it that way, it is certain others will spell it the same.

Long Term Content Production

Creating content can be time consuming and also challenging to craft something valuable. It takes effort to get conversations started but good things don’t come overnight, but over time. An online community is a long term investment for your association, your members and your brand. Once members are active and engaged, you still need to oversee the community, but you want it to be essentially run by your members.

Your community comes with an open forum, where members can have an open exchange of ideas and information. The community is designed to get feedback from your members. Generally, the open forum is a privilege for members in good standing. Having this exclusive, members only area is a great way to entice prospective members, but allows your existing members to not worry about asking something that could be considered foolish and be exposed to the wrath of the internet police. Remind them that there are no dumb questions.

For instance, people discover your site using a search engine. They get what they are looking for. They want more but they can only get it if they become members. They find your site full of useful information so they return, see more of what you have to offer, subscribe, and ultimately become a paying member.

Your association may or may not have a marketing specialist or already have some strategy set up, but we must constantly analyse the data to know what is working and what areas need improvement. Sengii is your technology and strategy partner and we’re always innovating and adding new features to your Online Community.  Contact us at any time to find out more about how you can apply a successful SEO strategy to your community.