In the online business world, the biggest goal is to rank highly on the search engines via SEO. You’ve got your link building campaign set up, your online ads area a go, great content has been written, you’ve done your keyword research, and everything that you can think of in SEO. But there’s more. You can use your online community in your SEO endeavors. You can actually use both to increase your brand even farther than if you utilized just one or the other.
What makes a community and SEO so great together is that they will inherently affect each other in positive ways. Not only are you building relationships with your customers, but you’ll be ranking higher as well. What is the best way to promote your name? People.
By building your brand up with the help of people via social media channels like Facebook and Twitter, the result is invaluable. They will be the ones who will get the word out to their friends and family about what product or service you are offering, and they will be able to positively vouch for your brand in a way all the money in the world couldn’t buy. It all has to do with trust.
The community can help you in your SEO, but it’s true that the opposite will work just as well. There have been case studies that show how people, when asked to go to a particular product or service website, instead of typing in the actual URL in the Address bar, they would end up going to Google and putting in the brand name in the search bar to get back to the home page.
By doing SEO, you’ll be able to attract people who will fit naturally into your community.
Using the Community Can Improve Your SEO
Link building can be great to do, but the best way to do link building is by developing a relationship with people. If you create content that people cares about, they will link to it. In the end, you will have to talk less about yourself, since the people in your community will doing that for you.
Make sure that when you are building your community, put somebody in charge of it. You’ve got somebody in charge of your SEO, why not do the same for your community? By putting somebody on your community to head it up, it will make everything work better when you are trying to focus on the SEO aspect of your brand.
Sharing is a key factor in your community. The last thing you want to do is to post something that everyone wants to check out and read, but not have any way for them to share it. As I said in an earlier blog, you want to write for the people, not you. If don’t care about what you’ve written, nobody will talk about it. They won’t share it. You won’t get any links from it.
But how do you go about writing what others want to read about? An easy way would be to ask. Utilize the very community you’ve been busy building. Go on Facebook and Twitter and ask away. With a strong enough community, you will get the feedback you need in order to write what the community needs.
Using Embed Codes
Similar to sharing, make sure your content is easily embeddable. If your community loves it, they will re-use it. Make sure your content not only has a link, but an embed code. This is one of the great things about Youtube. As an example, if your company is big into making videos, make sure they are up on Youtube. The video site will automatically have embed codes in every video posted. This can make for easy access to placing the videos on other websites. There are many other services that utilize embed code tech, and look how easy it is to share the content from those sites.
Sharing The Way You Want Them To
Another part of sharing that you want to think about. As an example, let’s look at how one would share something on Facebook. Make sure you have a meta description. Having a CSS background image is good too.
Without these things, you could go from this page:
To this on Facebook:
Not very nice looking anymore is it? It’s boring and very drab.
Community Work For The Win!
It sounds a little backwards, but it’s good to let the community do some of the work for you. What do I mean? Well, if your community enjoys the products or service that you provide, they will write reviews, blog posts, and opinions about your brand. And there’s a chance that they will place a link on their page that will direct readers to your site or product page. Talk about community sharing and link building!
Using SEO To Build Your Community
Just as building a community can help build up your SEO, you can use SEO to build your community. What better way to increase awareness of a community than to get your brand name high on the Google search results.
If you have a community that you are trying to build up members for, use your SEO tactics to get the community to rank higher. Make sure you target your community site to the correct group. If you can do all the right things on the SEO side of the equation, that is, target the audience that you are dreaming of, you will find that your community will grow by leaps and bounds when people can easily find it.