Essential Forum SEO Tips to Boost Your Online Community Visibility
It is common knowledge that webpage rank in the search engine result page (SERP) plays a pivotal role in business growth. This is no different for online community SEO (search engine optimization); a well-optimized online community that employs forum SEO tips can drive organic traffic, increase brand visibility and domain authority and help in new user acquisition.
Since web users are more inclined to click on organic results than paid advertisements, investing in SEO (and legal considerations) for your online communities and forums must be one of your top priorities as a community manager. If you think about it, many branding agencies nowadays offer SEO services and corporations worldwide have dedicated teams that work only on creating SEO strategies.
In general, SEO professionals understand the different CMS platforms such as WordPress and Ghost and hosted solutions like Webflow. This expertise in configuring the website technically (technical SEO) and the knowledge to ensure that the content is easily indexable by search engines constitutes on-site optimization (on-page SEO).
The other component of SEO is off-site optimization, which encompasses factors such as guest posting, media mentions, influencer outreach for building backlinks and other factors.
The same principles apply to discussion forums, where strategic SEO efforts can significantly impact visibility, engagement and growth. Forum SEO has unique considerations that are different from traditional website SEO due to online communities' dynamic, user-driven nature.
This article will guide you through essential forum SEO best practices to enhance your community’s online visibility and improve its chances of ranking higher on search engine rankings. Implementing these strategies will ensure that your community’s discussions, resources and user-generated content (UGC) become discoverable to new audiences.
These forum-specific SEO tips and SEO best practices will help you build a high-ranking community that attracts organic traffic and enhances brand authority.
What is forum search engine optimization?
Forum search engine optimization (SEO) is optimizing an online customer community or forum to improve its visibility and ranking in search engine results.
The goal is to make forum discussions, content and other resources more discoverable by search engines, which helps attract more traffic. This differs somewhat from standard site SEO practices because forums are ever changing, with content constantly generated by users instead of solely by the site admins.
Read more: Check out how to create an engaging forum with Bettermode.
Factors to consider for online community and forum SEO
Although most SEO professionals are focused on optimizing websites, the experience of working on online communities and forums (especially customer support forums) for SEO is comparatively less. This is incredibly challenging since the content is user-generated and community owners cannot change the content posted by the members. That said, there is enough scope for on-site optimization of a community portal and discussion forum (which you can embed).
At Bettermode, we have taken special care of the SEO aspect of online communities by providing you with numerous community templates and adhering to the best practices given by search engines. Many of our clients have noticed a surge in traffic via the community route and some of them even rank target keywords related to their competitors. In this article, we'll cover the common questions as well as the helpful practices to follow when performing SEO for online communities that also save time.
All the optimization aside, the best way to rank in search engines is to create high-quality content. When you don't have complete control over the content that users will post, your best course of action is to guide the discussion in a way that would prompt the members to post highly relevant content.
That all being said, here are the factors you need to take into account when performing forum SEO.
Subdomain or sub-folder for your community (Google Search Console)
The indexing of an online community by search engines doesn't get affected by the location of the community. The subfolder structure looks like the following: yoursite.com/community and the subdomain looks like community.yoursite.com.
This becomes a concern when SEO people start building links and they are interested in passing the link equity (link juice) to the main site. When a website is using a subdomain, search engines consider it as a different entity if there is no interlinking with the company site, which is why you need to use SEO tools like Google Search Console.
The easiest way to inform Google that the web properties are connected is to verify them in a Google Search Console account. You can signal their relationship by adding consistent links between them (internal linking)—like links in the navigation bar, footer and relevant internal links and pages. This approach supports their connection and helps maximize the SEO benefits.
Core Web Vitals
Google has specifically started laying emphasis on the user experience as a ranking signal. Core Web Vitals are factors that show you how your community's pages perform and are the key to measuring its user experience and discovering the scope for improvements.
The Core Web Vitals comprises of three core metrics:
- LCP. It measures loading performance by evaluating the time for the largest visible content element (like a large image) to load within the user’s viewport. A good LCP score is 2.5 seconds or less.
- CLS. It measures visual stability by looking at layout shifts while the page is loading. A good CLS score is less than 0.1.
- FID. It measures interactivity by tracking the time from when a user first interacts with a site to when the browser responds. A good FID score is less than 100 milliseconds.
You can access this report using different tools such as Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights. On Google PageSpeed Insights, always aim for a score of more than 90.
An XML sitemap for your online community
XML sitemaps are structured lists of all the pages that help search engine bots discover different pages created on websites. These maps also tell bots when the pages were last updated and the priority of each page.
Sitemaps aren’t strictly required but they’re beneficial for helping search engine bots discover and index site content efficiently. In Bettermode, the SEO Boost app automatically generates and updates the sitemap of your online community and its high quality content (and helpful content), keeping it current without any manual effort.
Modifying the URL slug
The best practice for SEO-friendly URLs that will help your community rank higher is to create URLs with relevant keywords. Simultaneously, be sure to avoid overstuffing links with keywords, as this can negatively impact search engine rankings.
Since members drive the community forums, it is practically impossible to edit all the URLs and make them SEO-friendly. However, particularly important threads can definitely receive "special treatment."
Creating mobile-friendly online communities
Google and other search engines consider a site's user experience on mobile devices to be a major factor for ranking in search results. Your community must be mobile-friendly and responsive.
If you choose to build a community with Bettermode (and templates like Saasplex and Edumark), you don't have to worry about this. All the communities built with Bettermode are fully responsive by default.
Bettermode can automatically recognize when a user accesses the community on mobile and loads the community pages to ensure faster rending and availability of complete functionality.
Ability to edit title and add metadata
A page's title tag tells a lot about the page's content to website visitors and search engine crawlers. A meta description doesn't really affect the SEO but provides additional context about the pages and improves the number of clicks from the search engine result page.
With Bettermode, our community engagement platform, you can edit the title, title tag, meta description, URL slug and Open Graph image to ensure that important content posted on your community is well-optimized.
Adding semantically-related terms
Many SEO professionals and website owners highlight LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords (and anchor text) as the terms related to the main topic of a web page and claim that LSI keywords boost the website page ranking. Unfortunately, LSI keywords don't exist!
There's no such thing as LSI keywords -- anyone who's telling you otherwise is mistaken, sorry.
That said, the semantically related terms do exist and they definitely contribute to ranking in search engines. Here's how Google search algorithms work:
Relevance signals help Search algorithms assess whether a webpage contains an answer to your search query, rather than just repeating the same question. Just think: when you search for “dogs”, you likely don't want a page with the word “dogs” on it hundreds of times. With that in mind, algorithms assess if a page contains other relevant content beyond the keyword “dogs” — such as pictures of dogs, videos, or even a list of breeds.
The presence of semantically related phrases and words signals that your web page is of higher quality in terms of topic coverage.
Now, how can you ensure that some of the important threads in your community that you believe should rank well contain the related keywords? The answer lies in content seeding and working with the internal team to use terms that are related to the topic of the discussion.
With Bettermode, you can create bot profiles and benefit from content seeding organically, including the strategic use of anchor text to link to relevant pages within the community.
Editing the robots.txt file
A robots.txt file directs the search engine bots on which pages or files can or can't be crawled on your site. The most important point to note is that the robots.txt file is not a foolproof method of keeping search engine bots from crawling particular pages.
The crawlers can still discover those pages from other links and index them. To keep a webpage out of Google's site, you could use noindex directives.
When would you want to stop Google from indexing your pages? Well, if you, as a community manager, would like to protect the user profiles from the search engine to ensure privacy concerns, that would be the time to do it. That's why Bettermode allows you to add noindex directives and fully edit the robots.txt file.
Redirection rules in search engines
Sometimes content created in a community becomes old and irrelevant, which mandates a new content thread with fresh and relevant information.
In such a case, if a search engine has indexed that old content and page, you should redirect that page to a new one.
When you permanently move a page to a new destination, you use 301 redirections to inform the search engine to transfer all the visibility of the old to the new page.
This step is also crucial if you migrate the community to an entirely new domain or subdomain. A 301 redirection allows you to transfer the link profile of the old domain so search engines don't start from scratch when they encounter the new domain or link.
Adding link attributes
When a link gets added to a web page search engine bots, as well as people browsing the web, can follow that link to discover new pages (follow links). Unless it has a specific link attribute, it is considered as a "follow" link and passes the link juice.
When you get such backlinks from high authority sites (high DA), it can improve your site's credibility and eventually the ranking itself.
A few years ago, Google used to have the nofollow attribute, however, since 2019 it has introduced two different types of attributes, UGC and sponsored, to help Google understand the link's origin and intent.
The UGC attribute stands for User-Generated Content. This means the links posted by the members of your community should have this tag. The sponsored tag is excellent when you want to offer advertising services to your community by linking to certain sites.
By properly using link attributes, you can control link spam and spam score and discourage people who solely want to post links to improve their link building activities. Links without a specific attribute are generally treated as "follow" links, passing link juice.
A good SEO practice is also to whitelist certain pages and domains so that they are considered a "follow" link.
Schema markup
Search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo have joined forces to ensure that the data generated on the web is structured and easy-to-consume for the bots.
That's the reason Schema.org has emerged so that webmasters can embed structured data into web pages. For example, your community page with questions and answers will have a different type of schema structure in comparison to a travel blog.
There are different ways to implement structured mark-up for a web page: JSON-LD and Microdata. JSON-LD is the preferred way and that's what Bettermode uses by default. So, a community page that contains Q&A would automatically have the markup specified by Schema.org. You can check how the schema looks by looking into the page source code.
Benefits of forum SEO for your community
Forum SEO and its techniques can boost your community's visibility, attract more organic traffic and increase community engagement in online discussions.
Here are some benefits of focusing on SEO for forums and online communities:
- Increased visibility and traffic. When discussions and threads are optimized with relevant keywords, they are more likely to appear on SERPs. This organic visibility leads to new visitors and newcomers who are actively seeking information, solutions, or discussions on topics covered in your forum. Optimized content can attract users over time, unlike content based on short-lived marketing campaigns.
- Build authority and trust. By optimizing your forum to provide accurate information, your community can become one of the authoritative sources in its field. Search engines prioritize websites that consistently provide value to users and informative discussions contribute to that value. An authoritative forum attracts users who prefer advice and user insights over blog posts or articles.
- User-Generated Content (UGC) and long-tail keywords. As mentioned before, forums are rich with user-generated content, which search engines find valuable. This content often includes long-tail keywords—specific terms that are actually user intents and more accurate than generic terms. By optimizing this content, your forum can capture queries that conventional websites or competitors might miss ensuring customer success.
- Increased engagement and user retention. SEO-friendly forums are easier to navigate and more likely to appear with relevant discussions, improving user experience. Users who find valuable information quickly are more likely to participate and engage with other content. So, ensure you create structured navigation, topic tagging and internal linking to improve user experience and help your community retain users. With the right marketing efforts (like a proper community engagement plan), you can even transform them into brand advocates.
- More monetization opportunities. As your forum traffic grows, so do monetization and marketing opportunities. With higher visibility and traffic, your forum can attract potential advertisers and sponsors interested in the forum's audience. Forums also frequently make deals with companies offering subscription models, affiliate marketing and partnerships.
Optimizing online communities through forum SEO can lead to organic growth, improved authority and increased user engagement.
Read more: Check out the best practices of building a thriving community portal.
Conclusion
Optimizing your forum using the mentioned SEO techniques can transform your online community into a high-ranking, high-engagement hub (like Bettermode hub) that attracts organic traffic and builds authority.
By implementing targeted SEO strategies, you can make your forum more visible to search engines, streamline the user experience and retain members who value informative discussions.
Ready to elevate your community’s visibility? Start with Bettermode.
Try Bettermode for free and start building an optimized, engaging online community today!
This article was originally published on July 27th, 2020, and was updated on November 4th, 2024.
FAQs
What is forum SEO?
Forum SEO is the practice of optimizing a forum's content and structure to improve its visibility in search engine results.
Is a forum good for SEO?
Yes, a forum can be a valuable asset for SEO, as it can generate high-quality and relevant content and backlinks.
What are the best practices for forum SEO?
Best practices for forum SEO include optimizing thread titles and post content with keywords, encouraging active member participation and building high-quality backlinks.
Are forum backlinks good?
Yes, forum backlinks can be beneficial for SEO, but only if they come from reputable sources and are relevant to your forum's content.
