Essential guide to building a community for SEO and branding

Believe it or not, communities can be found in the marketing industry. That means that there are many communities that are all about improving search engine optimization (SEO) and branding.

seo branding content community

When it comes to running an online business, web page rankings in the search engine result page (SERP) are important for business growth. But with an online community at your side, your SEO will skyrocket, resulting in the following:

Drive more traffic to your site
Increase brand awareness
Help you in new client acquisition

The ultimate goal of SEO for your business is to help build a community (or fanbase) for your business. With that said, this article will explore the following in building a community for SEO and branding:

The factors behind it
The benefits that you’ll get from it
How to build a community that’s SEO-rich

By the end of this article, you’ll know how important community is to your business, and how you can create one that will generate great SEO and branding. So, let’s jump right in!

Shortcuts:

What Do These Communities Look Like?
Consider The Factors of building a community for SEO
Benefits of online communities for brands
How To Build SEO-Based Communities

What Do These Communities Look Like?

First and foremost, communities in SEO and branding can take on many forms, including:

Online forums (i.e., Reddit)
Blog post comments sections
Social media, etc.

As people on these forums and sites talk about SEO and branding, it creates a network of many communities, if not an entire community.

Consider The Factors of building a community for SEO

Many SEO professionals want to optimize their websites since that’s their ticket to ranking high in the search results and reaching their customer base. So, when doing so, there has to be community involved. But how is that?

With that said, consider the following factors:

Online communities and forums affect SEO, since the content is usually user-generated, and community owners can’t change content posted by members. This provides plenty of scope for the onsite optimization of communities and forums.
In the community route online, SEO marketers see plenty of traffic when they use rank keywords (even those from competitors).
Highly-relevant content can also be posted on online communities and forums.
On-page and off-page content are linked to online communities and forums.
- On-page SEO is when you optimize both the web page content and the HTML code behind it.
- Off-page SEO is when you optimize activities that are a part of advertising a web page or site and generating more traffic via social media and link building.

As you can see, there are many factors involving SEO.

Benefits of online communities for brands

Now, you’ll be glad to know that building a community to increase SEO and branding for your business comes with plenty of benefits.

Here are the top 5 benefits of using online communities for SEO and branding:

It Helps You Adapt To Google’s Algorithms

Google’s algorithm is always changing. Instead of chasing the search engine’s ever-changing algorithm, why not focus on building a community around your brand? “Doing so will help your company be strong enough to weather the algorithms. Building an online community is one of the best ways to weather Google’s algorithms,” says Timothy Richmond, a writer at Ukservicesreviews and Studydemic.

It Adds Equity And Value

Building an online community has you do the following:

Create better-quality content
Enhance your product or services, AND
Improve your systems and processes.

Doing these things can help you attract the right customers to your community, thus bringing equity and value to your company.

It Gives Your Business Purpose

All businesses have their reasons for existing. The reason for your business depends on the niche, the products (or services), and the audience you want to target. Building a community allows you to see a purpose in your business. In other words, you’ll see your company goals more clearly. By seeing a purpose, you’ll be able to explain your business to other people.

It Makes You Stand Out

Want to stand above your competitors? No problem! Just build your community, and you’ll be talked about, shared, and recommended. Once you’re shared throughout the community, your SEO benchmarks will go up, and people will recognize your brand more.

It Helps You Focus On Goals, Not Tools

So, now that you know what your goals are, thanks to the community that you’ve created, you can now focus on said goals more. Don’t just think about your SEO and marketing tools; think about the goals that can drive SEO strategy.

How To Build SEO-Based Communities

So, now that we’ve learned about the factors and benefits of building a community, it’s time to learn how to use SEO to build company brand awareness to further said community:

Build Links

Link building has been around for a good while. However, as many SEO marketers have seen, link building can be tedious. However, creating referring domains that link to a page can lead to higher SERP more than any other factor implemented.

And it can lead to more brand awareness when your strategy helps you rank higher in the search results. Such links and domains work for this cause:

Email outreach
Guest posting, AND
Natural, unsolicited links

These forms of links and domains will help you not only improve search performance but also help you “link together” similar parties to create an online community for said links and domains.

Optimize Keywords And Phrases

When you search for something online – say, “shoes” – you’ll notice that when you type it into the search engine, there are many brands, individuals, and other entities talking about shoes – whether it’s selling, endorsing, reviewing, etc. That’s a community!

Therefore, organic visibility on Google is important, if you want to grow brand awareness. If you’re not looking into organic visibility, the competition will get to your target audience before you do.

“Keep in mind: This strategy isn’t just about optimizing your content with keywords; it’s also about generating brand awareness with your keywords. In other words, ranking high in the search engine results doesn’t just draw potential customers to you; your social proof draws them to you as well,” explains Kathy Paul, a branding blogger at Best Essay Writing Service and Viawriting.

With more and more users adapting to voice search and using smart devices, it’s now more important than ever to keep tabs on long-tail keywords, instead of relying heavily on generic searches. In other words, focus on optimizing keywords and phrases by doing the following:

Evaluating and optimizing for search intent
Leveraging structured data, AND
Make sure that your company is adaptable to voice search

In addition, you’ll need to look at structured data, which is often underestimated by SEO marketers. Why structured data?

Well, this form of data is vital to your keyword and phrase optimizations, because it gives you snippets that contain SEO-rich product images, reviews, and other details that make you stand out in search results.

And the best part? A lot of these snippets can be accessed with zero dollars put towards ad spending.

Ultimately, targeting non-commercial keywords with SEO is a great way to get in front of potential customers.

Integrate With Other SEO-based Channels

Let’s face it: Organic traffic is not as easy to gain in today’s online marketing world as it has before. Not only do the changing algorithms make it hard to gain organic traffic, but so does trying to integrate another marketing channel.

If you go the route of integrating another marketing channel, you’ll find yourself spending a lot of money on paid campaigns to make your content more visible online.

But what about social media – the mainstream way to build a community?

Believe it or not, social media and SEO go well together. Why? Because many people are on social media nowadays.

As such, many companies have learned to adapt to this revolutionary marketing tactic to increase brand awareness and connect with their customers.

As a result, social media content gets indexed, meaning that search engine crawlers will crawl and recognize social media posts as viable for search results.

So, why not get your brand out there with social media? If your company already has a social media account, then you must stay active on it, so that customers can continue to see you as relevant.

Remember: While publishing great content is one thing, promoting your content through your social media channels is just as important – in fact, even more important.

By maintaining an active social media presence, you’re presenting your company as an authority on social media, thus helping you reach a wider audience.

As a result, your social media presence will encourage other websites (and even individual social media accounts and influencers) to link back to your articles, thus giving you backlinks acquisition.

This, ultimately, boosts your SEO performance and increases brand awareness throughout all of your channels.

Plus, you don’t have to leave your content to chance, when user views and visits begin to dwindle. Here, you can utilize target keywords and audiences to run appropriate campaign content. By doing so, you’re not forgetting about your customer base. Instead, you’re being there for your customers.

As a result, your posts will do the following:

Reach more people
Increase brand awareness, AND
Send people directly to your site

Think: Top-Of-The-Funnel content

As you can tell by now, optimized content can give you more data and leads. Not only will the right keywords work (especially long-tail keywords), but also fresh and high-quality content. Plus, that content must fit your target audience.

How can you do this? By creating top-of-the-funnel content. “Top of the funnel” refers to the early stages of a customer’s journey. So, when creating content, create for people who are at the early stages of their customer journey.

Let’s take a look at an example of top-of-the-funnel content at work:

Suppose you’re a college student in need of a new laptop computer. At first, you’ll search by typing in queries like “laptops for college” or “college laptops.”

Now, picture the other side of the scenario: a laptop brand. You see that there’s a need for laptops for college. So, what would you do? Create top-of-the-funnel content to the shopper in need of a laptop.

One of the best top-of-the-funnel posts to produce, in this case, is to create a comparison page, which describes the pros and cons of various laptops. This strategy helps you gain value by building trust and credibility for your brand.

So, going back to being the customer, when you see a brand create a comparison post that shows their products and that of the competition, you’ll be able to make a decision on which laptop to buy.

Now, in regards to the content itself, you’ll need to update it every so often (preferably every 6 to 12 months after you post something). If something needs to be updated, go for it. If something needs to be removed from your site entirely, then scrap it right away. That means fixing the following:

Outdated links
Outdated statistics
Really old images and other visuals
Typos and grammar issues, etc.

In turn, you can update the content by doing the following:

Update posts that are below the SERP’s top three.
Make your posts longer.
Give post titles a makeover.
Add a table of contents in each post. AND,
Update the publishing date.

By taking care of outdated content, you’re showing people that you offer fresh content. And, as you can see, the ultimate goal for top-of-the-funnel content is to move people further down the funnel, so that they can turn into leads and, eventually, customers.

Create Appropriate Content

Finally, your top-of-the-funnel content must fit your brand and your customer base. Since you’re working with the community of your niche, you’ll need to serve them that niche.

Don’t just focus on using the best ranking keywords in your text; you should also make sure that those ranking keywords are relevant to your brand, or the subject of your brand.

Nowadays, good SEO is based on search intent, meaning that people want “specific” results when they look for something online. With that said, not only do people want actionable content, but they also want a satisfying experience when they find what they need.

That’s where search intent classification comes in. Search intent classification is when you take the time to add value to your visitors’ lives.

When you do that, you’re raising awareness for your brand. While there’s a technical side of search intent classification, it’s not as technical as one might think.

In fact, it’s all about spreading the word about what your brand is, and how your products and or services can help people overcome any problems that they might be facing. By speaking to their pain points, those people will come to you.

Conclusion

As you can see, a community plays a monumental role in generating SEO and gaining more brand awareness. In review, building a community for SEO and branding:

Is based on many factors
Holds plenty of benefits, AND
Can be easily implemented in a handful of ways

Just keep in mind: your community strategies can change over time, just like everything else does in a business. That’s why it’s important to stay up-to-date on your community – or fanbase if that’s a better name for it – and give your target audience what they want. Adjust your strategy every so often, it won’t grow stale to even your most loyal customers.

By following this essential guide, you can tailor your SEO strategy to reach out to your community, and serve them for many years to come. Good luck on your business endeavors!

About the author

Madeline Miller is a writer and editor at Assignment Writing Services and Big Assignments Reviews. As a content marketer, she helps companies improve their marketing strategies and concepts. Also, she is a blogger at Top Essay Writing Services.