How to Create and Use a Forum to Improve Your SEO

Although forums have usually been used and abused by spammers trying to receive back-links there’s still value in making your forum from a search engine optimization perspective.

As several followers might know, search engine optimization nerd and among the electronic marketing leads for an internet retailer called Mobility Scooters Direct.

We are one of the very best players in the powered-mobility space and most of our online revenue comes from traffic.

➦ Choosing A Platform (CMS) & Theme

Just like every website project, you are likely to have to start with the basics.

A domain, a host, a CMS (Content Management System), and of course a design for your forum is necessary.

Picking a domain and server is simple, and there are numerous great companies to work with but we’re not likely to pay for these steps in this report.

Install the forum into a sub-directory instead of using a separate domain name. This allowed us to construct the current domain’s content and SEO.

You can go on it in either manner, you can even utilize a sub-domain if you would like.

If you anticipate building a business that’s based on a forum solely, you may need a new domain. If you have a present business and site that has SEO worth, employing a sub-domain or sub-directory is probably a much better choice as you’ll be adding SEO worth to an existing website.

➦ Choosing A CMS & Theme That Works For You

There are lots of CMS’s you may opt to manage your Forum.

Additionally, when using WordPress you may choose from a wide variety of topics that enable you to save money and time when compared to creating a custom website from scratch.

WordPress also offers several amazing plug-ins that may be used to add features to your site on the front end or management side.

There are many other great CMS choices out there.

We chose to go with a WordPress theme known as “Help Guru” which is fairly robust and is quite low-priced. This theme has a lot of features that are helpful in regards to the administration of the discussion.

There are lots of WordPress themes that were designed particularly for forums.

➦ Organizing Your Forum

As soon as you have a theme and your design customized to your liking, you’ll need to maximize your forum for usability.

We advocate creating the main class forum and sub-category forum segments so that your customers can quickly find relevant forum sections they can engage with.

This is where you may add some search engine optimization tactics by using keyword-friendly URLs for your class structure and by incorporating part SEO-friendly descriptions or content marketing for eCommerce for any shopping site to each forum section.

➦ Funneling Your Forum Traffic To Your User Shopping Journey

As a digital marketer, it’s important to always think about the consumer’s shopping journey and how to get more qualified users to embark on that path.

They leverage email marketing, re-marketing (through the Google Ads & Facebook system ) to maintain engaging prospective clients after their first interaction together.

Reports indicate that on average, customers interact with various advertisements at least five times before purchasing on the website. This means that consumers return to a website or related social media pages 5 times before ultimately deciding to make a purchase.

This is exactly why we find it crucial that you create multiple touch points through the client’s shopping trip.

The forum is suddenly becoming a powerful source for prospective buyers to input into the consumer journey.

From that point, you can funnel those users into different advertising and marketing campaigns.

Once a user signs up for discussion, adhere to those users with re-targeting advertisements across the various networks in hopes that finally they wind up buying an item from a shop.

This kind of optimized shopping trip makes a snowball effect for conversions and sales as seen in Google Analytics reporting.

➦ Restricting Back Links From Users & Preventing Spam

Among the most frequent issues that you will face when managing a forum is fighting discussion spammers. Almost instantly, you will start to find fake accounts which use scripts to include topics or posts to your forum with backlinks.

• First, you’ll want to ensure that your forum has some type of anti-spam features like Google RECAPTCHA or some sort of plug-in that blocks spammers by creating fake accounts. RECAPTCHA by Google works the very best in my experience.
• Second, you are going to want to disable users from having the ability to add links to their posts or replies.

When those 2 things are done, you will likely mitigate a lot of your spam which makes it much easier to manage your forum.

➦ The Way Moderators & Admins Can Assist With SEO

Once your forum is up and running, you’ll need a team of people to handle it.

This can be carried out by modifying user access roles within WordPress or your CMS of choice usually.

Moderators and administrators may help with adding links that are internal links, external links, keyword-rich responses, and more.

To get the maximum from your blog, the individual handling the topic responses and moderation of topics must have an understanding of SEO.