I thought I would make a quick post about the benefits of attaching a forum to your site. Now this most likely applies to large ecommerce sites however it is still worth noting as forums can prove to be very effective in search engine optimisation (SEO).

Have a think about a consumers or even your own search behaviour. Very seldom when we are after a certain product do we search for it in a search engine, go through to a site and then buy it (okay this sometimes does happen especially with sites like Amazon). What I tend to do is research into products I am after and more often than not this research takes me to communities within the World Wide Web. Now this is one half of why having a forum for your site is a good idea.

People have different search behaviours and this is what makes forums such a good idea. When buying technical products, like a laptop for example, people may need to do a little more digging in order to find the information they want. More specifically if someone is looking for a laptop for design purposes they may come across a Toshiba Satellite Pro L300-1FK laptop and like how it looks and think it offers the exact spec they need however they want to be sure. So they then do a little more research into how well it operates, if other people like the laptop, if it is in fact a good laptop for design purposes and so on. If your forum has built a community more than likely perhaps the products has been talked about and topics such as these have been covered and this can help your site receive traffic. On top of this people will be searching this in a more receptive part of the buying cycle and so if you site sells the product who knows they may click through to see what your site can offer.

Forums come into play even later on. A person has now bought the item but they may want to find out some post purchase information. So they may have decided to buy the laptop but have realised the power button is a bit temperamental so they may type in ‘Toshiba Satellite Pro L300-1FK problem with power button’ and are then are taken to a forum where people have exactly the same problem with talk of various solutions. Although this perhaps will not drive sales it will drive traffic to your site still and on top of this it extends your brand beyond the realms of simply selling items.

So we move onto SEO purposes. Forums are a fantastic way of getting good keyword rich content which your site otherwise may not get. For example your site may refer to the laptop in its entirety the ‘Toshiba Satellite Pro L300-1FK’ when customers may refer to it as the Toshi Sat Pro L300-1FK. Also people in forums use a lot of slang and industry specific jargon which is difficult to rank for on your actual site and so you can get ranked for these more niche keywords without having to very much work at all!

All in all I would say that including a forum on your site is definitely worth considering. A few tips if you do decide to set up a forum are to make sure you can moderate it on a regular basis. The amount of spam that people post on forums is almost ridiculous and can destroy forums credibility which defeats the purpose. A good way of combating this is to include a ‘report as spam’ button under each post. If you build a good enough community then the users of your forum can almost moderate your forum for you. Lastly on occasions get involved and offer you opinion to people. It gives your site more credibility and gives your company a bit more of a face which can differentiate your company from others.

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Search Engine Optimisation, Social Media Marketing