We all know that with SEO, content is king. The fact is that if it’s not explicit on your site, you don’t have a chance to rank for it.  That being said, creating a mass amount of content that is both engaging and central to your product is often a difficult, time consuming and expensive task.  A common content creation recommendation is to add a blog to your site, but again, blogging requires an ongoing commitment and leaves the burden of topic creation to one person or a small group. A great way to let your target audience help relieve this burden is to open a public onsite forum.

What is a Forum?

A forum allows people to hold conversations in the form of posted messages. Unlike a blog, where the blogger broadcasts a message and waits for comments, a forum lets users create the initial topic or thread. Then, moderators and participants alike can address the topic with answers or suggestions of their own. Allowing your customers to initiate interaction on your site essentially shifts the responsibility of content creation away from you and onto your most interested consumers. They can ask questions, request advice, post interesting ways they have used your product and get answers or comments from the company and from their peers.

Why are Forums Good for Search?

In most forum applications, each new thread expands the site by a page and all subsequent responses are added as content to that page. This expands the size of the site and gives each new page the opportunity to contain keyword-rich content in your consumers’ voice. Search engines also give merit to pages that are updated frequently. Without a forum or blog, this becomes a very difficult task. Google even recently started to call out these dynamic pages with a ‘Blogs’ and a ‘Discussions’ logo in their left navigation and within their search results pages.