Customer forum on an ecommerce site, good or bad idea?
-
Hi, We are an online furniture retailer in Ireland and have been going for about 4 years, there is about 1000 visitors onto the site everyday. We have been thinking of new ways to interact with the customer and build the sites online content and constantly working to improve rankings. Have been toying with the idea of a user/customer forum and was wondering what the general consensus was with that as an idea, I appreciate that there could be negative aspects for the brand and was wondering if anyone had experience of similar and how that was perceived by the user and in what way did people interact with the forum. I assume differently to how they would interact with an "independent" furniture forum. My hope would be that the forum would be used for discussing general home improvements, asking questions relating to the home for community feedback and assistance and other similar home related topics. All thoughts and feed back welcome. Cheers. Eunan.
-
Hi Eunan,
I have done this very thing in the past - creating a forum for the ecommerce site that I was working on. I actually put the forum on its own domain and found that it did help increase relevant traffic to my main website. However I found that customers were reluctant to post on this community in comparison with a well known independent forum in the same niche. The one thing I didn't do at the time and think that I should have done learning from experience is inviting customers and others with interests relating to my site to be moderators. By doing this I think that you would help increase some exposure through these sources and also give the forum more of a feel of independent discussion even though it is attached to your business.
One other thing I would say that I think you should consider is the fact that if your forum is on your main site and creates a sudden surge in traffic will your site be able to handle it without causing the whole site to slow down. As we all know there is nothing worse for user experience than a site that is slow and clunky. We also know that this also has an influence on rankings.
-
A forum isn't the best way to improve rankings and there are a number of issues to watch:
First, old content gets pushed to the bottom and there isn't a lot of interlinking that happens, so the older content would eventually lose some of its power. 1,000 hits a day isn't very high, so I wouldn't expect that the surge of new content would be enough to immediately make up for the PageRank depletion on the buried topics. Using a system that has interlinking, creating a dynamic sidebar that pulls random topics and displays them on the page, or creating a static list of highlighted topics might help.
Second, you run duplicate content risks. I've managed two forums in the past, and posters never use the search button. Instead, they'll just ask the same questions over and over again. Communities are tricky; moderating may upset people, so you'll want to be very up-front about your stance on not using the search function to see if a topic was previously raised and you may want to create a sticky topic of frequently asked questions that you update from time to time.
But all in all, a forum isn't a bad idea and would add some dynamics to your site that probably don't exist now. There are work-arounds for some of the ranking issues you might run into; just make sure to put user experience before any potential SERP lift.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Best Site Architecture tool for analysis my & competitors site?
Hello All, I am really confused with my current architecture for Ecommerce site, can you please suggest any tool or software where I can analysis mine and competitors site architecture ? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | pragnesh96390 -
Client Worried About SEO Decline After Site Redesign
Hi, We're in the process of redesigning www.directvillasflorida.com/ for a client. The client has recently expressed concern that their rankings may drop off after the change. Here are some facts about the site: As you can see, the current homepage is _very _keyword heavy. They have a DA of 26 and are ranking #1 for 'florida villas', higher than their more authoritative competitors. They are also ranking #1 in the mobile search results, despite not being mobile-friendly. Their link profile is pretty average and the anchor texts are pretty keyword-rich 'florida villas' appears 30 times with a 4.41% keyword density 'florida' appears 66 times with a 3.31% density The client has admitted keyword stuffing years ago and hasn't changed anything because it worked and still is working. In the site redesign, we've cut out a lot of the spammy, keyword-rich content and he's worried he'll suffer because of this. Any ideas what to do here? It seems clear that the site is breaching Google's guidelines, but, for whatever reason, isn't being picked up by Google. Cheers, Lewis N.B. The client is just paying us for a redesign, not SEO.
On-Page Optimization | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
Ranking a forum topic
We can rank a e-commerce product page,
On-Page Optimization | | kevinbp
http://moz.com/blog/building-deep-links-into-ecommerce-pages Q: But how do we rank a forum topic?
For example i want to rank this page, http://moz.com/community/q/does-a-link-in-facebook-count-as-a-backlinkHow do i go about doing it? Is it similar to ranking a website?1 -
Nice looking ecommerce menus with featured product categories - bad for SEO due to duplicate content?
My ecommerce website has menus which contain 'featured product sub-categories'. These are shown alongside the other product sub-category links. Each 'featured product category' includes a link, an image (with link) and some text. All menu content is visible to search engines. These menus look nice and probably encourage CTR (not tested!) but are they bad for SEO?
On-Page Optimization | | Coraltoes771 -
Keyword usage in eCommerce Sites - Danger of keyword stuffing?
Hi all, I'm having a little difficulty deciding the best approach for selecting my product titles as I've encountered a few issues. I understand how important it is to try and use the keyword in your product titles, but about the category page that lists all of these products? One of category pages, for example, has 16 products on it. Each has the product title followed by the keyword. I have also used the keyword in the category title, URL, breadcrumbs and two or 3 times (because it was natural) in a paragraph that describes the category etc. Due to the little amount of text on the page, and the sheer amount of times that the keyword is being used, it looks like I am keyword stuffing (By Moz On Page Report Card). I think it came to 23 uses of the same keyword altogether. This is the pretty much teh same throughout every category page on my site, and think I was penalised by Google for this reason. I'm a relatively new site and have done everything by the book as far as I know, so everything is pointing at this to be the cause of the drop/disappearance in ranking. How do I rectify this problem? It's important for the products to have the keyword in, right? As this is one of the SEO practices that is given more weight when considering rankings. I have thought a potential way around this, which is to split the keyword between an exact match, and a variant of the keyword in the titles - only very slightly though. So my product titles would look like 'Product A Exact Match Keyword', 'Product B Variant on Keyword' etc. Could this work? Can anybody advise on the best thing I could try? I have attached an image to give you an idea of the layout of my category pages - Apologies in advance about my embarrassingly rubbish photoshop skills! I wasn't able to upload directly, so I have attached a link. Thanks for reading, John 4iIkmSx
On-Page Optimization | | John_Francis0 -
Should I remove the Jetpack Plugin From A SIte
I dont know if anyone has any experience with the jetpack plugin, but personally I prefer yoast. My point is someones site I am looking at has both Yoast SEO plugin and also Jetpack for wordpress, should I just remove the jetpack as it seems to be a very heavy loading plugin.
On-Page Optimization | | propertyhunter0 -
Site structure question
I'm currently working on a very awkward custom-WP setup, in which I can't maintain the present drop-down navigation menu without having those pages under a parent or without completely recoding everything. I have two requirements, for SEO purposes I'm looking for the following structure for each targeted landing page: www.example.com/landing-page as opposed to www.example.com/sub/landing-page Of course, having my landing pages as a child, I get the latter of the two. For navigational purposes they need to fall under a specific category in a drop-down menu. With any other theme or setup this is an easy fix, but not here. What I have now is that the landing pages are currently placed under a parent category page. But, they have custom permalinks. The permalinks are setup as follows www.example.com/landing-page But, technically the exact structure is still www.example.com/sub/landing-page which then redirects to the custom permalink. So, my question is - in an attempt to get my most important landing pages close to the root for better PR and crawlability, do I still get the same benefit with my current setup? Is this structure I have, better, worse, or indifferent? Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | JayAdams320 -
Site-wide keyword density
A colleague of mine was saying that he has been able to get top ranking for a high traffic term by using variations of that head term on multiple pages that are associated with the main page. For example,he would optimize a landing page for the high traffic word "Construction." He would then build pages under this landing page that are optimized for variations of this word: "Construction facts," "Industrial Construction Companies," "Construction Resource Allocator" etc. His theory is that the subpages add credibility with spiders that the root page is the best for that root page. This doesn't seem like it would work, but I'm curious as to what other people think.
On-Page Optimization | | EricVallee340