Learn a powerful, low-risk strategy to boost your SEO by leveraging existing communities, saving you the immense effort of building one from scratch. Watch as Erin Simmons shares a practical framework for building brand authority, earning trust, and creating more relevant content that connects with your audience

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Hi, I'm Erin Simmons. I am a part of the Women in Tech SEO community, and I'm here today to talk to you about ways that community can help your SEO without actually having to build your own. 

So I've heard a lot of folks kind of starting down here and saying, "Community is really important. This is something we have to get off the ground for our business." And I'm not quite sure that's always, in some cases it is the right way to go, but always the right direction to go. 

I'd much rather start up here and invest a little bit of time, test to learn and understand is community and building your own actually the right way for you to go for your brand, your business' brand, whatever it is that you're trying to achieve. 

So getting started, you have to find a relevant community. I have a post on LinkedIn with a step-by-step process to do that, that we can link to in the notes. Become a member and engage and learn. So this is a super important part when you join a community. You are here to help. So do not sell. If that is one thing you take away from this, it is do not go into a community that is not yours with the intention of selling. 

I would actually even say if you build your own community, do not make it with the intention of selling. You are here to help. You are here to get things out of it, of course. But you are mostly here, especially in the beginning, to put things into it. So engage, learn, help, answer questions, provide resources, offer opportunities, amplify others. 

These are the things that you can do to be a helpful member of any community. 

So let's say you go through this process and you're like, "This is working. I'm getting what I need out of it." Then you can maybe decide you want to partner up with that community. You're going to have a little bit more of a time investment, and you're also going to have a monetary investment at that point. 

So as you go down this, increasing your level of effort, increasing your time, increasing your actual monetary investment, but you also should be increasing your impact on what this community can do for your brand. You're putting more in, so you should be getting more out. 

So let's say you do this. Make sure when you're partnering, you also maintain your membership. You're also continuing to be helpful. These all build on each other. 

And then you decide this is great, this is working, and you kind of have two paths. You can expand within the current community that you've chosen. You can expand into other communities. Or you can say, "I'm ready to build my own." 

There's a bunch of wonderful resources out there, including the founder's of Women in Tech SEO book that dropped a few months ago, "Community Building for Marketers" that can help you do that. 

So a couple of benefits that we have to community actually helping your SEO.

The first is you're going to get to build a stronger brand, whether it's your company brand or your personal brand. And we keep hearing a lot about, because we always have to bring AI into it somehow, but a lot about how to get into AIO, to get into ChatGPT, you really have to have a strong brand, a strong brand. 

But I don't hear a ton people yet talking about: How do you build that? How do you get that if you don't already have that? Community is one way to do that. 

So what is brand? Brand is really what people say about you when you're not in the room. So when you think about engaging in a community, what you're helping people understand is who you are and what your brand is. 

Is your brand helpful? Is your brand providing opportunities? Is your brand amplifying others and collaborating, not competing? 

If you are showing up in a community consistently and providing value to that community, that's going to influence what people are saying about you. When someone asks for a recommendation, maybe they're giving you. When someone needs a resource to write about, maybe they're linking back to you. 

You are having this now group of people become your advocate because you've been advocating for their success on an ongoing basis. You have really just earned their trust. And visibility, I believe, is a byproduct of trust.

So as you earn that trust, people are talking about you, you are building your brand, and that is going to help you show up in search results. It's going to help you show up in social. It's going to help you show up in conversations when people are asking for recommendations and opinions on what they should do next and who they should do that with.

So that is one of the community SEO edges that you can get by participating. 

The last bit is kind of the more standard SEO benefits.

You're going to be able to create better content. You're having conversations with actual people. You're getting real questions. You're getting their first-person experiences, and you're getting real-time conversations. 

So you have all of this beautiful verbiage that you can go back and do things like update your meta descriptions, update your titles, create net new content on topics that folks are really talking about and bringing up and that you are providing helpful answers on, so you already have a lot of that written. 

You also get this opportunity to create content with your customers, with your audience. So this collaboration of content and this idea that is crucial in communities of collaboration over competition will also help expand that visibility. So that is the second benefit I have for you on community being an SEO edge. 

So I hope that these tips helped you go back to something. If your boss is asking you for, "Hey, we need to build a community," go back with something on, "Yes, I hear you, and to get here, we have to start here." But also help you take advantage of how do I engage in a community and what benefits are going to be out there, and is it even worth the time investment to start on this. 

Hope you all have a good Friday. Thanks for listening.