SEO & Forums

[noahl (Noah Lovell)]

We restructured our forum around the time of this topic - moving from 16 categories to 3 - shared more info about it here:

@noahl

A few extra insights into how we got to 3 categories (only 2 of which users can create topics in). I know cutting back on categories can be hard!

We had 16 categories when we first launched our forum—each based around a conversation style: “Ask a question”, “General”, “Feedback”, etc.

Not only was it frustrating to manage and make sure everything was organised correctly, but it was also frustrating for users. We saw a month-over-month decrease in engagement and activity—simply because topics were incorrectly categorized.

We moved from “conversation style” categories to “intent-based” categories and have seen significant increases in engagement and retention.

We asked ourselves why people came to our forum, and it all boiled down to asking questions and showing off projects. We then use tags to separate topics within categories (e.g., “code”, “design”, “cms”, etc.).

A little preview into our thought processes:

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We’ve spent a fair amount of time making sure topic titles are reflective of the topic, and that things are tagged correctly.

Each month, we also export the top results we ranked for in Google Search console and manually review the topics - checking that if they have a solution, they’re marked as solved, and if they don’t have a solution, providing one. The assumption is, that if those are ranking regularly, and we don’t have a solution, people are less likely to return as they didn’t find value.

Here’s a little preview of our Google search results before and after making adjustments While this did work for us, I’m no SEO expert, so can’t say if this will work for others