How Coinbase Uses Discourse to Educate Customers and Improve SEO
Coinbase, a company that aims to make bitcoin accessible to everyone, uses Discourse to power their community forum, community.coinbase.com. John Mardlin, who helps traders, devs, and humans use bitcoin at Coinbase, shares how they use Discourse to educate customers and improve SEO.
Before launching their Discourse community in January 2015, Coinbase’s support team created content to reduce the volume of support requests coming in through email. The community has helped with this goal and has also provided SEO benefits by allowing customers to ask questions and find answers using their own words.
John Mardlin customized the stock Discourse FAQ and replaced it with a thorough, customized FAQ that addresses common questions. He also shared how Coinbase links up their knowledge base and Discourse using “feedback” buttons on the bottom that link to hidden docs.
Other users, including bradydowling, found John’s SEO strategy and results helpful and plan to implement a similar approach. Codinghorror discussed the importance of warning users about external links, and cregox highlighted the often-overlooked feature of improving SEO through Discourse.
Overall, Coinbase’s use of Discourse has provided a valuable resource for educating customers and improving SEO, and their approach serves as a useful example for other organizations looking to achieve similar goals.
As part of our ongoing series of interviews with customers, our latest is with John Mardlin who helps traders, devs and humans use bitcoin at Coinbase — partly through their Discourse-powered community.coinbase.com. What is Coinbase? Coinbase’s mission is to make bitcoin accessible for normal people. Our core product is a wallet with +3MM users, which…
This topic is for comments on the original blog entry at: How Coinbase Uses Discourse to Educate Customers and Improve SEO
Thanks @erlend_sh it was fun to put thought into this. 
I was going to add that I’m still keeping my eye on the topic about warning on external links, e.g. bad guys posting phishing links like this:
[totally safe and normal link](http://evil-phishing-site.com/bad-link)
It might be best to warn (if enabled) on TL0 posted links, like so:
“Improving SEO” must be one of the best and often technically overlooked discourse features.
For one, www.discourse.org have no mention of “SEO”, “engine” or “google” (in this sense) after a quick CMD + F.
Very good word choices for the title! 
I suppose we should be opening new topics to discuss feature requests mentioned in the post?
Yep. “Reply as linked Topic” should do the trick nicely 
@john_mardlin incredibly helpful to read about your SEO strategy and results.
Also, I am intrigued by how you link up your knowledge base and Discourse as that’s a balance we’re trying to strike as well and we’ll probably just move forward, copying your approach with “feedback” buttons on the bottom that link to hidden docs.
@codinghorror I’d love to see more blog posts about how people use Discourse, this was really helpful.
Go nuts.
It was a lot of work at first, but we eventually found some tricks to simplifying the process. The key was instead of manually creating a new topic, we made use of the /newtopic URL feature, and built a spreadsheet of all our KB articles:
Hopefully that’s enough to help you reverse engineer the process. 
To @cregox, SEO was actually more of a pleasant side effect. I typically think of SEO as a marketing tactic, although for us it’s almost entirely SEO for people to help themselves. Though really the lines behind customers service and marketing are blurring, and both are good things to have. 
