Question

Topic: SEO/SEM

Blog Or Forum?

Posted by markp on 8/3/2010 at 4:30 PM ET 500 Points
I regularly see amazingly perceptive and insightful answers come from this forum and have enjoyed learning and standing in humble astonishment at the clarity and capability evident in many of the answers posted here. Truly great minds at work.

But this question is a little different than many in that it is an either/or question vs typical open-ended opportunities to be creative...I guess the real value will come from the brilliant "reason-why" that follows the recommended path... =;-)

For a small company with very limited internal resources, which tool would be more effective and productive if that was defined as (a) providing Customers with valuable product-use information they can use, and (b) providing Company with enhanced SEO strength?

1) A Tech-Support/Customer Problem Resolution-oriented blog (repurposing actual call-in and chat questions from customers);

or

2) A User Forum with typically defined topic areas and a moderator (likely this same person doing the tech support function above).

Which would we expect to require the greatest investment of time, and which provides the greatest return (customer value and seo/community value) on that time?

The market is typically 25-55 year-old men in construction and industrial market segments using electronic/digital tools that, while intuitive, have some element of "use it or lose it" entailed (and in this economy, fewer have opportunity to use them!).

Extra value given to answers based on actual experience or knowledge of this construction/industrial space and/or experience with both blogs AND user forums.

The fact that MarketingProfs offers both a blog and this user forum has been noted with a smile (and I do have my favorite part!) but for this exercise we think we can only do one, or the other, at least at first.

So there it is, if I can provide any more helpful detail, just ask!

Thanks to all for your insights!
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RESPONSES

  • Posted on 8/3/2010 at 4:45 PM Moderator
    I don't think there's a clear advantage for one over the other when it comes to SEO.

    The advantage of a forum, in my view, is that your target audience will consider it "theirs," and perhaps become engaged in an ongoing conversation. A blog, while it might invite comments, is mainly a soap-box for the owner to spout his/her wisdom.

    In either case the really critical success factor is going to be creating the community environment, so people (a) know it's there, and (b) want to come back and contribute/read often. That's probably more difficult than you'd think ... but may be worth the countless hours (and some budget allocation) that will be required to get there.
  • Posted by excellira on 8/3/2010 at 4:51 PM Member
    One of the issues with a forum is your traffic/interest level. If you have a sleepy forum with few visitors and questions, then the forum could actually turn your audience away. If you have substantial traffic and need a customer service device then it might be a great tool. I personally prefer to see open forums on commercial services because I get get a comfort level on how well the product/service is supported.

    If the traffic and postings would be thin, I'd prefer a blog because you have more control over the frequency of publishing.

    Furthermore, a blog has greater potential reach as it can connect with third-party sites and provoke external discussion/debate.

    Clearly the blogosphere has prevailed over forums but they both have their purposes.

    Can you provide more info on objectives and the size of your potential audience?

  • Posted by markp on 8/3/2010 at 5:13 PM Author
    Understood and agree on dead forums being a negative; and have seen some where despite valiant interest-generating and cheerleading efforts by moderator, the forum still fails to generate enough interest and interaction to sustain a viable community.

    These are users of niche products that are but one of many tools of their trades. Not the centers of their universe though, unfortunately. There are power expert users (and educators/trainers that utilize them in classes), but they are a small group and we don't know if their passion for the product runs deep enough to be the active core seemingly needed to keep forums alive and interesting...

    Size? High hundreds of thousands up to maybe a million customers have been sold over the years, but maybe a quarter are still active, esp in this economy. Monthly web traffic is around 10k uniques.

    Objective is to make this information available to those users who search for it, to build site traffic, and if increased engagement and interaction with customers also results we won't be displeased!

    Thanks for asking!
  • Posted by excellira on 8/3/2010 at 5:48 PM Member
    Hmmm. Tough one. 10k/mo might be enough traffic. The question is how many will use it. This is a tough call. Perhaps a survey?

    Another option is the blog plus FAQs or Knowledgebase.

  • Posted by Gary Bloomer on 8/3/2010 at 6:50 PM Accepted
    Dear MarkP,

    Blog? Forum? Semantics? Possibly. In reality, the column you're reading now is actually a hybrid: it's part blog, part forum, part knowledge-base, and part showcase.

    But content is content. And although content is king, CONTEXT is the true royalty. Type Phil Grisolia's name into Google and his name comes up with a link to this part of M.Profs. Likewise Randall Montalbano's name and the names of numerous other contributors to the threads here on the KHE.

    But the point is this: search engines may not care about the
    format the information is in, but when it comes to filtering and apportioning relevant results, what they DO care about is context and entry relevance weighed against search term significance. That's one of the key to effective ROI. One of the other keys is that search engines don't rank Web SITES, they rank Web PAGES.

    For your purposes (in in terms of investment of your time and ROI on the same) a Wordpress-based blog—with comments enabled—may be your best bet. Easy to set up and maintain, search engine friendly, and user friendly too.

    Link it to other, related blogs and sites within your niche, link it to authority based article sites, and include self generated content as videos, audio, articles and white papers (or link to the same on other sites), encourage people to subscribe, and throw in name and e-mail address capture in exchange for some kind of ethical bribe and you build your list too.

    I hope this helps.

    Gary Bloomer
    The Direct Response Marketing Guy™
    Wilmington, DE, USA



  • Posted by markp on 8/3/2010 at 9:47 PM Author
    Good idea on the survey excelleria, we have regular eNewsletter that we could post that out to. As to FAQs and Knowledgebases, we have both in place today which are indexed for SEO but they are pretty static and maybe not so much on the interactivity / engagement scale as a blog (esp with comments enabled) as Gary Bloomer mentions, or an active forum.

    Gary, any thoughts on comparable workload levels (remember this is an existing employee now doing some tech support chats, calls, emails and other customer care tasks that have her at about 75% capacity) i.e., between moderating/cheerleading a forum vs writing a 1-2x per week blog post and then responding to the resulting comments (assuming enabled)?

    Thanks to both for thoughtful inputs!

    Anyone with any specific insights into the forums/blogs participation quotient of the blue-collar 30-50 yr old male tradesmen, as a group? I recall once seeing a continuum by Forrester or someone on the social media participation characteristics of various demographics -- from "observers to creators of content" kind of scale...

    Any industrial marketers out there who have blazed this trail before?




  • Posted by excellira on 8/3/2010 at 9:52 PM Member
    One advantage to a forum is that while your support person is busy, the answers could be going into the forum and can be referenced later, possibly reducing their load later.
  • Posted by markp on 8/3/2010 at 10:13 PM Author
    "One advantage to a forum is that while your support person is busy, the answers could be going into the forum and can be referenced later, possibly reducing their load later."

    excellira -- do you mean forum participants (vs our support person) providing answers to other participants?
    Perpetual motion! =;-) The dream of every forum moderator! I hope for this, is that what you mean? Thanks!
  • Posted by excellira on 8/3/2010 at 10:24 PM Member
    Yes, to some extent, but more-so, your support person will be able to reference existing forum posts and your users can search to find their solutions, potentially eliminating a call. You're organically creating a reference tool.
  • Posted by excellira on 8/3/2010 at 10:26 PM Accepted
    When I say "reference" I mean that the support people can point users to forum threads.
  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 8/3/2010 at 11:01 PM Accepted
    So long as you have solid search functionality (by keyword, topic, product line, etc.) then forum/blog format is more semantics than anything else. People won't be interacting with the forum/blog so much as using it as a library.

    To make the workload easiest - why not take the recorded interactions, send them to a transcription service, and then copy/paste the transcribed content into the site? That'll save your internal resources.
  • Posted on 8/4/2010 at 4:52 AM Accepted
    Forum every time, primarily for the aesthetic layout and logical navigation (tree) than endlessly scrolling and unsearchable blog.
  • Posted by markp on 8/5/2010 at 8:12 PM Author
    Thanks all for the insightful input and discussions, I've got a better framework of understanding now to help make this decision.
  • Posted on 8/29/2010 at 6:38 PM Member
    Is it at all possible to incorporate both? Either a blog or a forum would reinforce each other . I understand the value of focusing resources due to the limited nature but if I was to choose one from the other I would likely choose a blog as it would require less resources to upkeep than a full fledged forum. I would like to share an interesting tidbit though for the community .... A respected SEO expert wanted to test the effectiveness of natural linking to quality content on blogs so he cleared his articles on his blog page and wrote 30 well written quality content rich articles and after a couple of months checked to find that only a few backlinks were created much to his disappointment . The point is when you do choose to go with the blog even with quality content you should not stop there and hope natural organic links will come. I wish you well and hope you have grown to love this community as I have.
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