Erin says: “In 2025, I think your best SEO edge is joining communities.

They give you real language, and they give you real-time insights to help with your content – and the trust that you build in community, that will fuel your brand visibility.

One of the things we keep hearing about getting into AI search is growing your brand. It's a great tool for not just traditional search, but also for AI search, and just growing your network and helping your customers one-to-one.”

Okay, so you're selling it very effectively there.

Should any brand be interacting in communities? I guess I should ask the question, should it be an individual rather than the brand interacting on communities as well?

“Great question. I think with communities, of course, it depends on: Are you a freelancer or are you a brand, right?

For freelancers, it is a lot easier answer. It makes sense to go in there. Your personal brand is your brand. But just like we have thought leaders that are writing content, running webinars, and speaking on stage, those thought leaders should be in community and building (like they are in those other activities) their personal brand alongside the brand that they're representing.

I do think that it can be for any brand, it's just a matter of finding an active community that has your audience in it.”

Should a business brand be encouraging its thought leaders to interact in communities during work time?

The way that you're selling it made it sound as if you're building up the individual authority of different people within the organisation, and they can take that authority away and use it for other organisations in the future.

Is it actually worthwhile for a business to be investing in, or should this be individuals within an organisation investing in it themselves?

“I think it can be either, but I think the question is (not to answer a question with a question), should speakers be going on stage, speaking, and sharing their knowledge with their brands underneath, and their title underneath, on company time? Should your content writers be creating content and answering customer questions on company time?

I think it depends on what your business values. So, yes, I absolutely think, if you want to use brand ambassadors in your company to help uplift your brand, then that should be done on company time.”

I remember the days of lots of different forums online and actually getting SEO value from signatures within posts. Then, if you were interacting on forums like that, you were probably best to interact on as many different forums as possible in order to get links from different domain names.

Nowadays (obviously you mentioned brand), is brand more important? If so, are you better off just focusing on a single community and, if so, how do you actually select that single community?

“Yeah, that's a great question. My thoughts are focusing on a single strong community.

I do have a post on LinkedIn on how to start to think about selecting a community, because it above all has to have your audience in it but that's not the only qualifier. It has to be engaged. It has to be active. People have to be asking and answering questions.

It also has to represent your values and your brand values. You don't want to go in somewhere where people are being unkind to each other or people are asking questions and the answers are, ‘Well, why don't you just go Google that?’

You want to be in a place that aligns with your audience, aligns with your brand values, and is active enough that you can make an impact.”

In general, I guess you're looking at the community and seeing how much of your audience is likely to be there and how much engagement that community gets as opposed to using any external metrics to measure any SEO value directly from a domain name.

“Yeah, I think that that's a great point: This is not going to show up in your Google Analytics overnight. It's brand building, for a lot of purposes. But also, there are opportunities to have more direct metric impact, if that's what you need.

If you're going into a place where your audience is speaking, and you're getting that language, and maybe you're updating your meta descriptions to better reflect that – because when someone's sharing in a community and asking questions, you're getting that raw emotion. You're getting exactly how they're feeling.

You can use that to go and enhance your current content and create new content. You can have pieces that help with your SEO strategy that can show up in your metrics, but I think the actual investment where you're going to see the most return is just getting in there, answering questions, offering help, and offering opportunities.

That's absolutely not going to show up in your Google Analytics or in your Search Console overnight.”

Are there any tools, like maybe SparkToro, that you can use to identify whether or not that community is likely to be as relevant as possible for your business?

Or is it a case of just going in there and actually seeing what people are saying, and then making a decision based upon the conversations in there as to whether or not you should be there?

“Absolutely, I think SparkToro is one of the tools that I reference in the steps I have on trying to find communities that are the right fit for you (I can send you a link to that post), and I think it is doing that research, using audience tools like SparkToro, and then getting in there.

Is it active? Are people asking questions that are relevant to my knowledge, what I can answer, and what I can help with?”

I imagine that you wouldn't advocate selling what you do directly within the community?

“If there is one thing you take away from this, it is: Do not go into a community to sell. Go into a community to help; go into a community to build relationships and build trust.

I think of earning trust and visibility. Visibility is a byproduct of trust. If you're helping people, they're going to recommend you when something comes up that's relevant, like a question from a colleague. Maybe they're writing a piece of content and they think, ‘I need someone to collaborate on this with.’, so they reach out to you because they know that your field of knowledge is specific in there.

I think it is it's very, very, very important to go into communities to help, not to sell.”

‘Visibility is a byproduct of trust.’ Love it.

“That statement has stuck with me. I landed on it a couple of months ago.

I really believe that visibility is a byproduct of trust, and one of the places where you can earn real genuine trust is in community.”

So, you don't want to be selling directly. Is there a place for a signature? Is there generally a profile of what you do within that community so people can find out more about your business from there?

Or are you just wanting to interact on the basis of people finding out about your brand within that community itself?

“If your brand is relevant to answering a question, then by all means, share your brand.

I think of it as very typical content strategy, right? Where, if you're answering these higher funnel questions, you're not necessarily going to drive that directly back to your brand. But if you're answering some sort of consideration question, yeah, you can throw your brand in there as, ‘Hey, maybe my SEO tool could help you with this. I can give you a free trial if you want, but here's another option too.’

It's not that you can't mention your brand at all, but I think the most important thing is to answer the question with as much value as you can, and that's going to be what differentiates you and what starts to earn you that trust.

The path in community is also: You join as a member and you engage. Let's say that goes well. You're like, ‘My people are here. This is great, but I need to start selling to them.’ Lots of communities have partnerships, so then you move to the next phase and maybe you're like, ‘I'm actually going to invest some dollars in here and I'm going to become a partner, and that's going to allow me to share my brand more directly.’

Let's say you do that for a while and there's a lot of value. Then you have a decision to make. I hear a lot of folks coming in and saying, ‘Oh, our brand needs to start a community.’ My advice would be, don't. Don't start there. Become a member, partner with a brand, and then make a decision.

Maybe then you want to start your community. The brilliant thing then is, you've already created connections with people who enjoy community, so you have a little bit of a built-in audience already to help start that.

Or maybe you decide, ‘I don't want to build my own, but I want to find more to expand into.’ I think, when it comes to partnering with communities and actually wanting to sell your brand more, there are a lot of opportunities to do that. But let's test, let's start small, let's become an engaged member, and then build these things.

Whereas going out and saying, ‘I'm going to build my own community’, that's starting, to me, at the wrong end. That's very hard to test. That's a whole thing you have to set up. It's a lot of time, it's a lot of money, and it's a long-term investment that isn't going to get you immediate return.”

Would you ever try and be a little bit sneaky and have more than one profile within the community, and within the second profile ask certain questions, and then use your main profile to actually answer the questions?

“I would not.”

I thought the answer would be that. Be as white hat and truthful and real as possible, is the piece of advice there.

What happens if there are not enough questions in relation to your topic, even if you're fairly convinced it's the right community to be on? Then, if you've got an email list of people, would you email your audience and say, ‘I'd love to actually hear some feedback/questions. Why don't you ask some questions here and then we'll interact there, and I'll answer all your questions there.’

Is that a better way to do it?

“I think that you're not just reliant on people asking questions. You can also do things like offer opportunities.

Maybe your field of knowledge is something that isn't getting a tonne of questions in the community. You can put a post out and say, ‘Hey, here's what I'm really good at, and if anyone has any questions on this, wants to talk, or wants to do a virtual coffee, drop them in this thread and I'd love to talk about these topics.’ Just putting yourself out there.

There’s usually an introductions channel. That’s a great place to say, ‘Hey, I’d love to talk about these three things.’ and see who gravitates towards you. There are typically opportunities beyond just answering questions that you can partake in.

You can share resources that you've written: ‘Hey, I think maybe this would help some people. I've been thinking a lot about this topic. What do you think about this article?’ You can ask your own questions. That's a huge one.

I think that, in community, there's this give and receive that has to happen. Don't go into a community expecting to give, give, give. You should also be in that community to receive. That's actually how trust is built in a relationship, where people are giving and receiving.

Ask your questions that you have in that community. Seek help in that community. There's a lot of ways that you can build trust beyond just answering questions.”

How do you measure the SEO success of interacting in communities?

“I think that that's not something that can be measured in numbers.

Unfortunately, for a lot of businesses, that is why we don't invest in communities directly – because it is this sort of intangible (for a while) ROI), right? You have to almost trust your gut a little bit more.

Are these conversations valuable? Am I learning? Am I teaching? Just understanding, are these connections growing? Am I talking to more people? Am I having more people tag me in posts? There are ways to feel that out.

In the Women in Tech SEO Community (which is a community that I am a part of), we have a Partners program and we run a community survey every year. Some of the things that our community members were saying about our partners, specifically, were just flooring to me.

Like, ‘If I'm between two people and one's a WTS partner, I would choose the WTS partner.’ and ‘I've learned so much from Majestic (who is a WTS partner), I find their insights so valuable, and I really trust them as a go-to for answering these types of questions.’

We do find that there's more qualitative information and there's more, ‘How are the conversations going?’ that can help indicate if this is a good place for you to be than quantitative metrics.”

You talked about brand as being something that you can impact as a result of interacting in a community. Perhaps, then, a community might impact the results in a knowledge graph, or the results in an AI overview.

Is that something that you see?

“That's not something that I've looked into specifically yet. We are working with one of our WTS partners, Profound, to start to understand that a little bit for our own brand: the Women in Tech SEO Community.

Because we've started to see, even on our own brand, people coming in saying they found us through ChatGPT and they found us through all of these things – and we know that our members talk about us a lot organically in social, on LinkedIn, and all of those sorts of things.

Right now, we're starting to look into: Is there some sort of correlation there that actually shows us that? And it's the community itself. In theory, we should be having folks also shouting out Majestic (and we do see that), – and shouting out our WTS partners that are putting on activities and helping add value to the community.

So, more to come on that, but yes, that's what I would hope to see.”

Is AI impacting online communities in any other way?

“I think that AI is going to start showing up in communities a little bit more, in terms of perhaps how we manage the community or maybe how we summarise things.

We haven’t started using it, specifically in our community, but I can see value in creating, say, an AI agent that sees all of the unanswered questions, consolidates them, and puts them out in a post at the end of the week to make sure that people can see them again.

But honestly, right now, we have members who just do that on their own. So, I'm not quite sure what should replace human interaction, because I love that our members are taking that on themselves and are wanting to make sure that other members’ questions get answered.

We will see how AI impacts it, but we are definitely at least seeing a lot of people finding our community through AI search now, more than we've ever seen before.”

Erin, what's the key takeaway from the tip you shared today?

“Go and find a community that has your audience and is highly engaged. Spend five to ten minutes in there a day.

You don't even have to jump in and start answering questions right away. Just read through. What are folks talking about? What is going on in their current challenges and their current struggles?

See if it's going to be a valuable place for you to show up – not just for the audience, but also for yourself, to be able to get help in the things that you need and your current challenges in your day-to-day work.”

Erin Simmons is Managing Director of the Women in Tech SEO community. Join up over at WomeninTechSEO.com/join.