Most of us in the search field have likely seen the addition of "Discussions" to Google's search options. It lets searchers specifically target either forums or Q+A sites for their queries (or both, by default), and it's a gold mine for competitive intelligence and research.
Here's 5 ways to leverage discussions for SEO + competitive intel:
- Search for your competitors' product names or websites in the Q&A section. You'll almost always find people asking about features, alternatives, ways to use the service/product. These are great opportunities to authentically present your solution as an alternative, or simply learn about what makes their customers happy (or unhappy).
- Query your keywords in the forums and you'll discover popular threads with engaging content. You can use these as the catalyst for content/blog posts, as opportunities to connect with other forum users who share your interests and sometimes even as link opportunities. You can use the sorting by "by date" to ID the most recent discussions.
- Keep tabs on your own brand/product names - potentially you might use the "24 hours" or "past week" settings every day/week. The discussions and questions are opportunities to explain your product, present the best face you can and provide "off site" customer service. Many times, these will lead to some good traffic, and often, links/tweets/shares as well.
- Using high-level topics around your site/niche/keywords, you can often find entire forums/Q+A sites/sections devoted to your topics. If they contain a large number of active users, it's likely worthwhile to register, make yourself known and be a contributor in these communities (it's how I started building SEOmoz's links and traffic back in 2003!)
- Similar in function to Link Intersect, and perhaps my favorite in terms of finding good referencing opportunities, is to use the brand names of multiple competitors with "OR" separators and set the sorting to "relevance" but restrict the date range to "last month." This shows recent threads where several of your competitors were mentioned, and is often an ideal place to present your own solutions.
Forums and Q+A sites are often good sources of direct traffic, but your presence in them can also lead to greater awareness, links, sharing, tweets and citations of other kinds. In addition to Google's Discussion search, BoardReader and BoardTracker make for solid alternatives (and will often show stuff Google misses or buries).
Undoubtedly, you'll be able to think of many more tactics that discussion/forum/Q+A search enables. Enjoy!
p.s. Some folks noted in the comments that SocialMention's search and the integration with Raven Tools are also good for this type of stuff.
Nice post. i am checking out the search terms and will make utilize it.
Nice post Rand. I wasn't aware of sites like BoardReader and BoardTracker. Social Mention is also a cool tool.
Its a shame people use Q&A sites in such a spammy way - when its done right it can certainly work well!
Awesome idea. As someone who does a lot of searching for coding tips I've definitely noticed the Discussions tab but never even thought about using it to keep, uh, tabs on my competitors!
Rand,
Great Tip! We have been using the discussion boards and blogs to promote our clients and build links. I like your thinking of become an authority on these boards providing your solutions and alternatives to the competitors discussions!
That's GREAT!
Great tip. I would add other Google search types to include news, images, videos, blogs, and realtime. Each of these can give you key competitive intelligence.
Gyi,
I have done video optimization (YouTube) and blogs before for clients. Have yet to try Google news. Awesome tip! Have you played with it yet? What kind of result can we expect from Google News?
Thank You!
Nice one Rand!
For me this is definitely a great way of researching blog content and similar link bait ideas. One of the main aims is to tap into your customers and find out what motivates them to purchase, what doubts they have and what solutions they are looking for. Your tip with using discussion, blog and real time search options has so many uses and is no doubt not used nearly enough by most SEO's.
"Forums and Q+A sites are often good sources of direct traffic, but your presence in them can also lead to greater awareness, links, sharing, tweets and citations of other kinds."
Rand your tip is widely followed but in a rather negative way by spammers who spam the hell out of forums in a hope to promote there products and get links. You may say "you can definitely do this wrong" but i think very few can do this right or can even do this in the first place esp.if your product is not talked about much. If someone ask/complain about my competitor's product on a forum, Q&A site, i just can't go ahead push my product without looking like a spammer or can i? I don't think any serious forum is going to allow any type of self promotion no matter how much you contribute to it. Best you can get is signature links and i have rarely seen traffic coming through signature links. Q&A sites revolving around your target market can help in getting good traffic but then it is very time consuming and not a good ROI esp. if your hours are billable.
Just like any advice or tips, this can be abused, but I've seen a lot of value personally in doing this in an authentic way. Even if it's the first post you leave, so long as you're authentic and transparent about your position, it can work great. For example, you'll find plenty of threads around the SEO forums where someone's asked about a good SEO tool for a particular task, and I'll leave a response saying something like:
"I realize I'm biased, so take my suggestion with a grain of salt. At SEOmoz we have the XYZ tool that does ABC and might be of help for your issue."
These types of replies are well received, and even if I don't use a direct link, the branding and indirect traffic is often worthwhile.
You just need to look on the bright side!
I swear Rand is the Captain America of SEO.
Hot Damn, I didn't even know that button existed let alone carried such potential... Thanks Rand!
I'm in the same case, It'll do great easy links for my website ;) Thank u Rand for that post
That's right. i mean a lot of people don't use links on the right side of Google Serps. I remember last december when i asked to my students if they use real time link or discussion link on google? They all say no :)
I now realise I'm more likely to learn something new when Rand makes a post. Thanks Rand!
I hate to always promote another tool (especially when I don't get anything for doing so), but EliasAQ stated that socialmention is another good tool to use and I would agree.
Actually I would take it another step and say to check out Raven Tools and their Social Monitor (I always seem to be talking up Raven). It actually uses socialmention to search for brand terms and then you can rate them whether they are posititive, negative or neutral. It is a great way to establish a sentiment about your brand across the internet.
I was actually using this tool to check keywords also (not just branded terms), which did not make sense for the sentiment tool. There is no sense in tracking positive or negative reactions to keyterm (vs. a brand). But I liked the results that I would get and I would find linking opportunities. I didn't realize that google had the discussions link and accomplishes the same thing.
Great post. Never utilized this feature in the past but can see myself using it a lot in the near future. Keep up the great info!
greatpost! tnx a lot!!!
Super interesting. Will SEO ever get dull?
I guess the closest on bing would be "social" search? For example, https://www.bing.com/social/search?q=seomoz, which is akin to Google's "realtime".
Anyone insight in to how Google are parsing this - how can they tell a site is a Q&A site algorithmically? Or are they just adding the sites manually?
>This shows recent threads where several of your competitors were mentioned, and is often an ideal place to present your own solutions.
Maybe this accounts for a recent rise in spammy comments that I've seen in threads with product recommendations?
Nice post. I often use Discussion tab when looking for some forums/blogs to participate in. Once I find a good quality site I also perform search using this query "related:URL of my great page" and when happy I can get some similar results of the quality like the queried page. Regarding social mentions I woudlnt say its very accurate, it depends on the website but in many cases its simply showing bunch of data not conected with checked by us URL...
Great ressources.
Great Article. I will use the discussion tab more and will maximize my seo on forums and community boards. Thank you very much for sharing.- Engr Labra Intellekt
Great tips here. Yet again, how to gain competitive insight using search engines properly.
Cheers Guys!!
cool. learned something new today, had not even been aware of the discussions tab...
thanks,
Mtn Jim
Great Post! Using active forums and reply on recent discussion is my general practice in order to connect with different users on the forum and get traffic from it.
I am on forums from quite a bit but what’s new for me in this post was point no. 4 using high-level topics around your site/niche/keywords,
This is a very creative idea that I never tried before.
Thank you so much for this post. I hadn't ever found the Disscussions tab on google as it hides under +more on my screen. Very informative and useful. I look foward to adding these new strings to my linkbuilding bow.
Dave
Nice tip.
Another "competitive" discovery you can do with it is to see where your competitors are probably going to invest their new efforts. How? Simply check for all the open job offering from your competitors that are almost surely republished in several job sites.
thnak you for advice. Will you please propose a syntax (queries) to get these from Google? Thank you.
"brand" and "job keyword related" -root brand domain name (this last if you don't want to see job offers directly posted in your competitor brand site).
For smaller brands job offers you can use discussions searching simply with the brand name.
"xyz.com" -site:xyz.com
Yep, this is a pretty common tool in the games business to get a heads up on who is going at what market and when. Reporters in the field also do a lot of speculation based on hiring listings, so even if you arn't watching them you end up learning about activities through them.
Of course in games software there is a long road from trying to make a product and releasing a product. They have a high project death rate.
Hi Rand,
thanks for the post!
Do you know how to tag your content on the site as relevant for the discussion section?
We have pages on our site, that would be relevant for that section (but not all of them are). Or is google automatically filtering relevant sites?
Thanks
Matthias
I have to admit, I didn't even notice this on the sidebar. I need to pay more attention to it. It seems to change once a week.
Good post, yeah checking out the discussions tab is a must when you are researching competitors and promoting your own brand but it is good to remember that you need to build good authority on a specific forum before you even attemp to add links ;) Some of these discussion sites are now soo in tunr with people posting links you need to make 50 posts before you can even link to any thing.
Lots of great tips here, I was one of those who didn't know about the Discussions link either! Having said that, we do make use of Google Alerts for similar purposes and tend to get a lot of forum results. We find reading what people are saying about our products/services extremely useful because they often help us in developing them further. - Jenni
I hadn't noticed the addition of Discussions embarrasingly so thank you for this Rand. I've spent an hour or so this afternoon searching for my main keyword and have found some excellent discussions that i'm now getting involved with. I've also set up a Google Alert for the very same keyword within Discussions. Thanks again!
Great points. Seems logical, but they are always the best discoveries.. The ones so obvious they are almost smacking you in the face.
Hi Randfish,
Great post. Most of the google users does not know about this feature. Any way thank you so much for letting me know about this.
I just want to comment particularly about one thing that is, participating in this kind of discussion forums will encourage us to get business related visitors for a particular business. But some times this gives press releases too. May i know why?