Ok good to know, but where do I start? Which community pages are interesting to optimize?
The best type of content to focus on is blog posts or news articles (pages with a lot of valuable content) and landing pages (pages where visitors are entering your community if they are looking for something specific).
According to many SEO consultants (including ours!), SEO isn't just about building search engine-friendly sites. It's about making your site better and more useful for people too.
1. 5 Make your community and its content easily accessible to search engines. What does this mean? First, make sure your community has public content so that it's accessible to search engines (e.g. via robots.txt), otherwise, you don't have any chance to be visible. Second, the community should be well structured. All topics, all content, and all important pages have to be linked to each other in a logical and easy way. This means you have a structured menu at the top and from there on it's easy to dive deeper into your community. The best moment to think about the structure is before you go live with your online community. But no worries, it's also possible to structure it later on. That could be even better because after a period of intensive usage you might have another vision for the structure.
2. Focus on answering search intents. Web users are always searching for a reason. They are looking for something. We call this 'search intent'. Every subject will be searched for with different intents. Everybody wants to know something different about a subject. If you are writing a blog on your community, keep these intents in mind. The more intents you answer in your content, the more Google will love your content (and ranks it higher in the search results). Use tools like Answer The Public for inspiration to answer search intents with your conten.
3. Focus on long tail keywords. As a result of the second point, the way web users use search engines has been changing over the last years. Nowadays, the search queries are longer. We even use complete sentences and questions as a search query. And that's really positive for communities. Because that's exactly how e.g. discussions are built in communities. A discussion is mostly focused on a question, problem, or challenge. Thus, use the most important long-tailed keyword in your unique title and meta description, and the well-crafted URL. Do also mention the directly related question(s) in the first paragraph of your content and heading later on (if possible).
4. Track your internal search queries. Do you need any inspiration for writing new content? Analyze the internal search queries first. Search queries made in your own community will help you to figure out what types of content the community members/visitors are looking for. Why is this useful for SEO? It gives you possibilities to create new content and gives you visibility for new business-related keywords. People are interested in it, otherwise, why would they be searching for these subjects in your community? Be aware: this is only possible if you have a search option in your community and a Site Search set up in e.g. Google Analytics (in any case, it's recommendable to implement an analytics tool like Google Analytics, also for other marketing activities).
5. Track your rankings with a keyword ranking tool. If you thought about optimizing your community for keywords, then you have to monitor their rankings as well, of course. You have to know if your optimizations have done the job. The easiest way to monitor this is by using a tool like Moz or SEMrush. There are plenty of them out there. Mostly, these tools are monitoring other SEO results and are constantly providing advice on how to improve. Really helpful!