Crossed 800 members on Local SEO Community

I started a community called Local SEO Community 3 months ago, and just crossed 800 members.

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Backstory

I noticed there were a lot of FB groups and forums that talked about SEO as a whole, but there wasn't really anything focused specifically on local SEO, so I created Local SEO Community, a forum-ish site that specifically focuses on local SEO and Google My Business tips and strategies.

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But first, what is local SEO, and how is it different from normal SEO?

For example, a restaurant doesn't need to worry about ranking globally for the search term "food".

Rather, that restaurant just wants to show up at the top of the map search results (AKA Map Pack) when people search "food" in their area.

That is local SEO.

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Growing the community initially was kind of tough. It took a lot of manual outreach to people who I thought might be interested in joining. Some people were even mean to me (mean people on the internet? What??)

But I started getting a good mix of small business owners and people who work in the local SEO industry (agencies, freelancers) joining as members.

Small business owners like it because there's an "Ask for feedback" section where small business owners can get advice on how to optimize their SEO and/or Google listing so they rank higher.

For people who work in the local SEO industry, it gives them a place to share their knowledge and be seen as an industry expert in a place full of potential leads (the small business owners).

Eventually, word-of-mouth helped growth a lot, as I noticed batches of signups from people who work in the SEO industry (employees at companies like Moz and Ahrefs).

At this point, the engagement is pretty solid, with new posts basically every day, and other members commenting on those posts pretty quickly (which is important because nobody wants to join a dead community).

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Why not just have a Facebook group for this?

I think a lot of people might have gone the Facebook group route, because of the simplicity and low barrier to entry.

BUT, posts in Facebook groups cannot be found via a Google search.

This was a very important thing to me.

I wanted to create a community where the questions and answers people were posting could be found in the future by others who were googling the same thing.

That way, the flywheel starts turning, super slowly at this point, but eventually increasing more and more.

Ideally within a year or so, the majority of traffic coming to the site will come from Google searches.

Link: www.localseocommunity.com