Study: Why You Need a Forum for SEO Success

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Forums are making a comeback, at least when it comes to SEO. And I have the data to prove it. I did a quick study of how the latest Google updates impacted organic traffic and the results are incredible. Most of the forums I researched saw a 20% or more increase in organic traffic

How I Started

After Google finished rolling out the Helpful Content Update (HCU) in late September 2023, a lot of people started to complain in SEO Facebook groups or subreddits about how they began to be outranked by Reddit or Quora.

But Reddit and Quora aren’t the only places that have communities online — forums still exist, even though they are not as popular as they once were (in fact, they were a huge thing in the late 90s and early 00s).

So, I decided to see how these were affected by Google’s HCU update.

For this small study, I analyzed 50 forums, including Reddit, from all over the world that target different niches, like travel, money, fashion, beauty, food, marketing, and even politics.

Using Ahrefs, I analyzed the global traffic changes between September 13th, the day the HCU started rolling out, and 26–28 November. The only criteria for inclusion was that they had an organic traffic of at least 100 when the update started.