Your Website as Community: The Search Strategy Nobody's Talking About

Your website being a community—this one is fun, and I've been seeing more of this. It's a little different, but I think the shift toward wanting authentic experiences and expert advice should come into your website in some way.

I think websites should be able to be accessed in ways that people want them to be accessed.

Why Community Matters Now

People are more interested in the humans behind the brand than in the brand itself, which makes sense. People buy from people, not businesses. And if there's a strong community around that person or that brand or that particular piece of content, that's a big indicator of credibility.

The bloom is off the rose with social media. So many people aren't using social media personally anymore because it's that idea of "I don't want to just present my life to the world." It's not bi-directional communication. It's one way. It's just being autobiographical.

And that's unfulfilling, because people's reactions are artificial or arbitrary. We're suspicious of it. It's highly curated. We've started to demote social media as a source of community because of the way behavior works on social—trolling, bullying, artifice, all these things.

What Community on Your Website Actually Looks Like

Is adding a chatbot to your site to navigate where you want to go the only tactic? Of course not. Is that perfect for every website? No. But that's just one way.

I see SparkToro doing this really well. They're an audience research tool, and they're going back to true-to-form blog posts. It's from a single person, written from a single point of view, highly specific, highly calibrated, not really formatted super well for SEO. But they get a ton of engagement, a ton of comments. All of their blog posts specifically on their website have got ten plus comments on each.

Actually getting people to have conversations when possible on your website is going to be very helpful, especially as we're going to own less and less of our opportunities online if we have to be everywhere. We've got to be on all these different social platforms, all these communities and forums. The website is kind of losing a little bit of its kingdom.

If we can move the community there, I think that will serve us really well.

The Technical Requirements

Building communities in centralized digital spaces makes a lot of sense, but it would be really hard to get right. It requires the ability to have reasonably timed, bi-directional communication.

It can't be that you post something and maybe somebody sees it two months later. That's not community. It has to be responsive, engaged, ongoing.

And it will take a lot of effort that the right people will have to be willing to put in. Not all clients are going to be good fits to do that because they just aren't willing to do what it takes, which is building this daily. You can't touch it once a week. You can't touch it twice a week. You have to be on there building that all the time, almost like a little mini business.

Where We Own Nothing

We're living in a multi-channel, multi-ecosystem world now. We have to make sure we're optimized everywhere. But here's the problem: we can't own everything.

There was that massive shift five, seven years ago of "host everything on the website, we don't want to give any information to third-party folks, I don't want to rely on Facebook for my leads, I want to own everything." That's just not going to be possible in this multi-channel ecosystem.

But if the website is kind of losing its kingdom, and we're spread across all these platforms we don't control, then owning the community conversation becomes even more critical. That's the one thing we can actually control and build equity in.

Who This Works For

We can do some of this for clients, certainly. And I think there are ways that we can get good enough at different industries and understand human behavior enough to build those communities for our clients.

But only the right ones. The ones willing to show up. The ones whose expertise is actually worth gathering a community around. The ones who understand that community isn't a "set it and forget it" tactic—it's an ongoing commitment.

Some industries are naturals for this. Highly specialized professional services where people are hungry for expert guidance. Technical fields where practitioners want to learn from each other. Anywhere there's genuine knowledge exchange happening, not just promotional content.

The Long Game

Everything we say is going to matter even more going forward. Almost any Reddit thread that pops up in the top ten on traditional searches are two to three years old. They're not yesterday. They're not conversations that happened a month ago.

We're seeing things living a lot longer than we might have expected. So what we say could come back to us two or three years from now. We have to be intentional about what we put out there for ourselves and our clients.

Not that this should put us into paralysis of "now we can't say anything because everything matters so much," but being really thoughtful about the narrative we're crafting and everything fitting into what that narrative is.

Community builds that narrative over time, organically, through actual human interaction.

Why This Is a Search Strategy

This isn't just about engagement metrics or "building relationships"—though those matter. This is about search.

Community signals credibility. Comments, ongoing conversations, return visitors—these are indicators that your content isn't just AI slop churned out for ranking. It's actually valuable enough that people gather around it.

And in a world where anyone can generate content about anything, that distinction is everything.

Build Community That Drives Search Authority

Your website doesn't have to be a static brochure. At Winsome Marketing, we help brands build engaged communities on owned properties—turning websites into destinations people actually return to and trust.

Ready to make your website a gathering place? Let's talk about community-driven content strategy.