MeetUp is a social platform where groups are formed and events (“meetups”) can be planned. While creating a MeetUp event for SEOs in Phoenix, Arizona, we noticed that we could put a link in the description area of the event page. We decided this would be a good opportunity to see if links in MeetUp event pages pass juice.
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We build a lot with Web 2.0s and we like to see if they actually do anything because there is always the latest and greatest kind of thing - we did something with Trello a couple of months ago. That was fun. So we did something with MeetUp.
Actually how this came from was I wanted to meet up with some SEOs in Phoenix and I wanted to make sure that there were several SIAs that were on the Phoenix area and I wanted to make sure that they got the information and I was happy to bring them out and meet with them face to face and after the second person asked me for the details again, I got pretty annoyed and I was just, I’ll put it up on this MeetUp thing.
Then I realized that this is an opportunity for a tes. I was going through the MeetUp frameword, you can put links in the description, anything you want. What I ended up doing is I created this MeetUp for Phoenix and then I put a link to the test page within that MeetUp display to see what will happen.
What was cool was the MeetUp page indexed within the day. It was ranking for the target term. The test page moved to number one. All these different MeetUp pages indexed. All said and done, 5-6 pages that are MeetUp archived kind of pages like WordPress does, for example, all indexed.
Then, some third party sites also scrape up MeetUp and published those MeetUp information. What ends up happening with this is that you’ve got your one event page, you get a lot of links from it. At the end of the day, it is going to move and affect rank.
As a site note, when I set this thing up, I made it public, I guess that is the default, and all of a sudden all of these people started clicking to come to the event when I was really intending that for a couple of SIA SEOs that I know in Phoenix and then some SIA people that was open to.
All of a sudden, I got this people showing up to this event. Four strangers showed up. It was unbelievable. I realized that this is also a biz up. You could use this two ways, one for yourself – you’d want to sell yourself as an expert? How can you do that? It is not one thing. It is a series of step to be an expert.
People also need to perceive you as an expert and one way to do that, I think, is running one of these kinds of things. I bet there are several SEO things in Phoenix, even on this platform. I didn’t look because that was not what I was doing it for. I realized that maybe I should actually care about it. I think there were 30 that are now members of my SEO group.
Some of them are SEOs, 2 of the people that showed up, 1 guy was just actually asking SEO questions which as totally fine, 1 guy was looking to hire somebody, I thought that was pretty cool. You can establish yourself as an expert, answer people’s questions, you can probably get some clients. That is the A of this. B is that it is something that you could do for your clients.
You can say that you are not just an SEO, you actually care about their business and driving leads. You are innovative and trying to come up with concepts that could be used for the business to succeed. You need to establish your clients as experts in their industry and niche and this might be a platform to do that. It costs $15 a month so the cost is pretty low, it took four minutes, tops to get through this sign up and create this thing. It was not tricky and next thing you know, you’ve got your own SEO group or your clients have their own group.
Dori: Also, I just discovered, I did a search on your name, there is a roofing company so I used Kyle Roof Phoenix and everything is coming up, the MeetUp page also shows up for that, pushing down some other stuff, even the SIA’s website. That can also be done for any field for reputation management if you are looking to push things down, if you have your name in there and the business in there, it might help do that.
For sure, it is awesome. That is a $15 push down of one or two spots of that bad thing and you could charge $2000. This is also a really proven concept too because it only took a week for all this movement to happen.