More and more users are concerned about the question: how to bring a VK group to the top of search engines? This is easier to do than with a website, but it also has its own peculiarities. VKontakte is ranked well by Yandex and Google. To promote a community or public you will be helped by some mechanisms that will bring the community to the top in the search engine in a few months.
Number of subscribers in the VKontakte group
This is one of the most important factors.
The more subscribers you have in a group, the higher you are in the search results.
Moreover, it is important that these are living subscribers. If a few years ago, in order to get to the TOP in the VKontakte search results, bots and offers were added to groups, today such methods no longer work. You risk losing your community forever.
I recommend recruiting people into the group using exclusively white methods, and this is public advertising, targeted advertising and promotion of records.
For the query “CHINESE MEDICINE”, 431 communities were found in the internal search on VKontakte. In order to get into the TOP 5, we needed to gain more than 4,000 subscribers. Quite an achievable goal.
The SECRETS OF CHINESE MEDICINE group was created in July 2015. In January 2021, the group already had more than 4,000 live target subscribers. Participants were recruited through organic advertising (advertising in large public pages, where our target audience is concentrated) with a very modest budget for promotion. Then paid promotion in the group was stopped.
The target audience of the group is women over 35 years old. Their interests are health, longevity, Chinese medicine, qigong, self-development, self-improvement. I was given the task of recruiting just such an audience into the group. I think I managed it.
What would I like to get from VKontakte search?
Through the eyes of a technical specialist, I understand that organizing a high-quality search is quite difficult, but with such resources as in the VKontakte company, this can and should be done. I'll explain. This could significantly shift the focus of users from classic search in Yandex, Google, etc. to search in VKontakte, this would increase the coverage of quality posts and communities within the network.
For example, I need to buy a faucet. I enter into the search on VKontakte - Buy faucet and get a relevant answer.
The search understands my request and shows products that I can buy in my region, video reviews, communities where I can buy a faucet. Thus, I do not go to Yandex, for example, but find information that interests me within the network.
For such a new VKontakte search system, it is necessary to track the behavioral factors of users who use the search:
- Snippet CTR;
- Time spent on the results page;
- Snippet conversion (number of likes, reposts from number of views);
- Uniqueness of content;
- Number of sources referring to the result (selection by topic and quality);
- Regionality;
- Subject;
- Quality of the site (like ICS in Yandex).
Using this data, VKontakte could build competitive search results within the network and give businesses and information communities a tool for development. As for me, this is much better than the existing “Prometheus” which shows “compressed cars from Google”.
I think a new VKontakte search will not appear soon. But don’t be upset - this gives us the opportunity to use the imperfections of the system by promoting our own VKontakte products and services among the general audience.
VKontakte group name
If you chose brand positioning when creating a community, then the name of your group will be very important. It must include keywords, and the accuracy of queries in the title is very important.
The group fell into my hands already with an avatar and a name - “Secrets of Chinese Medicine”. If I were choosing a name, I would definitely choose the name “Chinese Medicine”.
I decided to replace the title “Secrets of Chinese Medicine” with the shorter title “Chinese Medicine”. After changing the name, the group was first in the VKontakte search results the very next day.
A detailed article on how to choose a name for a VKontakte group is HERE.
Use the power of wiki pages
Wiki pages have one undoubted advantage - they can be made very beautiful, with conversion elements, buttons and text formatting. For posts in this format, the markup is done in accordance with the syntax of search engines.
For wiki pages, it is advisable to use subheadings and lists, and insert thematic images. The recommended size for this format is 16,294 characters. To create a simple wiki page in a group, in the right control menu you need to select the “Add link” action:
- The link address should look like:
https://vk.com/pages?oid=-XXX&p=Enter page_name
(where XXX is the group ID)
Note: the page title must be written in Cyrillic.
- Specify the page name:
- Click on the link - select “Editing” - turn on the markup mode (frame in the screenshot) if we insert pre-marked text. This can be done in visual mode, but there is limited functionality.
- To add images to the text, click on the camera icon:
- We look at the result in preview mode, correct the shortcomings, save and publish the page:
- You also need to set permissions to view and edit the page:
Detailed information about wiki markup can be found in the official community.
How to find out what search queries users are using?
In order to select keywords and find out what search queries people enter, use the Yandex word selection service - Wordstat.
It reflects statistics on impressions of a user-specified word or phrase, as well as queries made by people who searched for it. Personally, I use this tool all the time.
We see that 23,985 people entered the phrase “Chinese medicine” in their search.
But only 219 people entered “secrets of Chinese medicine” into the search bar. The difference is obvious.
How to index a VK group in search? (bonus)
There are at least 2 simple ways by which you can quickly index a group in the search.
Method 1:
It's no secret that search engines use information obtained from their own browsers. Therefore, you can use a service that opens pages in search engine browsers. Sooner or later the page will be noticed by the crawler and indexed.
Method 2:
If you have your own website, you can set a link to the website page, and send the page itself for re-crawling in Y.Webmaster.
Activity in the VKontakte community
The social network VKontakte itself states that activity in the community affects the ranking of groups in internal search. However, I often come across information in articles by experts in the field of VKontakte promotion that activity in the group does not affect getting into the TOP at all.
I will express my opinion on this matter and support it with an example. Yes, indeed, the importance of activity in the community should not be overestimated, however...
We have before us an internal search on VKontakte. With the name “Women's Happiness” we see three communities. In first place is a group with 20,072 subscribers, in second place - 18,403. It would seem that everything is natural, a community with a large number of subscribers is higher in the search.
But pay attention to the third group, which has more than 23 thousand subscribers. I looked into the community and was not at all surprised. The last time posts in the group were updated was in September 2014.
Thus, I conclude that activity in the group still has its own, albeit insignificant, impact on the group’s placement in the VKontakte search results.
And one more very important detail. In fifth place we see the group “ஐ Women's Happiness ★ Beauty ★ Health ஐ”, which with its 35 thousand subscribers could easily overtake its competitors. But the title was too long, the lack of an exact entry of the request into the title, and unnecessary embellishments prevented her from doing this.
Of course, in real life, few people will search for a community using the key query “Women’s happiness,” but my goal was simply to convey to you useful information that you can then use for your projects.
What is VKontakte search
As you already understand, VKontakte search is a terrible invention of mankind. But no matter how absurd it may sound, a huge number of people use it and this gives us huge opportunities to attract free traffic.
This “miracle of engineering” is located in the most prominent place on all internal pages of the social network.
I don’t understand why VKontakte developers can’t do a truly normal relevant search.
Why do you need to display a group in the TOP of VKontakte search results?
Let's assume that when creating your community you chose brand positioning, you sell children's clothing and the name of your group sounds like “Children's clothing”. In this case, getting to the first positions in the internal search on VKontakte will bring you additional buyers.
If your community has a mixed positioning and you named it, for example, “Club of Caring Mothers,” then the internal search on VKontakte interests you insofar as... It is unlikely that anyone will formulate their search query in exactly this way. Don't believe me? Check out Wordstat.
Tags: business on the Internet, VKontakte business, online business, VKontakte Group, VKontakte groups, How to sell from a VKontakte group, VKontakte promotion cases, sales, sales from a VKontakte group, promoting VKontakte groups, creating VKontakte groups, VKontakte community
Use the Products widget for goods and services
VKontakte Products is a showcase of products and services in the community. It is almost impossible to optimize it, but the product names displayed on the first screen are taken into account by search engines as semantic relevance of the group’s main page.
For those who are just starting to develop their business, this is a great opportunity to save on creating a separate website for sales.
In the service settings (section “Community Management” → “Products”) you need to add unique text with product descriptions, photos and prices. An important nuance: use selections (collections of products by category) so that users can quickly understand the assortment.
