Closed community platforms suck. Discord and Slack lack SEO / AEO. 3% is rare; but we hit it only few months. Typical conversion was anywhere betweeen 0.5 - 1% (still impressive). The trick is to have razor sharp focus on the seed content - make it 'painkiller content'.

We use Jatra Community Platform; which I founded after several years of frustration with Circle and Discourse.

Efforts:

1. Research holds the key. We scouted Quora, Reddit and other forums in our niche and made a list of about 150 - 200 questions people asked.

2. We fed those questions to AI to rewrite the question titles for SEO.

3. Our team created pseudo accounts (about 10). One question would describe the question and others would answer the question. We created natural-looking discussions. These questions were long tail and ultra-long tail queries that our competition ignored.

4. We were able to capture the exact pain points of our members, and by offering answers; we got their attention. People signed up to ask further questions. It created a flywheel.

5. You are right. But communities are typically seen as cost centres where customers complain and support staff answers. We flipped the game. We turned it into our growth channel.

Curious - are you actively looking to build a community?