Quora is one of the most popular Q&A community platforms, that is often used as an afterthought in the digital marketing of a small business. Founded by former CTO of Facebook Adam D’Angelo, Quora allows one to crowdsource answers. Quora has over 300 million monthly active users, largely due to the quality of content as well as Quora’s strict anti-spammy policies. In the long-game of SEO rankings, Quora is often an afterthought. Some business owners and companies are however killing in in their Quora SEO marketing endeavors and here are of the key takeaways that you can apply for your business!
Building your reputation: Case Study – Moz
Co-founded by Rand Fishkin and Gillian Muessig in 2004, Moz is one the largest- SEO focused company with a suite of SEO-software and analytics tools. Moz has supported over 20k customers worldwide, so it is safe to assume they know what they are doing when it comes to SEO.
Rand Fishkin, the founder and CEO is an extremely active Quora member. He has posted 200+ answers and has over 23,000 followers. (There are even Quora questions on how he manages to find time to be active on Quora). The entirely of his catalogue of answers are in the field of SEO, Entrepreneurship and Moz.
Considering Quora answers rank in google and his answers often link to Moz’s website, Rand Fishkin has been effectively using Quora SEO platform to build credibility and build traffic for Moz’s website and products.
So how should a company distill the right questions to answer for its Quora SEO strategy?
- A good rule of thumb is to filter questions by topic, time and with the highest followers.
- Do not try to be the 20th answers on any questions, regardless of the number of views it has received
- Filtering my time is important as you don’t want to be answering questions which were active 5 years ago
- A widely held belief is that questions with 7-8 answers are ideally positioned to gain more traffic and views
- Unfortunately, there is no easy way to go about it. It can be a highly involved task. Another easy tip is look at ‘Related Questions’ for the questions you do end up answering. Don’t be afraid of repetition, higher the number of your responses, better the chances of Quora algorithm to rank your answers higher.
Use Quora as a Customer FAQs: IBM Security
Quora is often being used as a search engine by many people to get relevant, informative content.
Leveraging that, IBM Security has a dedicated Quora handle wherein multiple staff members clarify queries on cyber security. Despite being an official account with multiple admins and various staff members posting on behalf of IBM, the tone and tenor of the responses are fairly casual. It does not give the impression of a corporate behemoth sitting behind the account and releasing informercials masked as answers.
In fact, counterintuitively, relatively few of the responses from the account actually link to anything IBM or even mention IBM in the answers. The account just comes off as an authority on cyber security which is also generally trying to be helpful!
This is a great strategy to build customer base too as the brand persona automatically comes across as knowledgeable and helpful.
So how can a brand develop a persona on Quora?
- Create a rock-solid profile – This implies making your profile as complete and informative as possible. Make sure the profile looks credible and links to your company website.
- Personalize answers to the extent possible: As a platform, Quora thrives on answers being from genuine experience. Anything too salesman-like will get a ban. Quora moderators are super diligent and Quora has a stricter anti-spam policy than Reddit itself. Personal growth stories, lessons from failures, entrepreneurship are generally topics receiving good engagement.
- List down the traits that you want your company to personify – Have the personality come through in the answers – In the milieu of helpful but usually bland answers, answers with a distinguishing character often find more views and comments.
- Offer value in your answers – Always think form the perspective of the reader, if your answer reads like a commercial but ads no meaningful value, it will never receive good views and upvotes.
- Make sure to add sources to any facts, figures etc. that you use in your answer
Quora Promotions: Case Study – BITS SOM
Universities such as BITS SOM have been effectively using Quora ads and Quora promotions, particularly on queries of the nature of – ‘Which MBA school should I go to?’, ‘How is a 2 year college stint at BITS?’ etc. – you get the drift. So how does this work?
Quora has an ad-platform which works on the typical pay-per-click model. The ads are currently only allowed in text format so that it appears congruent with the Quora platform and doesn’t look like a Yahoo! Homepage. The ads are in the form of answers which will feature in relevant questions.
Quora credits can also be used to promote answers amongst particular audiences. These credits essentially act as a Quora currency and are awarded to people who contribute with answers that see good engagement. Some of the metrics Quora uses to award the Quora credits are based on upvotes, follow-up questions, ‘asked to answer’ requests etc. – essentially any behavior which makes Quora as a whole a more valuable and reliable platform.
While Quora’s paid tools have some time to reach the targeting sophistication of Facebook ads manager, it still offers a wide gamut of options to reach the right audience.
So how can you target customers using Quora ad platform effectively?
- Quora provides the option to target audiences based on topics, locations, platform (desktop/mobile), interests etc. You can even choose to advertise on only select questions, where the readers of the particular question only can see your ad
- Don’t be click-baity in your ad content as Quora has very strict community guidelines. The Quora moderators will simply not approve your ad. So no ‘Sale! Sale!’ ‘50% off!’ ‘Grab offer now before it expires ads’. Save it for social media!
- Choose where you want your Quora ad to show up- it can be in a topic feed, in a particular question, in user feeds or even Quora Digest. Quora Digest is the Quora newsletter that is delivered to Quora users who have opted-in for the service
Using QUORA blogs: James Clear
Not many are aware of it, but Quora has its own blogging platform too! You don’t always need to find the right questions to post your content into. Just like WordPress and Blogpost, you can use Quora to create content and distribute! And unlike WordPress and Blogspot, there is a ready-made distribution and Quora’s algorithm to help you gain an audience! Quora blogs can be an amazing source of free traffic.
James Clear, the author of worldwide bestseller Atomic Habits, has been an avid Quora blog user to build his brand. His blogs have received over 4.1 content views and 100s of upvotes.
Your company may not receive such a widespread distribution immediately but writing a blog on the niche that you specialize in is a good place to start and boost your business’ visibility. James Clear’s niche is productivity and actionable tips to improve quality of life. James has an impressive portfolio of 237 Quora blogs, each in long form, filled with actionable tips and practical insights to lead a healthy life.
These blog posts are also useful real-estate to insert links and redirect traffic into company websites. However, be mindful that all these links are no-follow links, so using it purely for SEO may not work.
Use Quora for Lead Generation
Many business owners are not limiting their Quora SEO strategy to only driving traffic to their website or product pages. Given the highly engaged nature of Quora’s platform, general trustworthiness and less competitive nature as a platform, it can be used to effectively develop and nurture leads and prepare a solid sales funnel.
- An effective strategy is to search for your niche within the Quora search bar and prepare a comprehensive list of all questions with their total answers and views of top answer.
- Identify all followers of the topic – These followers are interested in your exact niche, so they would either be your competitors or potential customers.
- Snoop around to check if you can land to these leads’ LinkedIn profiles. You can hire a freelancer to do it with a bit of coding (if you don’t know how to scrape that date yourself)
- Get their email addresses to the extent possible from LinkedIn
- Drop these emails into your retargeting campaign audiences and Voila!
Hopefully this article will inspire you to take Quora more seriously as an SEO strategy. Let us know in comments if you have used Quora effectively in your marketing campaigns. If you think your customer base is not on Quora – try and find out if it’s true!
For More Information How brands are using Quora SEO for marketing themselves?
