In this new era of Internet-based communication, our lives have radically transformed. If a question pops into our heads, we can type it into a search engine, and the answer will appear before our very eyes–like magic. At the same time, by using a social question-and-answer website like Quora, you can get direct answers to your questions from real people with expertise in a certain field. It empowers you to determine if the answerer has the necessary knowledge and skills to provide accurate information.
In addition to its primary function, which is to share and grow the world’s knowledge, Quora can help you build your professional brand, improve your leadership presence, and direct high-quality traffic to your website. Let’s go over this question-and-answer platform and determine how to use Quora for marketing.
- Quora was established in 2009 and has since grown to have over 300 million monthly users.
- Quora’s most popular topic is “Everyday Life,” followed by “Entertainment,” “Health,” “Technology,” “Business,” “Travel,” and “Learning.”
- Thanks to its recognition and high ratings, the platform provides many opportunities to businesses, including increased brand awareness & trust, referral traffic, valuable content insights, and online performance optimization for websites.
- Quora helps you drive traffic to your website, generate fresh content ideas, create crowdsourced content, as well as find untapped keyword opportunities.
- To fully leverage Quora’s opportunities, make sure to:
- Create a compelling bio.
- Find the best questions to answer.
- Answer each question with passion and authority.
- Connect with other Quora users.
- Use Quora Spaces.
- Create a business account.
- Use paid advertising and monitor your competitors.
- Format your answers in an appealing manner.
What is Quora?
Quora is a Q&A social media platform where users can ask questions, get answers, and interact with others. Founded in 2009, this knowledge-sharing site currently has over 300 million monthly unique visitors.
People have asked at least 116 million questions (on several topics) on Quora since its inception. This number is expected to grow steadily because 3,000-5,000 new questions get asked on Quora every day. “Everyday life” is the most popular topic on Quora, with entertainment, health, technology, business, travel, and learning following closely behind.
Why you should use Quora for marketing
If you’re wondering whether marketing on Quora is worth it, then consider this: Quora’s high recognition and ratings make it an excellent platform for businesses, offering tons of marketing opportunities to its users. Let’s go through the potential benefits of using this platform in greater detail.
Increased brand awareness & trust
Building brand recognition and trust with your target audience is one of the primary benefits of using Quora for business success. Actively engaging in discussions and offering thoughtful responses on Quora is a great way to establish yourself as an authoritative figure in your industry. As your brand grows in popularity on Quora, more users seeking answers to their questions will see it and associate it with expertise and reliability. This will greatly increase your brand awareness and help you build trust among potential customers.
Referral traffic
In late 2022, Google announced a new feature labeled “Discussions and forums” that aims to provide helpful content from a variety of popular forums on SERPs. This means that, in addition to traditional web results, you will also find links to relevant forum discussions on your SERPs.
For instance, when searching for the best car for a family of five, you will see a snippet like this:
Content marketing
The content marketing opportunities that Quora offers cannot be overlooked. This platform allows you to easily find relevant and popular topics that resonate with your target audience. Quora’s search functionality allows you to perform research on a specific topic, identify common pain points, and understand the interests of your potential customers. By leveraging this platform, you can create valuable content that addresses user needs and aligns with your marketing objectives.
Marketing on Quora can be especially useful when performing research on a topic and creating crowdsourced content. We will cover this topic later on in the article.
SEO
Your SEO marketing efforts can significantly pay off as a result of using Quora. Here are some ways you can leverage the platform to optimize your website’s online performance:
Keyword research
Due to its huge database of questions and answers, Quora is considered a valuable resource for keyword research. By exploring relevant topics and studying the language used by your target audience on the platform, you can uncover a rich collection of keywords. You’ll then be able to use this data to generate a list of long-tail keywords to incorporate into your website’s content.
Backlink building
If you want to increase your website’s authority, drive more traffic, and raise the overall awareness of your brand, Quora link building should become an integral part of your marketing strategy.
When answering questions related to your industry, try to insert links to your website organically when it’s appropriate. Instead of promoting your business, direct people to your online platform with the help of introductory sentences, such as:
- “Here is a great example of how this feature can help you.”
- “If you want to dive deeper into this topic, check out this guide.”
A Quora backlink can also be posted in a Quora Space or as a backlink in a user’s profile.
How to Use Quora for Marketing
Apart from being an excellent place to gain and share knowledge, Quora provides a variety of opportunities for you to boost your site’s online presence. Let’s review them thoroughly so you can better understand how to use Quora for SEO.
Use embedded backlinks to drive search traffic to your website
Since Quora posts can rank high in the SERPs for relevant keywords, don’t forget to direct some of that search traffic to your website by using embedded backlinks.
But before embedding backlinks, identify the most popular Quora posts in your niche and provide answers to those questions with a link to your site.
How do you do this? SE Ranking’s Competitive Research tool is here to help.
Here’s how this process works:
- Scroll down the Overview section until you can find the list of “Top pages in organic search.”
- Click the View Detailed Report button.
- Go to the Filter tab and make the Total Traffic section start from at least 100.
- Hit the Apply Filters button for the change to take effect.
- Insert your target keywords (in the search box at the top of the page) to narrow the list down to questions that meet your needs (e.g., marketing, content, and so on).
- Look through the list of links Quora suggested to find questions you can answer. Then add a backlink to your answer for SEO.
Perform research on a topic to get fresh content ideas
Coming up with content generation ideas isn’t always as easy as it seems, but you can nourish your inner creativity with Quora by using it to get fresh ideas for your blog.
Just perform research on a topic to determine what people are interested in. The questions you find will steer you in the right direction as you figure out how to turn these discussions into new content for your business website.
Type your main topic into the Quora search bar and check the popularity of detected threads through upvotes. Questions with lots of social activity are the best ones to base your blog posts on because they represent the most relevant requests people currently have. You can also use these discussions for your website’s FAQ block.
Find untapped keyword opportunities
Since long-tail keywords are less competitive than their short-tail counterparts, they have more potential to drive lots of traffic to your website. They have 2.5 times (on average) the conversion rate of short-tail keywords.
With Quora, you can generate long-tail keywords in two ways:
- Treat questions as keywords
Let’s assume you start your own health blog and come across a Quora question on How can I lose weight without dieting?
This query can already be considered a great long-tail keyword to use. To illustrate the point, let’s analyze this phrase with the help of SE Ranking’s Keyword Research tool. The screenshot below shows that this keyword construction is searched around 110 times per month and has a relatively low difficulty score of 49. This means you can use this keyword to identify the topics that your content covers.
To add more similar, related, and long-tail keywords to your site’s semantic core, you can also use our Keyword Research tool.
When opening a question thread on a topic, you can always find the Related Questions section nearby. This is where you can “borrow” some great long-tail keywords for improving your Quora SEO strategy.
- Reverse-engineer questions and look for related long-tail keywords
In the context of search engine optimization, the Quora reverse-engineering process is widely used to generate long-tail keyword variations by leveraging questions.
Here’s how to do it:
- Search for relevant questions on Quora by typing a keyword into the search box. Let’s type the “making friends” construction.
- Transform found questions into long-tail keywords. Based on the detected results in our case, we can come up with these content ideas:
What Helps Homeschooled Children Make Friends
How to Make Friends As An *****: Top 5 Tips
7 Reasons You Have Problems Making New Friends
Create crowdsourced content to ramp up your marketing strategy
Crowdsourced content is one of the best ways to flesh out your brand in 2023. This is where a content marketing tool like Quora can come into play.
By asking people their opinion on a specific topic and collecting their answers, you can engage your target audience and create content based on their real-life personal experiences. This will add more overall value and trustworthiness to your business. You can find examples of good questions that can be used for creating crowdsourced content below:
But don’t try to take someone’s words and pass them off as your own. Instead, describe other people’s ideas or results from your own personal angle. Don’t be afraid to present your opinion on the matter.
Top 9 tips to effectively use Quora for marketing
Now, let’s delve into the strategies that can help you unlock the power of Quora so you can drive engagement, build brand awareness, and reach your target audience. Whether you’re an experienced marketer or a newbie, the tips offered in this section will provide valuable insights into enhancing your marketing strategy and making the most of Quora.
Momenul Ahmad
Digital Marketing Strategist & Founder at SEOSiri
Effective Quora promotion demands the use of a variety of strategies. From optimizing your profile and establishing a Quora Space to creating visually captivating content that is perfectly balanced between an informative and promotional tone, you need to cover all aspects. Plus, it’s important to keep your answers concise, ranging from 200 to 700 words, and ensure they are exclusive to Quora, engage actively with the community, repurpose content for wider outreach, and drive traffic to your website and social media channels. With this multifaceted approach, my results include 4.5k+ followers, invitations to top Spaces, 5M+ content views, and 120k Space followers.
Let’s delve even deeper into our list of Quora tips to help you get promoted on Quora and gradually take your business to the next level.
Create a great bio
Unlike many other social platforms where creating a brilliant bio isn’t a necessity, you should fill out your Quora account to the best of your ability. A complete bio on Quora builds your reputation as a credible knowledge source.
A perfect Quora bio should include your education, career achievements, hobbies, or any activities that you enjoy. Quora only shows the first 50 characters of your tagline alongside every given answer, so mention your brand at the beginning of your bio. Add links to your website/blog so people will have the resources to review your professional background.
If your brand focuses on multiple niches, set up topic-specific bios. For example, you might create one bio that demonstrates your knowledge as a content marketing specialist, whereas the other one can focus on your web designing skills.
Joel Gascoigne, a founder/CEO of the Buffer company, is a great example of someone who uses different topic-specific bios on Quora. By modifying each bio separately, Gascoigne can highlight his diverse skills and expertise. For instance, when answering questions related to web business, Joel describes himself as a “startup guy & web developer” or “a lean startup practitioner.” In some other cases, he specifies that he works at the Buffer company.
Let’s recap. Don’t forget to take the following key aspects into account when completing your Quora profile:
- A detailed About Me section
- Your areas of expertise and interests
- Where you live
- Employment and education credentials
- Social media accounts
Find the best questions to answer
After setting up your account, you can start looking for the best questions to answer. Your actions should look like this:
- Search for your chosen topic by typing relevant keywords into the query box at the top of the platform.
- Choose a topic that fits your business. You’re likely to find hundreds, if not thousands, of queries similar to yours. Filter these questions by **** of publication and number of upvotes, so you get the most benefit out of answering them. Focus on relevant trends that have wide recognition in your niche.
- Track relevant topics using Quora’s notification feature by clicking the Follow Topic button near the most relevant topics for you. This saves you time when tracking industry trends and using them for marketing. Alternatively, you can track relevant topics on Quora and other websites with the help of Google Alerts. Learn how to use Google Alerts for marketing in our complete guide on this topic.
Quora recognizes and rewards individuals who engage in both answering questions and actively asking them. As experts answer queries, they attract more questions, which suggests their expertise in a given field. This approach is great for naturally attracting a larger subscriber base. As your subscriber count increases, your visibility and impact within the Quora community also improve.
Answer questions with passion and authority
Instead of answering a question with one or two simple sentences, try to fill your response with links to relevant sources, statistics, or visual content. Check out this answer posted by Rahul Yogi, founder of Techorhow, on how to fix Wi-Fi authentication errors. After giving a brief answer to the question, he includes a link to his website’s blog post that explains this problem in more detail.
If your answer includes statistical data, you should complement your textual content using diagrams or infographics. Take a look at an answer posted by Karoline Pedersen, a digital marketing influencer. She responded to a question about countries that have the largest number of Instagram users. She gives a direct answer to the question in words and then proves her credibility by including a screenshot of data from Statista.
According to one of the studies published by 3M Corporation, the human brain decodes and processes images 60,000 times faster than text. This means if you want to become a top contributor in Quora and get thousands of leads from it, fill your answers with diverse content.
Format your answers in an eye-catching way
No matter how insightful your answer to a certain question is, users are unlikely to read it if it’s a wall of text. These are painful to look at. To keep people visually engaged and sustain their attention, try to format your responses in an eye-catching way like you would with a blog post.
The best Quora formatting tips include but are not limited to:
- Adding a headline at the very beginning
- Using subheadings
- Bolding or italicizing essential elements of the text
- Including numbered or bulleted lists
- Using hyperlinked text
- Inserting @-mentions of Quora users or topics
Don’t forget to add visual content elements when necessary. Whether you’re using images, videos, infographics, memes, or screenshots, complementary content can help you convey valuable information in an engaging visual format.
And, of course, proofread your answers for grammar and spelling mistakes. Here’s a list of the best grammar and spelling checkers to fix English writing errors.
Katy Flatt, for example, used a combination of different formatting recommendations to answer a question about the best way to accept applications/submissions online. Take a look at this post:
By adding some custom formatting and visual content to your answers, you can boost your chances of gaining more upvotes and becoming a top influencer on Quora.
Connect with other Quora users
Quora isn’t just a Q&A platform but also a social media website where people can communicate, share their personal experiences, and find a social circle to make their businesses run better. Plus, you can enrich your relationships with customers by using this social network.
Statista says that 59% of the global audience has “a more favorable view of brands that respond to customer service questions or complaints on social media.” Your brand should strive to be socially active to maintain high customer satisfaction.
The best ways to find people to connect with on Quora include:
- Keeping your finger on the pulse of top answers and followers
- Providing valuable content that covers significant topics in your niche
- Spreading links of your Quora answers to other relevant websites
- Tracking customer requests and delivering efficient solutions as soon as possible
Use Quora Spaces
Quora Spaces is one of the latest community-oriented features made by the platform. It serves three main functions:
- To encourage people to discuss in groups the best answers about a certain topic
- To distribute valuable content written by you or your brand
- To give users a chance to share their common interests
This feature is similar to Facebook Groups, but Quora Spaces allows you to specify members that can contribute content and reply to questions. Sharing your own content with links back to your website is the main marketing benefit of Quora Spaces. This can improve your off-page SEO and attract more visitors.
By joining other Quora Spaces, you can find great people to follow in your industry. Just click on the Space icon at the bottom toolbar, search for a Space that interests you, and head to the Contributors or Followers tabs.
Create a business account
Setting up a business account on Quora is another useful way to use Quora as a marketing tool. Unlike user accounts, business profiles:
- Let you post answers on Quora under a company name.
- Can be managed by multiple people, which allows you to give access to other company members.
- Are marked with a business icon on the profile image.
To create a Quora account for your business, follow these steps:
1. Log into your Quora user profile and go to www.quora.com/business/create
2. Click “Business Profile (Beta)” in the upper-right corner.
3. Fill out the requested company information.
4. Wait for the Quora team to review your request (it can take one to two business days).
Once your business account is approved, you can now interact with high-intent audiences on behalf of the whole company. Use it to demonstrate your domain expertise by consistently providing valuable information to people interested in your products/services/industry.
Use paid advertising on Quora
You can promote your business to Quora’s highly engaged audience through its self-service ad platform. With this feature, you have the opportunity to create native, text-based ads, targeting users by interest, geography, or used devices (mobile, desktop, or both).
To get started, launch your Quora advertising campaign in 5 simple steps:
- Go to https://q.quoraforbusiness.com/business and fill out the requested business information.
- Add your credit card or the payment method.
- Set up a campaign (choose an objective, budget, and schedule).
- Create the advertising set (define your targeting, audience, and bid).
- Design your advertising.
When using Quora paid ads, consider the conversion targeting option that uses a specific “conversion” pixel to track the way Quora ads affect your website. To get the most out of this tool, place it in your website code to track traffic and conversions.
Monitor your competitors
There’s nothing bad about occasionally taking a sneak peek at what your competitors are doing. To stay a step ahead of them, check their activity (topics, questions, answers) on Quora for new ideas.
To outrank your rivals, seek queries where users have asked for alternatives to their services. If you’re a part of a food delivery company, for example, it would be a good idea to use keywords like “Uber Eats alternative” in the search box. People asking these questions are definitely looking for options similar to Uber Eats, so your business is likely to get more recognition if you can write a clear and comprehensive answer. You may even steal some (or a lot of) leads from competitors.
Conclusion
Using Quora for marketing can benefit your business in several ways. This Q&A platform can help you enhance and diversify your area of expertise. You can also use it to find a bigger target audience, generate content ideas, discover industry influencers, and stay on top of industry trends.
Tell us what you think of Quora and whether you’ve used it to boost your marketing goals. Also, if you can share any useful information about Quora marketing that we might have missed, make sure to do it in the comments section.
