Quora: SEO, online promotion and brand awareness

Quora, it’s probably the largest question-and-answer portal on the web, with 190 million users as of April 2017, which is proving to be a continuous increase in registrations. Compared to Yahoo Answers, the tool seems to be less prone to spam from users who want to boost their site, and with more experts present – as opposed to “regular people” – determined to devote their time and expertise to helping those who are struggling with certain topics.

A content pool

Basically, Quora is a huge pool of user-generated content, not yet on the level of giants like Wikipedia, but certainly extremely interesting for providing detailed information on a given topic: keep in mind that these texts are indexed and will be reasonably stimulated in cases where Google needs to answer specific questions and there are no web pages optimized for those particular searches.

With the rise of voice searches from tablets and smartphones, designed as queries in everyday language (e.g., “how to walk to the train station”) rather than rigid combinations of keywords (e.g., “from home to the train station”), Yahoo Answers and Quora, the question and answer portals par excellence, might be the ideal sites to answer these information requests, since the questions and answers they contain are written by people addressing other people with common jargon expressions.

It was recently introduced in the Italian version, opening the way to the Italian public: until recently, all information exchanges had to be handled in English and were probably very useful for those who wanted to address a foreign public.

For Belpaese companies, it can therefore be a brand new off-page promotion tool able to expand their online presence and develop valuable content associated with their brand.

Unlike other social networks, it’s much easier to build an audience here: instead of searching for influencers and following them one by one, you can simply subscribe to the topics you’re interested in from the list presented to you, and start answering the questions you think are relevant to your business: the people answering the questions will then vote your answers and decide to follow you.

In this way, you can also compensate for the possible lack of Q&A pages on your portal about your business topics and attract new and interesting audiences to your site, by indicating to Google that you are answering in parallel to the search intents that are familiar to you.

In your messages, you can even respond by inserting links that, although marked with the nofollow attribute and therefore not useful for the positioning, you can also ask to ensure additional traffic of visits interested in the topics you deal with.

For now, the Italian version of Quora does not yet have as much content in Italian as the English version: however, from the search bar at the top center, you can type the keywords of the question you are interested in – better to avoid being too specific and risk not finding anything relevant – and see if it has already been posted by others, to join the other answers adding your own thanks to an intuitive editing.

More specifically, what are the SEO and branding benefits you can get from an active presence on Quora?

How can you use Quora to support your SEO analysis and brand outreach?

Find information to support SEO

It can then be used as a container of knowledge and information about the information needs of the niche you are targeting.

Naturally, you need to combine the questions you’ve learned on this social network with pragmatic keyword research to decide if it’s worth investing in these topics. To do this, you can paste the questions you’re interested in into a search volume assessment tool such as Google Keyword Planner or Seozoom, to estimate the traffic these term sequences can bring you. This way, you can cover less in-depth topics than your competitors and get more shares through the originality of your ideas.

Get ideas for the editorial plan

This is a reservoir of doubt, curiosity and information needs around countless topics. By looking at the different topics on which information is needed, you can get an idea of the questions people are seeking clarification on and from there choose original topics from which to create new content for your corporate blog.

Take inspiration from your colleagues and professionals. If you’re still in the early stages of your online promotion business, you can identify other experts in your field and draw inspiration from them on how to connect with your niche, what type of popularity is most popular, what questions you can answer with appropriate content and services. Build an audience around your brand. Then go out and meet the freelancers to show your skills and ability to answer doubts and information needs in a practical way. By integrating with Facebook at the time of registration, the system autonomously assigns skill topics that can be corrected or expanded according to your preferences.The platform obviously implements a notification system that informs you when someone decides to follow you or evaluates your answers, providing you with direct feedback on the activities you have carried out.

Why use Quora to increase brand awareness?

Quora can be an interesting additional tool to strengthen your reputation as a network expert. Obviously, it wouldn’t make sense to use the platform exclusively to place links to your website everywhere, whereas – if you take care of your presence consistently and with a view to providing quality content – it can be a good additional tool to expand your online brand awareness. You can use your account to provide a quick summary to those who don’t know you of what you’re doing on this social network of questions and to quickly illustrate the type of topics you’re knowledgeable about. Quora is also a goldmine for information about your audience, for promoting your brand and for building an audience interested in your expertise.

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