The Unbelievable Truth Behind Using Quora For SEO (And How to Do it Right) [Updated 2020]

Over the past 12 to 18 months, one of the most frequently found sites on the first page of Google search engine results pages (SERPS) has been Quora.com.

But does Quora help with SEO?

The answer to this question is a hearty “yes, Quora helps with SEO.” But if you’ve been living under an internet rock, here are several reasons why Quora should matter to you as a digital marketer, regardless of whether or not it helps with SEO:

• Alexa rates it as the 81st most trafficked website on the internet
• Quora claims to have a global audience of over 300 million users
• SEMrush says it has averaged over 5.8 million top 10 keyword rankings in Google in the last year (screenshot below)

Is a site with tons of traffic, a large group of monthly active users, and great keyword rankings of interest to you and your SEO strategies?

We thought so.

At DOM, we’ve already made our case as to why you should take advantage of Quora’s advertising platform. We even have an in-depth guide to help you make the most of your ad dollars on Quora.

We have not covered how we leverage it for SEO—until now.

It’s time we share just how valuable Quora can be to your SEO efforts; this post will touch on multiple strategies you can use yourself.

How to Leverage Quora For SEO Keyword Ideas

At the original time of writing this, Quora has over 19.8 million pages of content indexed by Google.

And those 19.8 million were on the English language domain (www) only. Content on Quora is also available at any time in 16 other languages!

Are you struggling to find the inspiration to create content for your blog? What about expanding the amount of text on your service or product pages with an FAQ section? Are you trying to figure out what people are researching before buying in your industry?

As the #1 Q&A site on the internet, Quora is sure to have a question (or 19.79 million) to lead you to the answers you seek.

Keyword ideas are everywhere in Quora.

Get started by typing your main keyword phrase into the search box. You can do a sitewide search on the phrase you’re looking for:

Or navigate directly to a topic page about your search query curated by Quora admins.

Either way, you will find a ton of questions related to your target keyword phrase.

Want an easy way to determine the most popular questions on your topic? Pay close attention to the question’s follower count. The higher the number of followers a question on Quora has, the more interest and repeat traffic new answer contributions receive.

Does Quora Help SEO In Terms Of Link Building?

One of the most common ways SEO professionals leverage Quora is to include it as part of a comprehensive link building strategy. But does Quora help SEO campaigns build more effective links? Below are several of the ways we use it, along with some inspiration for your campaign.

(Think of a strategy we missed? Let us know, and we’ll add it to the list.)

Create A Blog Subdomain

Creating a blog subdomain attached to your Quora account (like the one found here: https://wordsthatshouldexistinenglish.quora.com/) isn’t a new strategy for building links.

In 2019, it also isn’t a very effective strategy when the links created are all going to be “nofollow.”

Alternatively, consider building a blog subdomain on Quora to expose your content to the thousands of users who want your expert answers to their questions.

Find Influencers From The Most Viewed Writers

Want to run an influencer campaign in a B2B niche? Or is the target promoter of your product a highly educated person?

Quora may be a better source of contacts to partner with than Twitter or Instagram.

Why?

A few reasons:

1. The content lives on the page it was added to permanently
2. Posts by content creators have significant potential to be seen by more users than just their own followers
3. Question pages create links search engines actually index

The process is pretty simple for finding top influencers of a given topic on Quora.

1. Navigate to a content topic page like this one: https://www.quora.com/topic/SEO-Tools
2. Click the link under the topic heading titled “Most Viewed Writers”

On that page, you will find a top 10 list of the contributors with the most answer views in the last 30 days. In addition to that, you will also see a list of the top 40 “Up and Coming” contributors.

For more on influencers and how you can find the right ones for your company, check out our complete beginner’s guide to influencer marketing.

Network With Podcasters

Looking to leverage the world of podcasting to promote your expertise or product? Podcast hosts will frequently tap into the power of Quora as a part of their outreach strategy for their own episodes.

The potential for massive referral traffic is available through Quora. These influencers have made a living out of knowing how to maximize attention arbitrage online.

For the best links for an SEO campaign, you will want to acquire links to your products or services in the show notes of any episode you sponsor or interview you provide.

That said, think of Quora as a great place to make first your first contact!

Get A Wide Variety Of Nofollow Links

Nearly every external link generated on the Quora domain by its users will have a nofollow attribute. Below is a list of the types of links you can create on Quora that include this attribute:

• Answer submissions (both in the content body and as footnotes)
• Answer Wiki’s (requires admin approval)
• Self-published blog posts
• Submitting a link to Spaces (requires admin approval)
• User profiles

But that doesn’t mean nofollow links are bad. In fact, SEO experts (and DOM) regularly recommend acquiring nofollow links as a way to diversify your link profile.

Also, you control the pages that you can link to in your Quora answers. This means that you can build links to pages that are tough to acquire through outreach. Think service pages, product pages or gated content resources—the types of content bloggers and other publishers look down upon.

How To Leverage Quora For Barnacle SEO

“Barnacle SEO” is not a new strategy, but it is the most effective way to leverage Quora for SEO. So, if you continue to wonder if Quora does help SEO, this strategy should be the answer you are seeking.

As the name implies, this approach leverages the authority of Quora by creating content specifically on their question pages that rank for your targeted keywords.

Because the links are nofollow, the value to help boost your search rankings is debatable. However, you can score a good bit of referral traffic from any of these question pages.

As we mentioned before, Google sends a ton of traffic to the site due to Quora’s visibility in the SERPs.

Using SEMrush’s Keyword Gap Analysis tool, here’s how to find the best pages to barnacle your answers to in Quora.

1. Open the Keyword Gap tool under the dropdown for Gap Analysis.
2. Input your domain and Quora.com into the domains list
3. Click ‘Go’ and get your keyword list

Once the list populates, there are a handful of ways we suggest filtering the results to make them as useful as possible.

You can do one or all of the following to narrow down the keywords that will matter the most for your barnacle strategy.

1. Limit the list to only include keywords with Quora.com organic positions less than 11
2. Limit the list to only include keywords with your domain in organic positions less than 11
3. Sort the list by the most expensive CPC estimates to find the most in-demand keywords for advertisers
4. Sort the list by monthly volume in ascending order to find the most searched phrases
5. Sort the list by keyword difficulty in ascending order to find the most competitive phrases

Once you find the list of keywords that are most effective for you, provide your opinionated answer to the question on the page. As a bonus, make sure you link to a relevant page on your site that supplements or adds value to your answer.

So How Do We Do All Of This Stuff “Right”?

So does quora help SEO campaigns become more successful? With time and patience, isn’t anything possible?

Like everything in our industry, there is a lot of trial and error that goes into a great Quora SEO strategy.

We’ve seen campaigns with only a handful of answered questions lead to conversions and a weekly stream of referral traffic.

On the flip side, we’ve also answered dozens of questions in campaigns and seen little to no impact made against our goals.

To do Quora “right” as part of your SEO campaign, there are a few must do’s you need to add to your strategy:

• Evaluate its vast database of questions to determine high-interest keyword ideas
• Use its referral traffic potential as a way to syndicate content, find influencers, and build links
• “Barnacle” to Quora’s content with top rankings in Google by answering them and linking to your site

Whether you decide to take advantage of it or not, millions of users are visiting Quora every day to ask their questions. Millions more are there to provide or read insightful answers.

We’ve shown you how. Now get over to Quora and leverage this opportunity to reach millions of people looking for your product or service before it’s too late.