Do you use Quora? Did you ever think that you can use Quora to promote your brand and bring traffic to your website?

Quora has more than 300 million monthly active users which makes it a perfect content marketing platform. In this post, let’s learn how to get the most out of Quora, from creating the perfect profile to submitting the best answers.

Let’s get right to it.

What is Quora?

Quora is a question-and-answer social media platform where users can ask questions, get answers, and interact with other users. It was founded in 2009 by Facebook’s former CTO and Co-Founder Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever.

Today Quora is a huge resource of questions and answers on any possible topic (400,000+ topics are currently covered on Quora). 

Beyond the simple ask-and-answer setup, there are some advanced parts of Quora, too, that might be good to know before jumping in.

• You can target your question to specific Quora users, asking them specifically to weigh in with an answer along with others in the community.
• You can publish content on Quora, just like LinkedIn’s publishing platform
• You can search for specific questions or topics related to your business and follow these to receive notifications of new questions.
• You can promote your questions and answers by Quora Ads.

Why Marketers Should Use Quora?

For marketers, there are a handful of really great reasons why Quora might be worth considering.

1. Grow Brand Awareness

Quora has 300 million monthly active users. You can gain exposure to loads of people on Quora, getting your valuable answers and business out to these users.

Also, if your consistently share your insights in relevant topics, you can position your business as a thought leader in your industry, and genuinely help people with their questions. This could help your brand to attract more positive support and spread a great name out to the world.

2. Drive Traffic to Your Site

Quora ranks for ~65 million keywords and gets an estimated ~90 million search visits a month. If you can find the questions that rank well on Google and answer them, you can drive referral traffic to your website.

Moreover, it will be a long lasting impact that will drive you consistent and predictable traffic over time. Even once you’ll stop actively marketing on Quora.

3. Help with Customer Support and Influence

Quora is a stage where you can address your customers directly over their queries.

You can use Quora to provide customer support to your users and to provide a positive influence to discussions about your product.

How Quora Ranks Answers?

As you’d expect, the amount of visibility an answer achieves depends to a large extent on how high it gets ranked.

For sure there is a complex Machine Learning system that is able to analyze multiple factors and assign a rank to each answer. If you want to get technical, Quora engineering team wrote a very technical piece here.

As described in the article the first set of elements that the Machine Learning analyze are to determine if an answer:

• Answers the question that was asked
• Provides knowledge that is reusable by anyone interested in the question
• Answers that are supported with rationale
• Demonstrates credibility and is factually correct
• Is clear and easy to read

It is still no clear what metric affect the rankings most. My guessing of other factors which are used to rank an answer are:

• User Credibility: Very likely a ranking is assigned to each Quora account based on how long they’ve been on the platform, how many questions they have answered, how many upvotes they received and more.
• Upvotes, Downvotes and reports: Answers having the most upvotes are ranked better. Likely Quora also takes in account the “user rank” of people who upvoted your answers.
• Topic Expertise: Likely you’ll have a higher rank if you have answered a lot of questions on the same topic before and received some upvotes.

How to Get Traffic from Quora?

1.  Create The Perfect Profile

It might sound trivial but one of the most important thing to kick off your Quora marketing activity is to have a good looking profile. Here’s what I’d recommend to get the most out of your Quora profile:

• Upload a picture as you would on any social profile.
• Use your real name. Quora isn’t about corporate brand building. It’s about personal branding.
• Populate the next line, “credentials,” with a few well-chosen words (amounting to 50 or fewer characters) with a description of what you do. When you answer a question on Quora, this short snippet of your Quora profile is visible. So, make the most of those 50 characters. Include your business name and why you’re qualified to offer the best answer. This would generally include your job title.
• Write a brief profile bio, format it as you like, and take advantage of the opportunity to link to your website, blog, and social media accounts.

2. Find The Right Question to Answer

Answering the right questions will significantly improve your success rate on Quora. Here’re two ways you can find the right questions to answer.

1) Find Questions That Receive Traffic from Search Engine

We all strive to get attention from Google and rank our website in the top spots. Well, for sure Quora already has a lot of questions ranking high for the keywords you care about. Let’s find them out and leverage them to promote our content.

Usually, I use Ahrefs or SEMrush to find questions that receive traffic from Google. Here, I’ll show you how to use SEMrush to find the questions you want.

Step 1. Enter the quora.com domain in SEMrush and then go in in the Organic research page from the left menu. Here you’ll find all the keywords for which Quora is ranking on Google.

Step 2. Filter keywords that you are going to target. Here, I filter out all keyword related to “make money”.

Step 3. You’ll only want questions with a meaningful amount of traffic. Then, you can filter keywords by position to only get questions that are ranking in the top 10 positions in Google.

Step 4. Sort the results by volume to get the questions ranking for keywords with a high volume of searches and where Quora is ranking well.

2) Leverage Smart Insights from Quora Ads

Even if you don’t plan to spend on Quora Ads, you can still get useful insights from it for free. For example, how many views a question get last week? Here’s how to do it.

Step 1. You need to have Quora Business account. If you don’t have an account create one here. Step 2. Login into Quora Ads Manager and click create a new campaign. Whatever you add here is quite irrelevant. We’re not really creating a campaign. Just give it a name and a budget and proceed to the next step.

Step 3. Define the targeting of your Quora Ads. Then you can find way more detailed stats on the views a question is receiving. Here I select “Contextual targeting”.

Step 4. You’ll enter question for your targeting. To get more stats, here you should click “Bulk Add”.

Step 5. A pop up will open. You can insert the title of a specific question if you are researching a specific one you’d like to answer. Or you can insert a bunch of keywords (one per line) if you’re in discovery mode and want to quickly find high traffic questions you could answer.

Step 6. Click “Continue” and the magic will happen! Quora Ads engine will return us the views our question received in the last week. Plus a list of many other questions on relevant topics. Now these are meaningful stats!

Bonus tip: You can also use Quora Ads to estimate how popular a topic is. In the fourth step, pick topics instead of questions as your Targeting type. Then write the topic you want to analyses.

3) Look for Questions That Had a Lot of Followers

If the question had a lot of followers, it had a higher chance of popping up in people’s Quora’s Daily Digest. If a question has 5,000 followers, there’s a chance that 5,000 people will see it in their digest.

3.  Winning on Quora with High-Quality Answers

Now that you have identified topics and questions related to your business, it’s time to answer them. Ask yourself, what makes you an expert or thought leader and why should others care?

Want to make your answers stand out? Use the actionable tactics below to help you earn upvotes, attract Quora followers, boost traffic to your website or blog, and generate high-quality leads.

1)   Be One of the First to Answer a Question

To increase your chances of having your answer earn a ton of views, try to be one of the first to answer a recently asked question.

Here’s how to find recently asked questions:

Search for your primary keyword or question in the Quora search bar, go to the search results page, and then use the filter menu on the left side to filter By Time. I recommend using the option to filter through questions published within the past day or with the past week.

2) Add Values to Your Answer

• Look for missing information in available answers? Can you share an original, superior answer?
• Are there any points mentioned in current answers that you can elaborate on? You can share tutorials, step-by-step instructions, or links to external resources readers can reference to learn more.
• Is there any information out of date or incorrect? Share new reports, data, studies, surveys, statistics, instructions, features, and other information to give visitors the latest information.

3)  Answer Questions About Your Brand and Competitors

I recommend following a topic on your brand (if available), and relevant topics in your market or industry. Then, answer questions about your brand, your products, and services, how you compare to competitors, etc. 

People who post these questions are likely in the middle of your marketing/sales funnel and are turning to Quora for additional information that could help them convert into paying customers.

Make sure to provide as much helpful information as possible to help them answer their query and include links to resources where they can learn more.

4)  Include Images in Your Answers

Across every social media platform, images are proven to boost post engagement significantly and the same applies to Quora.

Please note that Quora will use the first picture in your post as the cover image, even if it’s in the middle or at the end of your post. Therefore, if decide to include an image, make the first one stand out.

5)  Make Answers Easy to Read on Mobile

It’s easy to write paragraphs of text to answer questions, but don’t forget about mobile users. To improve readability on mobile, use limit paragraphs to only 1-2 sentences, use number lists and bullet points, and bold important points, quotes, or highlights you really want readers to notice.

4. Give Answer Similar Kinds of Questions

There you will find different similar kinds of questions on the same topic. You can start answering similar kinds of questions. Instead of writing new answers every time, you can make templates for similar questions. 

Make few changes to the same answer for different similar questions. The strategy of making templates will save you time and also make the answering procedure simple. 

5. Request Verified Badge On Quora

According to Quora…

“Only Quora (the company) can verify accounts, but you can let us know if you see profiles that you think we should verify.”

Quora allows users to submit a request for verification using this form. In the past, they have noted that profiles are likely to be verified if a significant percentage of Quora readers would recognize the name or background of the profile owner and if the profile is linked to additional social profiles like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

6. Make a Quora Page for Your Business

Anyone can create a Quora page and establish presence over any selected topic. If you want to start a page on the site for your brand, then begin by searching for the name of the brand.

In case you do not find the name, you can select the link to “create topic” under the “add question” box. Here, you can give a name and description to the page and get started with branding.

After the topic gets Live, you can request Quora community to give a review which will help users decide over engaging with the company.

7. Repurpose Your Blog Content on Quora

Previous blog posts and articles that were published long time back can be reused.

You can simply add the link or use the content of your old posts that are relevant in your recent answers. Thus, re-purposing is a smart way to drive in traffic to those blogs. Most importantly this saves a lot of time, effort and resources.

8. Try Quora Advertising

Businesses and individuals often want to reach a larger audience on Quora for their answers. With Quora Ads, anyone can extend the reach of their answers on Quora.

You’ll need to create an ad account to get started. Promoted Answers have the same targeting capabilities that are available for all other ad formats on Quora, allowing both businesses and individuals to build a following that will be ready to engage with future answers they write.

9. Share Your Answer On Social Media

Want more exposure? Through Quora you can share your answer your questions or answers and start a conversation on your social platforms.

This feature is handy if you have a big following on social media and you want them to learn more about what you do or engage them into a discussion through your posts. So Quora not only can bring traffic to your site, but can also potentially make your social platforms more active and alive.

10.  Contribute Regularly and Consistently

This is cliche advice, but social media rewards consistency. Quora is no exception.

The more questions you answer, the more likely it is you’ll appear in people’s feeds, and the more upvotes and views you’ll get.

It’s Time to Start Marketing On Quora

On Quora, you can get more high-quality traffic, boost your authority and learn more about your audience.

Is Quora something you’ve considered for your marketing strategy? If Quora marketing appeals to you now, it’s time to get over there and start answering questions.