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. The range of possible questions can vary from digital marketing-related to debates over cats and dogs.

But don’t always expect to get clear answers from Google because search engines only offer a list of places where you might be able to find solutions to your problems. By using a social question-and-answer website like Quora instead, you get direct answers to your questions from real people. It also empowers you to determine if the answerer has the necessary knowledge and skills to provide accurate information.

Let’s say you want to increase organic traffic to your website. Wouldn’t you feel more comfortable using information given by an experienced marketer than by a non-human online platform?

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.

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 633 million users per month (including unregistered ones). Around 300 million of them are 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 67,000 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.

As of January 2022, Quora (with its over 300 million active monthly visitors) was the second largest library of social knowledge behind Wikipedia. Quora belongs to the list of top 20 social media sites in the world based on its user count, surpassing Skype and Linkedin.

Thanks to its recognition and high ratings, Quora gives many opportunities to marketers, including:

• Discover new headline ideas.
• Create social networks and follow topics that marketers find interesting.
• Publish and promote their content in blog format.
• Keep track of market news and competitors. 
• Increase user engagement on a website.

By building an effective Quora marketing strategy, you can transform your online business into a formidable player in your industry.

Top 8 ways to use Quora for marketing as effectively as possible

Let’s discuss in detail how Quora can magnify your marketing.

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:

1. Search for your chosen topic by typing relevant keywords into the query box at the top of the platform. 
2. 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 date 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.
3. 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 do it in our complete guide on this topic:

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.

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.

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.

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.

To learn who your competitors are and what they do in organic and paid search to earn more traffic, feel free to use our Competitive Research tool. 

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 tools that will make your writing seem effortless:

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.

Best tips on using Quora for SEO

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.

Perform research on a topic

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.

Create crowdsourced content to ramp up your marketing strategy

Crowdsourced content is one of the best ways to flesh out your brand in 2022. 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.

Find top-ranking Quora posts in your niche

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.

Generate long-tail keywords using Quora

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:

1. 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.

2. 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 Adult: Top 5 Tips 

7 Reasons You Have Problems Making New Friends

Use Quora backlinks for SEO

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:

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. 

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.