Quora is the largest question and answer website on the internet. It has been around since 2009.
While Quora never achieved the cultural prominence that it was hyped up to be in the mid-2000s, it has become a staple of the internet.
Quora allows you to get answers from real experts or at least people in relevant industries. Unlike Google, Facebook or Twitter, it allows you to get more nuanced answers.
But like any giant website with lots of user-generated content like Wikipedia, Pinterest or Reddit, it’s an absolute gold mine for SEO and content strategy.
Here are some ways that I use Quora for SEO, content development and link building.
Keyword Research
Quora is a gold mine for SEO keyword research since people are speaking about a topic in everyday language that isn’t filtered by search engines or algorithmic suggestions.
It is sort of like Reddit in this way – you can find the keywords that you didn’t know you didn’t know.
Find High Volume Topics That Don’t Have a Single “Big” Keyword
The best SEOs know that the volume for any single keyword is only a fraction of the total volume for a keyword theme or “topic”.
Traditional keyword research looks for the big, high traffic keyword and uses that to explore the rest of the topic.
But this approach assumes that searchers generally all search in the same way. The thing is – many times searchers use all sorts of queries to describe a complicated topic. So that topic may have a super-high search volume but will remain hidden.
Quora can help you find these golden topics.
The manual path requires some guesses and estimation.
I start with the Most Viewed Writers Page.
Then you can look at the Top 5 questions in that Topic, in addition to the most trafficked questions of the top writers.
You can then extend this process to all your topics and sub-topics.
This process is effective…but also tedious.
But there’s a shortcut.
Go and setup a Quora Ads Account.
Start a test campaign – you won’t have to spend any money or even punch in a credit card.
Once you get to the Set Up Ad Group screen, check out Question Targeting. Type in a few seed keywords.
Bingo.
You not only get a list of topics – you also get exactly how many weekly views the question receives.
If people are asking & reading about that question on Quora – they are asking & reading via Google, Bing, etc.
You can create that exact post on your own site. And – keep that list of exact questions handy for other tactics.
Use Specific Posts to Find Keyword Ideas
The most straightforward way to use Quora for keyword research is to take an answer and drop the URL into Google’s Keyword Planner or SEMrush’s Keyword Tool (get a free trial here).
It’ll look like this research I did for a water filtration company –
You can also drop it into the Google Cloud natural language processing API to see what Googlebot extracts from the document.
Then you take all those ideas and add it to your running keyword list to go through the process of judging intent and difficulty.
Explore Top Pages in Links, Shares & Growth
Quora not only has a lot of user-generated content, but it also allows its content to be indexed by Google. And so Quora itself generates a ton of organic traffic.
In fact, many of its pages rank for some of the most competitive terms on the internet.
If you’re using a premium tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush or Mangools then you can reverse-engineer what Quora is doing right.
So you’ll find the top page or pages that are getting links and shares to reverse-engineer keyword ideas from those pages.
Use Quora for Content Gap Analysis
A content gap is a gap on your website’s pages where you should have a page but you don’t.
For example, if you have a comprehensive website about gardening and you don’t have a page about growing tomatoes then you’re probably missing out on a large bit of content that you should have on your site.
Content gaps are important because –
- You’re missing out on potential organic traffic
- The additional content helps Google understand what your site is about
- It helps to add relevance to other pages
The trouble is that a Content Gap is hard to identify because if you knew that it existed then you would have probably already filled it.
Since Quora covers so many topics, if you’re in the right industry, it can be a perfect way to find your content gap.
You’ll need to use either a premium tool like Ahrefs’ Content Gap tool or SEMrush’s Gap tool or manually work this out (via spreadsheet & Keyword Planner) by entering a competitor and Quora. Then see what keywords both of those websites rank for but you do not rank for.
Use Quora in General to Find High Relevance / Volume Terms
You can also use Quora to reverse-engineer extremely high traffic keywords. So instead of looking for relevant keywords for your website, you can use Quora to find what keywords represent an opportunity to target.
Instead of dropping a Quora answer into your premium tool, you will drop Quora.com into your premium tool and see what comes back.
It’s going to be a list of several million keywords, but that’s exactly the point.
Here you can use include/exclude, keyword difficulty plus whatever other filters you want within your premium tool or within your spreadsheet.
Content Development
Quora is not only useful for finding the right keywords, but it’s also useful for figuring out exactly what that content should look like.
Manually Look at Posts & Spaces in Your Industry
This idea is simple. Go look at the best answers on Quora for the content that you’re targeting.
Look closely to see what specific areas are addressed, what different sources are used, and what concepts are brought out by different users. Then Use your judgment to decide what answers and concepts you could integrate into your own content.
Convert Popular Answers in Your Industry
In addition to manually looking at the best answers, you can look at popular answers across your entire industry that cover different topics.
Try to identify what are common sources, common formats, and interesting ways of explaining the answers.
Find Interesting Data Sources
Many topics on Quora are dominated by industry sources. Sometimes they are self-promotional, but most the time it’s because they are the most knowledgeable people.
Look for not only how interesting the sources are that you can get in contact with, but also look at what the sources care about within the topic.
Your goal here would be to learn more about them so that when you do get in touch and try to work with them you can be as relevant and as useful as possible.
Write Human Headlines
Headlines are tricky. On one hand, you need to write a descriptive, detailed headline that sets expectations and matches what searchers want. On the other hand – headlines need to be unique, catchy, and conversational.
It’s hard to be un-naturally natural.
The answer is to just steal the headlines from Quora questions. You can browse – or just pull from Quora Ads.
Link Building & Content Promotion
You can also use Quora to get information that will help you promote your content, get more links to your content, and create strategies to target & develop it.
Use Profile & Answers for Links
This one is self-explanatory and straightforward.
But when you are plugging your work and your profile within your answers, don’t abuse the privilege. Be cool and don’t spam.
Do Complementary Link Building for Answers
*Aside – like Wikipedia, Quora has been an enormous target for SEO spammers. There are interesting linkbuilding threads to find on Quora. But, beware that you’ll have to sift through a lot of noise to find the signal. Like any marketing activity, be aware of your time/opportunity cost.
You can do this in two ways.
First, use your favorite premium tool to find links pointing to the Quora answer. The author of the piece might be interested in linking to a more thorough, more properly formatted piece of content, rather than a Quora answer.
Second, find the URL that your answer links to for sourcing.
Just like with Wikipedia, the odds are that if Quora links to a source then that web page will likely have many other links. You can either reach out to that page to try to get links or use that page to find even more relevant pages to get links.
Do Broken Link Building on Quora
I explained the concept and process of broken link building in this post, so I won’t re-explain it here. However, Quora does represent a goldmine for scaling up your broken link building campaign.
Just like Wikipedia or other massive websites, it will inherently link out a lot. And many of those links will be broken.
The simplest way to do this is to take your favorite premium backlink tool, drop in Quora & export broken outgoing links.
Once you have that massive list, you can use your spreadsheet skills to sift and sort relevant links – and go from there.
Aside – occasionally, Ahrefs / SEMrush will not have an index of outgoing links. So – you can switch to manual mode.
You can use a Chrome extension like Check My Links to manually check outgoing links on the most relevant answers if you would like to do a more manual campaign.
Use Quora To Find Influencers / Promoters
Lastly, you can use Quora to find and research websites or people who might be interested in promoting your content or working with you to develop a complementary relationship. The new Spaces feature makes this a bit easier.
Just like LinkedIn or Pinterest or any other platform that holds personal information, Quora is a great way to understand and pre-qualify your prospects. This way you are less likely to spam people and more likely to find people who are truly interested in working with you.
Next Steps
I have written several of these posts on how to use different websites to do better SEO and better content marketing. You can read guides on using content idea tools, Pinterest, Reddit, Wikipedia, Display Planner, and even Google Books.
But Quora is particularly interesting because it can serve so many different use cases for SEO, and has such descriptive high-quality content.
If you don’t have an account or have never used Quora, go to set one up now and start using the site.
And once you’re comfortable with the site and understand how the community & interests work, you can use it to expand and refine your SEO and content marketing campaigns.
Be sure to explore the full list of Free Tools To Find Prequalified Content Ideas!
