If you write it, they will come. Seems easy enough, right? Simply writing new blogs every week or month should help generate new traffic to your website. However, content marketers around the world (including myself!) would recommend taking your efforts one step further. To effectively utilize and market your content, you need to get creative in the distribution.
With a background in content and social media, my perspective on link building is very socialized. Rather than only focusing on the technical aspects of gaining links, I put more emphasis on fulfilling users’ wants and needs. Quora helps with this!
Are you ready to jumpstart your content marketing efforts? If so, maybe it’s time that you tried your hand at forum link building! Strap in as we take a deep dive into the world of link building and learn how to drive traffic with Quora.
What is Link Building?
Link building refers to a variety of methods used to increase the number of high-quality links pointing back to your website. While link building often includes spending an immense amount of time researching and reaching out to external sources, the payoff is exponential. With the right link building strategy, you can increase your website’s domain authority, boost brand awareness, and gain a ton of referral traffic.
What is Forum Link Building?
Forum link building is a specific type of link building that utilizes forums as the main platform. You have the ability to create backlinks to your website on question and answer pages. These backlinks increase your website authority, which can increase your ranking in Google search engine results pages (SERPs). This can be crucial if you’re trying to outrank competitors in your industry.
There are hundreds of forum link building websites available. The ones you choose to utilize may depend on your industry and the type of marketing you’re focusing on. To get a sense of where you and your company lies, take a look at the Conversational Prism. Some examples of useful forums to build links on include:
Unfortunately, forums do not offer link equity, which is the passage of value and authority from one page to another. Despite that, they’re still a great component to an effective marketing strategy. Forum link building allows you to generate more traffic to your website and establish yourself or your business as a knowledgeable authority.
Why You Should Use Quora
Quora is by far one of our favorite forum link building platforms, and one that we’ve had the most success with. It’s classified as an expert question and answer forum, allowing you to dominate your field of expertise. Get a more in-depth look into why Quora works and the benefits it provides to SEOs and those looking to create backlinks for their website.
Why Quora Works
Thanks to its user-friendly interface and all-inclusive community, Quora has become a one-stop shop for all types of questions and answers. The platform generates a ton of engagement from its users, which is extremely helpful for those looking to gain backlinks. To give you an idea of just how large and all-encompassing Quora is, consider the following statistics:
- 300 million users utilize Quora on a monthly basis.
- Quora houses over 400,000 topics.
- The company is estimated to be worth $1.8 billion.
But, why is Quora one of the best forum link building websites? The answer is simple. Quora allows you to communicate directly with people who are interested in the topics you’re knowledgeable about. Rather than hoping your audience comes to you, you reach out to them in a way that’s both authentic and useful. Plus, your answers continue to be seen by new users as time goes on. This creates a powerful connection that allows you to drive traffic to your website for years to come.
The Benefits of Quora
There are so many advantages of using Quora that can be leveraged by marketers and business owners. To get the most out of your efforts, you need to fully understand the ways in which the platform can work for you.
Create Backlinks
As previously stated, you can use Quora for backlinks and website linking profile growth. As you answer questions, you can add links back to your website, helping to guide users to the relevant, useful information they need. The key is using long-tail keywords and relevant anchor text within your Quora answers.
Since the links on Quora are no-follow links, they won’t pass equity onto your site. However, they will concisely pass traffic to it. This shows Google that your site is a reliable, trustworthy source of information.
Establish EAT
EAT is an acronym that stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trust. It’s a coveted method in marketing that helps websites rank better in Google SERPs. However, the method can be applied to just about any type of marketing, including forum link building on Quora.
- Expertise — Being a go-to expert in your field will not go unnoticed on Quora. By answering a lot of questions with useful and relevant information, you will gain followers who will recognize your knowledge in the topic or industry.
- Authority — In this case, authority goes hand-in-hand with your expertise. Answering questions on Quora gives you the ability to leverage yourself or your company over competitors.
- Trust — By consistently being a useful resource for users, you will gain their trust. Trust can turn into loyalty, which means users will be more willing to utilize you or your company’s products and services over another.
Gain Insight About Your Audience
Since Quora allows you to speak directly to your target audience, you can use the platform to gain more knowledge about them. What are their main concerns and questions? What are they searching for? Quora provides you with an opportunity to understand your target audience better.
Generate New Content Ideas
This Quora benefit is often overlooked. Thanks to the vast amount of users utilizing the platform each day, you’re bound to come across a variety of patterns in the topics you see. You’re likely to see questions and answers surrounding your industry that you haven’t thought of. You can use this information, put your own spin on it, and create new, unique content for your own website.
How to Drive Traffic with Quora
Now that you know just how beneficial Quora can be for your marketing strategy, it’s time to get started! We’ve created a step-by-step guide to getting started with Quora. With the right strategy and knowledge about guidelines, you’ll be driving traffic to your website in no time!
1. Create Relevant, SEO-Optimized Content
This is a crucial step, even if you aren’t planning on using Quora as a way to build links! Creating relevant, SEO-optimized content helps you gain leverage against your competition by allowing you to rank better and be found in the Google SERPs.
When it comes to Quora, having relevant, SEO-optimized content already at your fingertips eases the workload as you try to link build. You’ve already done the leg work, now you just need to distribute it to the right people on Quora! Plus, once users navigate to your website, they’ll see it’s a great, trustworthy resource, making it more likely that they recommend your site to others or visit again in the future.
2. Create a Quora Profile
After you have a good amount of useful content on your website, you can begin your Quora journey by creating a profile! This is where you need to make some decisions. Do you want to create a Quora account to represent your entire company or just yourself? There are pros and cons to both, and an option to put you somewhere in the middle.
Company Profiles
Creating a company profile is great if you’re simply a representative of the company. You can gather information from others within your company to answer a wide range of questions regarding your products and services. The disadvantage is that users don’t always like communicating with generic company profiles. You may not gain as much engagement as you would with an individual profile.
Individual Profiles
An individual profile still allows you to be a representative of your company. However, you give users the opportunity to put a face to the name and verify that you’re an actual person, not just a company trying to market themselves. In this day and age, so many things are run by computers and automated systems. Sometimes, users just want to speak directly with other humans. That’s why Quora users are more likely to engage with individual profiles than company profiles. With this type of profile, though, users may begin to only recognize your name and not the company you’re truly trying to represent.
Individual Personas
If you’re only a representative of your company but still want to reap the benefits of individual forum profiles, you may want to opt for creating a persona! You can create a knowledgeable persona that gives users the perception that you’re a single individual. However, in reality, you are gathering information from within your company to provide users with the answers they’re looking for. The downfall of individual personas is that you most likely won’t be able to share personal stories that catch users’ attention on forums. Your persona profile may lack those deep, personal details that help to create connections with other users.
Once you’ve picked and created the type of profile you want, be sure to add as much detail as you can! Add a profile picture, any credentials and highlights, and be sure to create an intriguing “About” section (with a link to your website!).
3. Collect Questions
After you’ve spent time fleshing out your profile, you can begin to collect potential questions to answer surrounding your main topics of interest. As you search for topics, be sure to bookmark them for future reference. You can also save individual questions by flagging them to be placed in your “Answer Later” list. To mark questions as such, click the three dots icon on a question and select “Answer Later.”
Quora often emails you new questions surrounding these topics so you can be the first to answer. By being the first to answer questions, you have more of an opportunity to make an impact on those who are seeking answers to new issues, concerns, and curiosities.
4. Take Time to Craft Your Answers
When you’re ready to begin answering questions, you’ll want to make sure you put in the effort to ensure your answers will stand out from others. By using the suggestions below, your answers will be concise, clear, and useful for users.
Use Formatting Options
Formatting options allow you to create visually-appealing answers that are easy to read. On Quora, you’re able to bold headings, italicize subheadings, and create bulleted and numbered lists. You also have the option of indenting sections and adding quotes. These formatting tools help you break up large sections of text, making your answers pleasing to the eye and easy to understand.
Incorporate Images
Visuals are another way to leverage your answers against others. By providing examples, graphs, charts, and infographics, you’re sure to catch the attention of readers. The images will help support your answer while providing users with additional information.
Add Value
Value is one of the main components of any great Quora answer. You need to be sure each answer you create is useful to the user, not just promotional. Offer expert knowledge and information while backing up your claims with reputable sources. Valuable answers tend to receive more “upvotes,” which signifies to readers that your answers are the best. Upvotes also allow you to rank better on Quora and gain you better visibility among readers.
Create Links
Don’t forget the most important part of your Quora answers! Add a link back to relevant information on your website. Whether you link to a blog post or specific product information, be sure that you place it on relevant anchor text. This is an essential step in using Quora for backlinks.
Follow Quora Guidelines
Many individuals and companies trying to market themselves on Quora tend to get banned or have their answers removed due to too much promotional content. Keep Quora’s rules and regulations in mind as you craft your answers and strategize how you’ll link back to your website.
5. Maintain Your Profile
After you’ve spent some time answering questions on Quora, make time every week to maintain your profile! You can:
- Answer newly-asked questions.
- Engage with others on the platform by upvoting their answers.
- Add blogs to your profile page.
- Create your own questions for other users.
- Share questions and answers on your social media platforms.
When it comes to adding blogs to your profile page, you don’t always need to generate new content! By this point, you will already have generated great content on your website. You can repurpose that content on your Quora blog and link back to your website. Your Quora blogs will show up in relevant Quora search results, helping to promote you, your profile, and your linked website even further.
6. Track Results in Google Analytics
Just like any of your other website data, you can track how many people have been driven to your website from Quora. Your Quora insights in Google Analytics will be a great indicator of how well your Quora content is performing.
By default, Google doesn’t consider Quora as a social platform. Therefore, it can sometimes be labeled as referral traffic. When you go into Google Analytics, you want to sort your traffic by medium. Then, you can see how much traffic came in through Quora. Follow these steps to filter for Quora data:
- On the left-hand panel, select “Acquisition.”
- Select “All Traffic.”
- Select “Channels.”
- Change the date range in the right-hand corner to reflect the amount of time you’d like to view data for.
- Under “Primary Dimension,” select “Source.”
- Quora data should display in the data chart. If it doesn’t, you can navigate to it quickly by typing “Quora” into the search box.
One thing to note is that if you’re using Quora paid advertising, your Quora data may be filtered under “other,” which can make your analytics hard to interpret. To fix this issue, we recommend tagging your Quora ads as social media ads. This should make your Quora ad data easier to view and understand.
Is Quora Really Worth It?
In my experience with working on Quora, my answer is yes! While Quora isn’t a massive traffic driver, you are still bound to see results. Remember, you want quality traffic over quantity. You are going straight to the source, which means you’re talking directly to the audience you want to acquire. They’re more likely to be interested in what you have to offer because they were the ones searching for it.
Quora provides the ability to spread brand awareness, create a rapport with users, and understand your audience better. As an agency, we love using Quora because each page on the forum is indexed, which allows your answers to be found and seen as an authority in the SERPs.
If you’d like to know more about my experience with forum link building and Quora, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Let’s talk! You can find me on LinkedIn.
thanks for the post about how to drive traffic from Quora ..
Nice article, I will be glad to get more tips on how to grow with Quora
Thanks for sharing this valuable content. I have learned a new technique of forum posting.