Hacking Quora For SEO Strategy & Growth
Have you ever wondered about getting a link on a website that can help you with SEO and also send you direct traffic that could boost leads and sales?
What if that site ALSO ranked for keywords you wanted to rank for? Not just for a few days, but rankings that held for months or years?
Almost sounds too good to be true, but Quora fits that exact situation and I’ll show you below how it has helped me in one of my SEO projects recently.
And I would have missed out on Quora if using a tool like SERPWoo hadn’t been in my daily arsenal for me to find it.
Part of the reason we developed SERPWoo was that there was no SERP Tracking tool at the time. Something that could monitor the entire SERP for you to find opportunities.
There was only generic rank trackers that monitored 1-2 URLs for you per keyword.
But there was nothing that monitored the whole SERP for you, and would alert you to important changes in those SERPs.
So we decided the build the industry’s first SERP Tracker. And we also set out to answer questions like:
- What websites have sticky-ness in the SERPs so we can try to grab a link from them?
- What websites are our competitors using to get direct traffic that might also rank for good keywords?
Answering these questions were fundamental in improving ourselves as digital marketers that got our hands dirty in real-world SEO projects, unlike the teams behind our current competitors who might have never ranked a website in their life.
So how does the team at SERPWoo get their hands dirty in SEO?
Well, when it comes time to do some Traffic Leaking and boost our SEO a bit, I head right into SERPWoo ( yeah, we use our own tools ) and research keywords important to us.
In doing research like this, I found out a few months ago that Quora.com ranked for keywords that are important to us here at SERPWoo. So I decided that would be the perfect place for us to gain some traffic and SEO benefit.
In case you didn’t know, Quora was also one of our websites to help you push down negative results like a professional ORM and while not on the list of the 35 sites to help you build trust, it should have been since it has a good DA score of 87 ( as of the time of this writing ).
So look what I found within SERPWoo for one of our keywords:
That’s Quora.com ranking in the top 10 for the last 12 months pretty much every single day on the keyword I want to rank for.
Such a score for link builders and traffic leakers like me.
Quora has a good DA, they have solid ranking ability in the keyword I want to rank for ( long term sticky-ness ), I can drop a link on their site easily, and they get a ton of traffic as a respected Q&A platform.
Direct traffic and a solid SEO link drop. Woo-Hoo!
I also noticed that for many of the other terms I wanted to rank for ( about 20 total in this project ), Quora.com URLs ranked fairly well for the majority of them too.
I decided to copy and paste all of the URLs into a text file so I could visit them and see what could be done with dropping a nice link back to SERPWoo.
While I copied and pasted several URLs in total, I noticed that many of them were actually the same URL over and over again. When I deduped the list, I actually ended up with 5 URLs from Quora.com that ended up ranking for all the terms. This made my job even easier!
This is an important tip.
You don’t have to answer a lot of questions on Quora to get traffic and SEO benefit, you only need to answer the most important ones.
See, many people do Quora all wrong.
They want to ask new questions, or answer questions that no one else really ever looks at or visits.
Hmm, why would you do that?
What’s the point in answering a question that no one else will likely see and upvote ( or click over to your site )?
You don’t want to blindly search within Quora and find questions that need answers.
You also don’t want to answer a question that has tons of other answers with lots of upvotes because your answer will likely be at the bottom of the page and never seen ( and never clicked ).
But this is what you can do:
- Put your keywords into SERPWoo
- Scan the top 100 for a Quora listing
- Copy and paste those URLs into a txt file
- Visit those URLs later and determine if you can answer the question ( legitly ) and drop a link back to your site
This process is a better plan because you know these are questions related to your site/service and will get internal traffic from Quora. But it’s also a question that ranks in Google so you end up getting search traffic from the question as well.
Even if there is no internal Quora traffic coming into that question, you know people are finding it on Google and visiting it, so why not get front and center with them by posting your answer?
But why stop at just Quora?
You can actually do this for just about any site that:
- Has good metrics ( DA, TF, Page Rank ) - Yes SERPWoo can pull Page Rank
- Allows you to be part of the conversation on their page
- Has sticky-ness in the SERPs for the keywords you want to rank for or get traffic from
- Generates a good amount of traffic on it’s own ( internal traffic ) that lots of people use
Need an example?
How about Reddit?
What about Amazon? Yes, you can drop a link on Amazon.
Search around with SERPWoo and you will find plenty of websites you can apply this technique to within your own SERPs.
So how do you actually answer these questions on Quora for the best ROI?
Well, you don’t want to post low quality answers and “copypasta” responses on Quora. That’s the first rule. Don’t write just 1 good answer and then copy that one to all future answers in the same topic either.
You want to answer each question uniquely. You want to provide value. You want to be different than the drive-by spammers that end up getting their answers removed and collapsed later on.
And dropping a link on every answer is not needed either.
I actually answered just shy of 60 questions myself, but I only posted a link back to SERPWoo on roughly 10 of those answers.
Each of my answers where several paragraphs in length and many contained images and facts no one else had posted. And I didn’t just answer one category of questions.. I actually picked different questions in different topics to answer.
I did such a good job, I actually became one of the most viewed writers in a topic that had nothing to do with SERPWoo:
You actually want to provide value and offer something no one else has talked about yet.
If you can not add something unique, try to offer a different viewpoint or “spin” to your answer if it is similar to someone else's.
And for sure, add in images/links/bullet points and personal experience if you can. That catches peoples eyes and they will more than likely read and upvote your answer if you include these.
Personally, I try to offer advice that:
- Is simple, but not shared yet
- Contains a personal experience from my unique viewpoint
- Can be visually improved by offering 2-3 images within my answer
- Has at least more than 6 paragraphs so it looks worthy of reading
- Is easy on the eyes and flows well with white space, breaks, and bold text on new sections of my answer
- Can be understood by professionals and laypersons.
But how does it actually impact my SEO?
Well, they say a picture is worth a thousand words, so I will just leave this here
Not bad for a few minutes work each day spread out over a few weeks time.
Especially considering only 1 out of every 5-6 answers contained a link back to our site.
And since we can track signups to SERPWoo, I can also say that Quora has provided direct signups ( revenue ) to our paid plans outside of the SEO benefit we received.
And this method is dead easy. Even grandma can understand and perform this type of work.
You don’t need to create a “brand” or following to benefit from this method, which is what most Quora related SEO articles are about on those other “guru” websites that try to teach you about Quora.
You don’t have to fill out your profile, follow topics, wait for new answers in your topic, or any of that other junk people pass off as advice. You especially don’t need to connect to other people either.
Just jump right in and start providing value and dropping your link when the time is right. Bypass all that other non-sense for now if you need to and start getting traffic and rankings.
I did none of the brand building, following of topics, connecting with people, or answering of new questions when people invited me to their questions. Nope. I just found a few I could answer and then the rest I found in the SERPs.
The key thing though is I provided value in all of my answers.
Pass this to a junior SEO analyst or a part-time virtual assistant as overflow work and always know they are working on tasks that can help move the needle for you and your clients.
I wanted to share more advanced info, but honestly this method can get abused rather quickly and I rather not spill all the beans on a public blog post for everyone to read and make less effective.
The more advanced white and “black” hat Quora methods I learned will end up as an exclusive guide for our paid members as part of our monthly advanced training PDFs we send out every month to paid plan members.
Not subscribed to a paid plan yet?
No worries. You can sign up today and get this guide and more each and every month. It’s something we do just for our paid plan members because we actually care about helping you stay on top of your game every month.
So what are your thoughts on Quora?
Have you found any other sites you can apply the same method to?
Share below in the comments and let’s see where we can take this.