4 Business benefits of using Quora

Quora is a fairly recent addition to my resource list, although I wish I’d stumbled upon it a lot sooner. For business owners it contains a wealth of information. It gives you access to industry-relevant stats, latest news, competitors and expert opinions, as well as being beneficial to your SEO.

Quora is essentially a Q&A resource where users ask questions and experts come to share information – their knowledge and their expertise. For example, I use it to gain insights into my client’s industries and sectors, to help support their business better. And I also use it for my own purposes. Answering questions where I feel I can add value.

But how can we trust these opinions?

Well for the simple reason that Quora is also used for SEO purposes. Search engines will index Quora’s questions and answers, therefore driving traffic. Anyone who’s answering a query will get their response voted on by the users, the more votes the better their results. For this reason, it’s usually only those that know their stuff who response, otherwise they just end up looking foolish.

And better yet, since Google (and other search engines) index Quora Q&A’s, by also getting involved you could see your own search engine results improve.

As a quick Quora overview, there are 4 key areas to be aware of:

1. Topics: Q&A’s tagged with a specific topic will appear in your feed.
2. People: Q&A’s posted by specific people will appear in your feed.
3. Questions: Activity about questions within topics or by people you’re following will appear in your feed
4. Boards: Allow you to organise, collect, and share anything from Quora or elsewhere on the internet.

And as promised, the top 4 benefits why you, as a business owner, should start using Quora:

1. Inbound Marketing

Be an expert in your field and answer questions posted by users where you feel you can add value. Within those answers, where relevant, include a link through to your blog for the user to find out more – obviously only do this if you’ve written a blog article on that topic! In fact here’s a good tip – Quora can also be a great place to get new blog article ideas based on what people are asking.

Or perhaps someone is searching for a particular product or service. A product or service that you offer. Respond to the query giving helpful advice and include a link back to how you can help. Just make sure you do this in a helpful, adding-value kind of way. If you don’t, and just provide a link to your website or blog for self-promoting purposes, you won’t last long on this site. That’s not the way it works, and people won’t appreciate you operating in this manner.

Links you add within Quora are classed as ‘nofollow’ links (which means they provide no SEO benefit) but they can increase your authority within your industry or niche. As long as you continually provide valuable information and helpful advice, including links in your posts will help with your inbound marketing. Try it for a few months, then check your analytics to see if traffic has started to come in from Quora. If you have, it’s working!

2. Improve Search Engine Ranking

As I’ve already mentioned, Quora Q&A’s are indexed by Google and Bing. In Bing any relevant responses to that search phrase will appear in their social side column. In Google, it will appear in the main results.

So if you’ve answered a question on something someone searches for in Google or Bing, your response could appear in the search engine results. People click on it, read it, think it’s of value and then decide to find out more about you. They may click on a link contained within your response and be directed to your website or blog – now that prospect is on your website – great news! Or perhaps they initially just decide to follow you. That’s okay too, your marketing reach has just expanded.

3. Business Trends & Competition Analysis

Use Quora for investigation purposes too. Find out what’s happening in the industry by following its leaders. Or check out what your competitors may be up to – what services / products they’re offering. What their USP is. That way you can make sure you’re always offering something different. Something to help you stand out.

And of course listen to what users are asking. Perhaps there’s an opportunity for a new product or service that you could offer to meet that need?

4. Content research.

This is probably my favourite use of Quora, and one that I think is hugely beneficial to business owners. We all know the importance of keep your website fresh, exciting and producing new content that search engines seems to love. But it must be valuable content. Content for content’s sake just won’t cut it anymore.

This is where Quora comes into play for me. By spending a bit of time browsing the topics it’s possible to come up with numerous blog article ideas, or ways to improve and freshen your website content. Using Quora means you’re focusing on the questions that your prospects are asking. By answering them in a blog or adapting your content to touch on those topics, you’re one step closer to converting that prospect into a customer or client.