As SEO is getting more complicated, many website owners find it hard to reach to visitors solely through SEO. This is where SMO or social media optimisation comes into the picture.
SMO is a relatively cheap method of generating traffic, especially if the social media platform is easy to use and free. Forget about Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest for a moment. Our primary focus now is on Quora and driving traffic to your website.
What Is Quora?
Quora launched in 2009 as a Q&A site, aiming to help people with anything they want to know about. It currently has around 190 million users and 400,000 topics.
Some write or comment there only out of marketing purposes, and some want to help others. However, most people answering the questions are experts in their field with insider information (and want to promote the real brand behind themselves).
How Does It Work?
A simple interface helps with the navigation and leads people where they want to go. It offers you a broad range of topics to choose from which are then shown on your feed (along with the engagement from the people you follow).
You can either search for questions and answers or write your own. High-quality answers can get you “The Most Viewed Writer” badge in various categories.
The best writers in their niche can thank the views and the upvotes for their ranking. Upvotes contribute to the level of authority, which pushes your answers higher.
Once you climb that ladder, your answer gets featured in Quora’s digest.
See where we’re going with this?
Quora and Driving Traffic
Your answers can be seen thousands of times. If you’re not shamelessly promoting your website or your brand, the viewers are more likely to click on the links within your answer.
Once you get into the “Top Writers” club, the readers trust you and follow your actions on Quora.
Just like that, the connection between using Quora and driving traffic to the site is much clearer, right?
Quora Answers: The Good and the Bad
As mentioned, a blatant promotion will get you nowhere. You will waste your time writing an answer for 50 views and no measurable CTR. Following are the examples of bad answers.
Out of respect to fellow Quorans, I’ll take an example of my early writing on Quora.
Here you can see how bad my answer was. I openly promoted the company I worked for when I should only mention it as an afterthought.
What’s more, the question is as bad as well. Even if I didn’t write it, I would now probably go ahead and write my question before answering it.
Similar Answers can be found throughout Quora, and most of them have these annoying lines:
- “READ the following article to get an answer to your question.”
- “Read my blog : ____”
- “You can find the answer over on my website ____.”
The time spent on Quora taught me that I could do better. Also, I learnt that people hate shameless promotion.
A few months after my first answers, I managed to get 400 more views and a few upvotes on a single answer.
This screenshot shows how real data, no visible promotion and a nice visual element give you more views.
Naturally, if the answer were more in-depth and showed more real-life statistics, it would be more successful.
Sadly, I wasn’t regular on Quora and didn’t get as many views in the end. However, I’m sure anyone who spends there at least an hour per week and writes good answers for a longer period can be featured in Quora’s digest.
Conclusion
Even though SEO still stands strong, SMO has made its way into affordable website marketing. No doubt that Quora and driving traffic to the site are tightly bound, and more businesses realise that. If you are thinking about outsourcing SEO, just feel free to contact us!
For some, there’s still a lot to learn about proper writing, but if you follow our advice, you won’t regret it!
