Most businesses have considered, at one point or another, the benefits of adding a forum or Q&A site to their domain.
One of the biggest benefits that forums and Q&A sites offer is the ability to generate a high amount of site traffic.
1. People Google Questions, Not Just Keywords
One of the reasons that these types of sites are generating more traffic is because of the rising trend of Googling questions.
While the questions do still contain keywords on the same topic, search volumes for generic primary keywords are seeing a slight decrease.
In fact, it’s becoming more and more commonplace for people to simply type the question into Google, than to use primary keywords and sift through the results looking for the content that they want. While you could create a specific piece of content to address each question, often users will do this for you if they create a thread on your forum.
2. Questions Include Long Tail Keywords
Another benefit that forms and Q&A sites both offer is the ability to easily incorporate longtail keywords.
Whereas, with blogging alone, it is often hard to incorporate long tail keywords that are you trying to target.
With questions, answers and forums, it is easy to incorporate three and four keyword phrases that are very specific to your market. This is because, in most cases, “natural” questions already contain long tail keywords.
3. Provide Genuine, Relative and Authoritative Answers
Whether you build your own forum or Q&A site, or use someone else’s, you can still leverage a great deal of traffic through this medium.
There are many resources that can help you learn How to Increase Website Traffic. However, it is important that you do not spam the sites as your posts and links will most likely get deleted.
Yet, when you provide genuine, relative and authoritative answers, you’ll find that people are following back to your website.
4. Boosts a Website’s SEO
When you’re leveraging the power of forums and Q&A websites, there are definitely some SEO advantages to be had.
For starters, these sites create the perfect storm for generating a diverse array of back links for your website. In fact, in order to make a link campaign look natural it is important to have back links from a variety of sources (forums, blogs, news sites, social bookmarks, static sites, etc.).
In addition, as a result of the variety of links, Google and people alike will find your site more authoritative and genuine.
5. Builds Trust
Here’s where the part about not spamming Q&A sites or forums comes into play.
People have quickly become very savvy when it comes to spam. If you’re leaving low quality answers, lots of links to your site, and constantly promoting your own products or services, then people will quickly be turned off.
However, when you take a more non-promotional route, and provide relevant and authoritative answers, people are more likely to look to you as an authority in your niche.
In fact, this is also a great opportunity for you to boost your thought leadership in order to set your site (and services or products) apart from the crowd.
These are only a few of the ways that forums and Q&A sites can be leveraged to generate site traffic.
Whether you build one on your own domain or simply use a popular site such as Quora, when used correctly these sites can offer massive benefits for both SEO and site traffic.
Do you know of any other benefits of Q&A sites and forums? Let me know in the comments section below.
