Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Do Q&A 's work for SEO
-
If I create a good community in my particular field on my SEO site and have a quality Q&A section like this etc (ripping of MOZ's idea here sorry, I hope it's ok) will the long term returns be worth the effort of creating and man ageing this. Is the user created content of as much use as I think it will be?
-
As an early member of Moz, I can tell you that what brought me back to the site everyday was the blog and the comments on the blog. However I rarely commented on posts, I didn't didn't answer or ask any Q&A, and I didn't use the tools very much (although I used free tools at other sites pretty often) but I thought they provided a lot of credibility. The content was very high quality and taught me to do my job better. You could tell that quite an investment was being made in the content and that there was a dedication to it and the community.
It's my feeling that it was the content and the tools that developed nurtured a community Q&A section--it didn't just spring out of nowhere. A lot of work first went into building a community where a Q&A section could flourish. I think the long term rewards will be worth it as long as you're in it for sake of building a community and not for the sake of any SEO value the community can provide.
-
Do you think you'd be able to attract authority figures in your industry to support your Q&A sectrion?
-
im in the equestrian industry and there is a number of thriving fourums out there however like all forums the quality of info is dubious and as yet the Q&A style of community has not yet been made. I feel this is an opertunity I could work with.
I realise that its a long game and will take lots of work. My main worry is that we are a retailer and that people may not trust our Q&A as we are retailers and no matter how much we separate our sales hat from our community element I feel it may not work. The fact that it has not been done make me think it is worth a try.
Any examples of an ecommerce site with a thriving community attached that would be a good model to emulate?
-
User Generated content can work amazingly well, even just being able to entice people to leave great comments on your articles can pretty awesome.
You do have some challenges through:
1. Cultivating a community.
Lots of website/webmasters have the thought - "Wouldn't it be good if I had a forum" and after getting things up and running are surprised to find that nobody's participating and the forums are dead.
It's a bit like organising a party, getting in the cheese and wine only, to find you've over estimated your popularity and end up drinking alone with the brie.
Do you have an audience in mind. What are their goals and needs. Would they expect to satisfy those goals by coming to you?
I think you'll find it a little harder than you imaging to "create a good community".
2. Differentiating yourself from others
If you're "just like the next guy" then why should anyone use your Q&A? How can you stand apart and offer something different and valuable to everyone else? There's little point just trying to copy someone else - they're already off and running and you're likely to be playing catch-up.
Unless you have something unique and valuable to offer (and be honest about this!). What's your value proposition. What's in it for your audience?
One tactic would be to cater to a very specific niche. One that is super-targetted to your own business offerings. This has pros and cons of course. The smaller the niche, the smaller the potential income. However, you'll be better able to specialise and become relevant to that niche.
3. Moderating and feeding
User-generated content sounds fantastic - just sit back and watch all this awesome content being created before your very eyes.
It's not quite as easy as that. Moderating and maintaining your community will take time and effort. So you'll need to make sure you have the resources available and the desire to do so. Managing people can be unpredictable and difficult so don't consider user generated content in any form as a quick win.
As well as moderating, you need to keep your audience focused and engaged. It's not going to be quick either.
All this can take you away from free earning work, and your business goals so do keep the opportunity cost in mind.
-
I think it's a great way to develop future content. If you have good analytics tracking on your Q&A (or FAQ section for some sites) you can take the questions that get a ton of traffic and make posts out of them for your main site. Also, if you have a particular section/topic that gets a ton of questions about it (ie panda, penguin, hummingbird, etc) you could develop a webinar for the people that come to your site.
As you develop your site and the Q&A section becomes widely used, you'll start to see questions show in Google searches. In general, as long as you develop that section for your USERS and not for Google specifically, you'll get the traffic you want and more sales (assuming that's the goal).
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
After hack and remediation, thousands of URL's still appearing as 'Valid' in google search console. How to remedy?
I'm working on a site that was hacked in March 2019 and in the process, nearly 900,000 spam links were generated and indexed. After remediation of the hack in April 2019, the spammy URLs began dropping out of the index until last week, when Search Console showed around 8,000 as "Indexed, not submitted in sitemap" but listed as "Valid" in the coverage report and many of them are still hack-related URLs that are listed as being indexed in March 2019, despite the fact that clicking on them leads to a 404. As of this Saturday, the number jumped up to 18,000, but I have no way of finding out using the search console reports why the jump happened or what are the new URLs that were added, the only sort mechanism is last crawled and they don't show up there. How long can I expect it to take for these remaining urls to also be removed from the index? Is there any way to expedite the process? I've submitted a 'new' sitemap several times, which (so far) has not helped. Is there any way to see inside the new GSC view why/how the number of valid URLs in the indexed doubled over one weekend?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rickyporco0 -
Paragraphs/Tables for Content & SEO
Hi Does anyone know if Google prefers paragraphs over content in a table, or doesn't it make much difference?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Ranking 1st for a keyword - but when 's' is added to the end we are ranking on the second page
Hi everyone - hope you are well. I can't get my head around why we are ranking 1st for a specific keyword, but then when 's' is added to the end of the keyword - we are ranking on the second page. What could be the cause of this? I thought that Google would class both of the keywords the same, in this case, let's say the keyword was 'button'. We would be ranking 1st for 'button', but 'buttons' we are ranking on the second page. Any ideas? - I appreciate every comment.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S0 -
How does Infinite Scrolling work with unique URLS as users scroll down? And is this SEO friendly?
I was on a site today and as i scrolled down and viewed the other posts that were below the top one i read, i noticed that each post below the top one had its own unique URL. I have not seen this and was curious if this method of infinite scrolling is SEO friendly. Will Google's spiders scroll down and index these posts below the top one and index them? The URLs of these lower posts by the way were the same URLs that would be seen if i clicked on each of these posts. Looking at Google's preferred method for Infinite scrolling they recommend something different - https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/02/infinite-scroll-search-friendly.html . Welcome all insight. Thanks! Christian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sundance_Kidd0 -
Is Chamber of Commerce membership a "paid" link, breaking Google's rules?
Hi guys, This drives me nuts. I hear all the time that any time value is exchanged for a link that it technically violates Google's guidelines. What about real organizations, chambers of commerce, trade groups, etc. that you are a part of that have online directories with DO-follow links. On one hand people will say these are great links with real value outside of search and great for local SEO..and on the other hand some hardliners are saying that these technically should be no-follow. Thoughts???
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
Need a layman's definition/analogy of the difference between schema and structured data
I'm currently writing a blog post about schema. However I want to set the record straight that schema is not exactly the same as structured data, although both are often used interchangeably. I understand this schema.org is a vocabulary of global identifiers for properties and things. Structured data is what Google officially stated as "a standard way to annotate your content so machines can understand it..." Does anybody know of a good analogy to compare the two? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
What are Soft 404's and are they a problem
Hi, I have some old pages that were coming up in google WMT as a 404. These had links into them so i thought i'd do a 301 back to either the home page or to a relevant category or page. However these are now listed in WMT as soft 404's. I'm not sure what this means and whether google is saying it doesn't like this? Any advice welcomed.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Aikijeff0 -
Is 404'ing a page enough to remove it from Google's index?
We set some pages to 404 status about 7 months ago, but they are still showing in Google's index (as 404's). Is there anything else I need to do to remove these?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0