It’s What You Know: How Sharing Your Expertise Can Grow Your SEO

If you own your own business, chances are good that you know your industry pretty well. Here are just a few of the places you can use that knowledge to help your business’s SEO:

1. Answer Questions on Quora

Remember Yahoo Answers? Quora is a lot like the grown-up version. Use the box at the top to search for broad topics related to your industry.

Here’s a good one that showed up for “pool cleaning”:

Not too long ago, it was much harder to Google complicated questions and get any real answers, so people had to turn to platforms like Yahoo Answers. Nowadays Google is a lot more sophisticated when it comes to answering a wide variety of questions—which means people generally turn to Quora when they want individualized answers, or they can’t find a good answer on Google, or they can’t find an answer they trust on Google.

So, when you find a question that you’re qualified to answer, go for it. Then, go write a post on your blog that covers the topic in greater depth, and edit your answer to link to it. Quora will give you a dofollow link—the kind that helps your SEO the most.

Be sure to also answer some questions without leaving links. Quora won’t appreciate it if you just use them as a platform to promote your business.

2. ProMatcher

At first glance, ProMatcher is just another directory site. However, the fun part of this site is that they’ll rank you better in their directory if you answer questions related to your industry:

This also appears to have a benefit on the links back to your own site, which is a lot more important.

3. Help a Reporter Out

Help a Reporter Out, or HARO, is one of my favorite ways to build great links for free. Just sign up and you’ll get three emails per day full of questions from reporters and bloggers looking for sources:

You won’t get a link from all of these responses, but with a little bit of persistance you can get a lot. If you’re really lucky, you can also get links from bigger publications, like the Huffington Post and Mashable.

Interested? Check out my guide on building links using HARO.

4. Blogging on Your Own Site

This one will never go out of style, but you need to know how to use it.

Readers don’t magically find blog posts to read. You can either target specific keywords and earn organic traffic from Google, share your post on social media, promote it on a variety of networks, or send it directly to friends and email subscribers.

Unfortunately, most of the benefit comes when other sites link to your blog post, which usually requires a little bit of strategy.

5. Blogging on Other Sites

Blogging on other sites is a much more effective way of growing your SEO, but you’ve got to be careful.

Contributing to another site’s blog, or guest blogging, has been singled out by Google in the past. Know what they’re looking for before you get started.

A safer, but less effective option, is to syndicate your blog posts on sites like Medium. Importing posts from your own blog into Medium gives them another shot at reaching a new audience and earning new links outside of your blog. Medium.com is also a very strong domain, which means your blog posts have a better shot of showing up on the first page of Google results, and each imported story has a little piece of code called a “canonical tag” that lets Google know that the post hosted on your own blog is the real copy.

Here’s some more info on how to import your blog posts into Medium.

6. Help Other Bloggers

Did you find a blog post that touches on your industry but gets the details wrong? Try emailing the writer. With a little luck and a little tact, you could help them out, get a link, and maybe even make a friend in the process. In fact, there’s a whole branch of SEO just dedicated to building links by finding broken links on other websites.