How to Uncover Conversion Focused Keywords Using Quora and Reddit

Your keywords are the heart and soul of your SEO strategy. Without a set of high volume, low competition keywords, all the links you build won't make a dent in your traffic.

The trouble is, finding high quality keywords is hard. Most tools don't do a great job of finding long tail keywords, conversion-focused keywords. Even when they do, these keywords don't always translate into high quality, useful content.

There is one solution: community-focused websites like Quora and Reddit.

These websites curate questions and discussions from millions of members from across the world. Because of the sheer breadth of their membership, you will easily find thousands of questions related to your niche.

As it turns out, these questions are also a great source of conversion-focused keywords.

In this post, I’m going to show you how to use Quora and Reddit to do your keyword research.

Using Quora for Keyword Research

Quora was founded in 2009 by two former Facebook employees to help people find the “best answer to any question”. Seven years later, it is one of the world’s top 125 websites with over 80M users every month.

Quora works on a simple model: community members ask and answer questions. Anyone with a Quora account can ask a question on any topic under the sun, and anyone, regardless of experience or expertise, can provide an answer.

This model helps Quora gain over 6,000 questions per day with over 8M questions in total.

All these questions (and their answers) makes Quora one of the most powerful sources for finding conversion-focused keywords people actually care about.

Let’s take an example. Suppose you search for a topic like “blogging”. This is what you’ll see:

After selecting the second result - “Blogging” - you should see a ‘Topic FAQs’...

...and a ‘feed’ with a list of questions and answers:

Both the FAQ and the Q&A are great for finding conversion-focused keywords.

For example, one of the first questions asked in the feed is “what are the best blogging platforms?”:

This gives us a keyword - “best blogging platforms”.

Plugging this keyword into the AdWords Keyword Planner shows the following:

This way you can find dozens of keywords with questions that people actually want answers to.

However, understand that not all questions will contain keywords directly. Most questions actually revolve around a keyword that is implied in the question itself.

For example, one of the first questions you’ll see when you search for “Inbound Marketing” is “what are the top inbound marketing platforms out there?”:

The keyword you’d get directly from this question is “top inbound marketing platforms”.

Searching for this exact keyword, however, doesn’t show up anything:

This doesn’t mean that people don’t care to know about the “top inbound marketing platforms out there”. It just means that people are using variations of this keyword in search engines.

When you search for “top inbound marketing platforms”, for example, here’s what you see:

Only one result - the top ranked Quora answer - actually uses the keyword exactly. The other top results use variations of the same keyword.

This is essentially what modern SEO is all about - finding topics people are interested in, not just keywords. And for this, Quora is a goldmine.

Finding Conversion-Focused Keywords on Quora

You can brainstorm hundreds of keywords and topic ideas from Quora within hours. We, however, want to find keywords that will help us convert users.

For this, you need to find keywords that target customers in the Decision-stage of the Buyer’s Journey.

This is the stage where customers are actively evaluating different solutions before deciding what to buy.

For example, questions like “What is Inbound Sales?” or “What are the Best Inbound Marketing Strategies?” are unlikely to convert easily.

With such questions, customers show that they are still trying to understand inbound marketing and are a long way off from purchasing a tool or a service.

On the other hand, a question like “How much does inbound marketing cost?” shows that the customer is actively evaluating different solutions to find something that fits his budget.

There are two ways to find such decision-stage questions on Quora:

1. Dig through the questions feed.

With this tactic, you simply scroll through the feed to find questions that might lead to a conversion.

Scrolling through the feed for “inbound marketing”, I found this question:

This would give us a keyword like “best CMS for designers”. A customer searching for this keyword is likely to be looking for a designer-focused CMS tool.

Here’s another question I found:

This would give us keywords like “Drupal vs Magento”, “Drupal pros and cons”, “Magento pros and cons”, etc. Customers evaluating CMS tools would arguably search for these keywords.

2. Find related questions.

With this tactic, you find one Decision-stage question, then click on it to find similar related questions in the sidebar.

For example, clicking on the question - “How much does inbound marketing cost?” - shows the following questions in the sidebar:

The top two questions would make for great decision-stage keywords.

This now brings us to Reddit and how you can use it to find conversion-focused keywords.

Using Reddit for Keyword Research

Reddit is similar to Quora in that it is community powered. But while Quora is heavily moderated, Reddit is mostly a free-for-all, with over 9,000 communities (called “subreddits”) and 227M unique visitors.

Keyword research using Reddit follows the Quora model - find a community related to your niche, then go through the discussions to find relevant questions. Thanks to the sheer number of communities, it is easy to find something that caters to your niche.

Start off by looking up your niche in Reddit’s search:

This is what I see when I search for “headphones”:

The top subreddit - r/headphones with 65,469 subscribers - looks very promising.

Opening it, I see a list of discussions and external links. The former can be identified by the “self.[subreddit name]” prefix.

To find the best discussions and links, click on ‘Top’. Then from the top left drop-down menu, select “Past Week”, “Past Month”, “Past Year”, or “All Time”.

Looking at the top results from “Past Week”, I see a bunch of very promising topics:

You can use the three highlighted results to come up with some great keywords and content ideas, such as:

1. Best mainstream gaming headsets

2. Gaming headsets for under $400

3. Introduction to open-back headphones

I prefer to look at weekly or monthly top results as opposed to ‘all-time’ top results. That way, you get more quality discussions and fewer images and memes.

You can repeat this tactic for any subreddit to find great keyword ideas.

Finding Conversion-Focused Keywords Using Reddit

As with Quora, we don’t just want to find keywords; we want to find conversion-focused keywords.

Reddit is particularly helpful here since a lot of users come to different subreddits to get buying advice. Finding such purchase-related discussions is great for coming up with Decision-stage keyword ideas.

Here’s an example of how to do this: on the /r/headphones subreddit, go to the search box and type in “buying”. Make sure to check “Limit my search to r/headphones”.

When you do this, you’ll see a list of discussions from the subreddit with the keyword “buying” in them:

All these discussions are great for coming up with keywords and questions people actually ask when they’re searching for headphones to buy.

For example, scrolling through this list, I see a question that would be great as an article:

Here’s another discussion that can be easily converted into an article to help customers buy headphones at the right time:

These biweekly advice threads on buying headphones are also very useful for finding conversion-focused keywords.

For example, the first post in the discussion lists highly specific requirements.

You can use this information to come up with a number of keywords and content ideas, such as:

• Headphones between $200-$350

• Over the ear headphones for laptops

• Headphones for listening to metal

Since these are long tail keywords with people searching for highly specific solutions ("headphones under $350"), converting them into customers will be relatively easy.

You can repeat this process for any popular subreddit to find dozens of conversion-focused keywords. Besides “buying”, some other search terms you can try are "advice", "review", and "guide".

Over to You

Finding conversion-focused keywords is hard, especially with conventional keyword research tools.

However, by using community-powered websites such as Quora and Reddit, you can uncover long tail keywords and questions your customers actually care about. Creating content on these keywords can not only bring you traffic, but also help you answer customer queries.

Note: The opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of Caphyon, its staff, or its partners.