Answer marketing for real-time search strategy

Asking questions and receiving answers can be a great way to participate in an online community--whether you are a community manager, user or brand. Some answer sites score high in search rankings. An example of this is Yahoo Answers, which can be found for numerous question queries.

Answer marketing can certainly play a role in a real-time search or digital strategy. Answer sites are often more than passive repositories of knowledge. Many popular answer sites contain actual or near real-time features--such as voting, scoring, filters, feeds and search pinging. Content within answer site can go live within search engines quickly--helping to change SERPs and make community responses findable within minutes to hours.  This can be a valuable asset to a digital marketing strategy.

Real-time qualities of answers

• Answer site content can go live within minutes or seconds
• Many answer sites have frequent updates and are well-indexed, which can help position them in search engines
• Question and answer results often score high in search engines for related queries
• Users often go directly to answer sites for information when Google doesn't have a clear answer
• Answer sites provide immediate gratification for users
• Many have voting and sharing mechanisms which help position and promote it's content socially
• Perfect venue for non-sales information as long as community rules are observed
• Answers (both in search and within answer sites) serve as a reference point for users with questions, which can garner links, tweets, shares and likes

Examples of answer sites

• Yahoo! Answers
• answers.com
• Linkedin
• Quora
• Ask.com
• (Although not traditionally an answer site, it is perhaps the biggest answer site) wikipedia.org