Is Quora low competition?

[WinMore]

Having Insomna the past few days I was listening to Income School while doing keyword research.
They mentioned that forums are easy to beat competition. I'm not sure if that's 100% true (I can imagine if a thread is 100% spot on on the search query that it isn't seen as a weak result by google?).

I would argue that Quora and StackOverflow also fall under "forums". But I can't for a second imagine that StackOverflow doesn't have high authority...

What do you guys make of this?

 

[Ryuzaki]

Quora and StackOverflow shouldn't be thought of as forums. They should be thought of as Q&A platforms.

The classical problem with forums in Google is that they're 100% user-generated content, which is assumed to barely be moderated with no editorial oversight. They're not wrong, and that's why you rarely see actual forums except for long-tails that lack sufficient content out there on the web.

Quora, on the other hand, has some moderation and has at least some validation by the users where they upvote and re-sort the content from best to worst. They also perfectly serve the needs of "question queries."

So I'd say it depends. If you're trying to take Quora down on "question queries" you're better off aiming for the spot #2. If you beat them, great. I wouldn't make it my site's mission.

But, to bring real life examples into it, I've gone after plenty of Q&A style searches. If you do a better job that Quora you may not beat them for the core query but you'll get tons of other related searches that they may not get. You'll still get plenty of traffic.

 

[socialpatterns]

Yes, I agree with Ryuzaki. Interesting points about quora vs forums.

More often I look at Quora as low competition, but it really does all depend on the keyword or topic. Sometimes it's easy to outrank, sometimes it's not.

The reason I may look at it as low competition: On one end, sometimes multiple viewpoints or answers from different people offer value to the end-user. However, sometimes the searcher just wants the answer, conveniently laid out and organized (like a blog post would offer), without having to read a bunch of entries dig to find the info. In these cases, you may be able to outrank if your content shines.

On the other hand, if quora already sufficiently answers a given query, and you can't add a lot more value, then quora does have plenty of authority, branding, click-throughs, etc. to keep their ranking.

 

[secretagentdad]

Hard to outrank pages have more responses and answers with lots of upvotes because Quoras internal linking structure prioritizes them

You can also check for external backlinks to the question url.

Pages with out links are generally ranking because the query is obscure and google doesn't have anything else to show.