What do you do to research the competition? - SEO wise?

[firestarter]

Hi guys,

I have been reading up on SEO for while now and i am jumping on the train to build some mini-sites revolving certain niche topics.
And of course the first thing you do is to check out the results that appear for doing a "insert keyword here" search phrase to see how many results come up for that specific search.

What do you do when checking out the competition? What do you look for what you can improve on to outrank your competition?

Real example:

Results 1 - 10 of about 27,900 for "keyword keyword". (0.12 seconds)

Results 1 - 10 of about 21,600 for inanchor:"keyword keyword". (0.62 seconds)

Results 1 - 10 of about 952 for intitle:"keyword keyword"

Now the inanchor: search is a nice command to see how competitive the keyword(s) is because getting anchor backlinks is a core factor to achieve better SERPs.

And the intitle: search command is interesting to see how well optimized your competitor page titles are in the sense how many sites actually take in account such a important piece of SEO real estate.

When seeing the above real life results what else would you do to find factors you can improve on?
How would you continue to analyze the SERPs further?

Also how do you regard the competition seeing the above results?

What would your strategy be?

A lot of questions for a first time post :=) But i hope to spark an interesting discussion from which we all can learn from.

-Firestarter

[Marketing Guy]

Not too relevant, but I thought I'd share. I spend about an hour this evening looking through articles submitted to an article site by another SEO agency. I now have a list of about 40 of their clients.

Point is that many less than intelligent competitors will reuse the same method over and over and you can generally read between the lines and pluck out some information from those sources.

In terms of pure SEO though - I wouldn't worry too much what the other guy is doing - every SEO has a different way of doing things, even if it's only a minor difference. As long as you are doing things right, just keep pushing things that way.

The competitor you mention looks competitive - but it's still possible to run a successfull SEO campaign without pushing them from the top spot.

My priorities would be:

- Finding new ways to generate business
- Finding new ways to generate more income from my business
- Finding new ways to keep visitors coming back to the site
- Finding new ways to generate traffic from my site
<--- SEO fits in about here
- Finding new ways to improve on SEO - new sources of links, new keywords to target, etc
- Worrying what the competition is doing

MG

[firestarter]

Hi MG,

Thank you very much for your input!

Off topic:
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The thing is, my goal is just that, to get on the first page so that means i would need to push competitors down the SERPs.
It's not that i would want to create traffic for my business but for personal developments.

But i need to actually have a good strategy to determine which results are actually worth competing for.

Doing an additional search with a search operator combo i discovered that the actual competing pages are in fact not that many by doing a search command like:

intitle:"keyword keyword" inanchor:"keyword keyword"

which gives me:

Results 1 - 10 of about 929 for intitle:"keyword keyword" inanchor:"keyword keyword"

So there are 929 competing pages that take the effort to optimize their page titles and anchor keywords in their back links.
That's an interesting number and worth my time to analyze these competing pages further.

What other type of SEO factors do you take in account for to analyze the competing pages that you can use to improve on your own project?