SEO Competition Report shows you how the top 10 sites in Google for a particular keyword stack up when it comes to links and several other factors.

The Google Keyword Tool is another great way of finding out what people think of another company. You can use Google Trends for larger companies to see how often people are searching on particular company keywords.

For example, if you’re starting a search engine and want to beat Google in its own rankings, you can go to Yahoo and do the search “linkdomain:google.com” and find out that you’re up against 1.4 billion links. If you want to find out where a competitor is getting links, a Yahoo (not Google) search on the site using the command “linkdomain:” will show you most of the other party’s links.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of getting higher positions for websites by enhancing the factors that search engines want to see. One of the easiest ways of getting market intelligence on another website is to closely look at the site itself. The two biggest factors are the layout of the website and the external links pointing at it. If you look at a few dozen websites and take notes about what you like, you’ve probably reaped the benefits of several thousand hours of research and testing. To find out how much traffic your website is getting compared to that of your competitors, Compete.com is a great source of information. Web.com Search Agency has a variety of tools that can point you in the right direction.

The advent of the World Wide Web has made it possible to learn things about competitive strategies which previously had been known only to a handful of people By assembling pieces of information from different sources, you can find out which strategies you can emulate, and what approaches would be most profitable if they were applied to your own business model.

You might also find gaps in your own marketing strategy and learn ways to shore up your own practices in order to make them more profitable. If you know your enemy’s most important keywords, you can get a pretty good glimpse into their current marketing strategy. This tool is also great because it lets you see year-over-year results for certain searches, allowing you to identify seasonal sweet spots for some keywords.

First, a search engine has to be able to classify and categorize your site so it will match up with whatever keyword searches you want to be found for. As a hint, these are usually the very same keywords you are buying in PPC. Another online tool, Spyfu.com, lets you measure sampled Pay-Per-Click (PPC) spending by your competitors, and even allows you to export a list of the keywords that your competition is being found for.

Another well known success story involves Compaq’s reverse engineering of IBM’s PC architecture, which opened the door for the proliferation of cheap “IBM Compatible” personal computers (now just called PCs) and the success of Microsoft.

You can even monitor another company’s reputation and offline marketing success with a few well placed searches. Within the space of a few searches, you can get a workable profile of just about any company’s market position and its relative success in the online world. By doing a search on the company name, you can get the last month’s data on what words people associate with it, and you can even find out how many people use a certain word or phrase when the company’s name comes up.

The free version lets you compare your site traffic over time to data for 2 competitors, but you can open this up to 5 with a paid subscription. Some of this information can be obtained for free, while other data may be available through a subscription that costs a few hundred dollars per year.

The internet is a vast source of publicly available information, and several sources aggregate valuable data from various places, and make it available to you for free or at a low cost. Finally, you may learn how much information about your own site is available on the internet, which will encourage you to create a profile that impresses the people who just might be spying on you!

Since much of this information applies to your competition, you can effectively run a sophisticated intelligence operation on your adversaries without resorting to expensive or dangerous cloak-and-dagger tactics. You can then study the different tactics used by your adversaries to see which ones are the most popular for your field of business.

The advantage of Compete.com is that you can see if your competition is more popular (or spending more money) in one season versus another. Goliath position, you can use your competitor’s formidable research skills to your own advantage. Whether you’re operating out of a garage or your own office building downtown, you can still glean a lot of actionable intelligence from online sources.

McDonald’s spent a lot of time and money figuring out how much traffic was in an area, checking out various locations, and paying people to do all kinds of research which would decide if a certain spot was good for a store. One of the best known stories in marketing involves Burger King’s strategy for finding customers, which usually involved opening a store up right next to a McDonald’s franchise.

Every year companies spend millions of dollars on market research, focus groups, surveys, and special studies to find out how to better serve their customers and gain increased market share. You can improve your own site further by learning from sites like MarketingExperiments.com, which regularly runs case studies and webinars that test actual conversion results from different site types.

This allows you to either add these terms into your own campaign, or carve out a niche where you aren’t going to be outbid by someone with deeper pockets. By searching on a company name with the term “commercial” you can see comments by people about whether or not they liked a TV advertising spot.

Piggybacking on your competition’s work isn’t exactly new. You can read Patrick Hare’s full article.

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Many keyword researchers and copywriters automatically assume that searchers type in a natural word order all of the time. If a potential customer is researching prices for help desk software, that person might type in the keyword phrase “help desk software prices” (without the quotation marks) directly into a commercial search engine’s search box. This is an specific search and is about someone really searching a help desk software to buy.

When the search has just one or two words, the user is researching. This is a kind of generic search and brings a lot of results on search engines. You can try the query above and another search using only “help desk”. The first will show 10 results of about 7,850,000 pages and the second of about 98,500,000 pages.

If you are targeting a product or service to sell you’ll need to user keyword phrase 3 to 5 words. Google has a beta version that can help you find a niche and see search trends.

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