For me, understanding competition is really very hard, how do you understand competition in SEO?

One of the most effective ways to see what your competitors are doing is buying them. If they are a store of brick and mortar. Go to see how they merchandise their products.

I like to use a simple system to get initial information on the difficulty of ranking for a keyword:

If a keyword has between 0 and 500 monthly searches:
and less than 10,000 competing pages - Rating = Good

If a keyword has between 501 and 1,000 monthly searches:
and less than 10,000 competing pages - Rating = Good

If a keyword has over 1,000 monthly searches:
and less than 10,000 competing pages - Rating = Excellent
between 10,001 and 20,000 competing pages - Rating = Good

Using this system I have found it relatively easy to rank for keywords with an excellent rating and fairly easy for those ranking in the good range.

You need to check,
- Number of backlinks
- SEO/ PPC keywords that are generating maximum traffic
- PPC marketing campaign
- Content strategy
- Local marketing strategies

I am stalking my competitors all the time...I use 'Keyword Country to track my competitors' ranking, traffic,SEO and PPC strategy and I am surprised to see how aggressively they are working!

For me, best of the best way to gauge the competition is type in Google the targeting keyword and see where your website has ranked in Google. If it is at position 8 on first page of Google then all above 8 are your competitors (no need to think about the below). Generate one excel report and name it 'competition analysis'. Note down major ranking factors like backlinks, pagerank, domain age, page load speed, content, header tags, descriptions, title, meta keywords, internal links, external links, social icons etc....

Check this pdf report lindajiang.net/documents/brandidentity.pdf for the complete insight.

Hi All this is very simple  i am basically use Google tool s for check or Gouse competitor .