The Agents of Change Digital Marketing Podcast Competitive Analysis and SEO: Beating Your Competition in Search - Jason McGovern
Times have certainly changed since the beginning of SEO, where the objective to winning the game was to just concentrate on a few keywords. Today, it's also about researching your competitors - both direct and indirect - to see where they're ranking and what they're doing to get there.
Fortunately there are a plethora of tools out there now to help us dig deeper to find out not only what keywords rank well in general but what keywords your competitors are using, what backlinks may be helping them, as well as which of their web pages are getting the most attention. This allows you to leverage that information and make tweaks to your own site and content so you can beat the competition and rank higher in search.
If you find a competitor is ranking higher than you and you just can't figure out why, maybe the problem is that they are doing a better job at answering the intention of the searcher than you are. So don't go reinventing the wheel, see what they're doing as a jumping off point, and then do it better.