Market research to discover what other people in your space are doing is one of the biggest and most valuable areas of SEO.

No matter whether you’re launching a new vertical or trying to dominate a small niche, analyzing what your competitors are offering is crucial.

There are ways to make that kind of analysis useful, game changing even, but it’s also possible to get hung up on the kinds of sticking points that only inhibit progress.

The Serenity to Accept the Things You Cannot Change

At some point in life, usually as a kid, we’re all introduced to a universal concept: life isn’t fair. It just isn’t.

Why do some people have all the money and most people don’t have enough? Well, there are probably some really complicated and intricate socio-economic theories about this, but we can sum it up with: because life isn’t fair.

You know what else isn’t fair? Google.

Even though we know this, it’s still easy to get frustrated by the rampant disparities we see in Google’s search results. It’s infuriating when a competitor with newer site and an inferior product is outranking you.

It doesn’t seem right when someone is ranking better with a backlink profile full of the kinds of links you’re trying to take down. It makes you almost homicidal when the other guys are all over the search engine results pages (SERPs) and their pages have about much content as the back of a shampoo bottle.

It’s not right. It’s not fair. But that’s life. And when you’re faced with this situation you really have two options: get mad, or get better. – href="http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2202298/Keeping-Competitive-Analysis-Healthy?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sew+%28Search+Engine+Watch%29&utm_content=Google+Reader">Keeping Competitive Analysis Healthy by Jennifer Van Iderstyne

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