I realize that spying on the competition may not seem to be of great importance when taken as a stand-alone SEO concept without understanding what you can actually glean from doing so, or knowing what insights the available tools can offer.
 
This post will try to demystify the issue.
 
Why Spying on the Online Competition Can Benefit [...]

For the number of big brands that do employ PPC effectively, there is a greater number that do not employ it effectively, or who do not employ it at all. Here are 6 specific data points that might be of interest to the latter group:
 

10% 1 to 20% 2 of consumers are strongly influenced by [...]

OK then… if not futile, then at least not optimal :). Let’s start with a bang with some data: 

64.3% of marketers plan to increase spending on SEM during this year. (B2B Survey)
North American SEM spending is now projected to grow by at least 36% to $25.2 in the next 4 years. (SEMPO)
In 2007, 87.4% of [...]

Paid Search is not about ROI. Technically, it’s not about Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) or conversions either. Paid Search should be about profit. Excuse the SEMI version of Finance 101 here but it’s for a reason. Bear with me…
• ROI = Profit / costs x 100
• Profit = Revenue - Costs
Companies are interested [...]

..actually, by Melanie Nathan
So you’ve SEO’d your site… your title tags are perfect, meta descriptions on every page, alt text on all the images and nice relevant content etc, etc…. now what? … Link building!
Among other factors, Google relies on other websites to determine how popular your website is. The more websites that link to [...]