The Competition in SEO

You might not even enjoy the same positions on Google or Yahoo and another search engines as the toppers do. It happens with sites that are new, sometimes even with sites who were once good on the SERPs but got pulled off due to strange reasons.
Well, it might be difficult to figure out exactly as to why you are not enjoying the same positions on the SERPs despite you having great content than the current toppers, but there’s a nice strategy you can adopt to fix the problem.
Site’s back link sources
Each competition and find out their first 500 backlink sources, and grade those backlinks based on qualities like PR, Alexa, Editorial or not, Homepage or not etc.
Anchor Text influence
Major factor helping the competition would be their anchor text strength. So along with the backlinks sources, I’d also make it a point to find what the anchor texts are. if there are any patterns and preferences.
Find out the most valuable pages linking to them
Page strength for each term
Internal linking structure
And the finally, do more than just search as much as get complete search analytics for your site.(Source :Here)