If you ask me, the toughest part of SEO (or one of the toughest things in SEO) is the data collection part. Every SEO I’ve known is day in and day out involved in collecting data to compare and study the SEO metrics. I strongly recommend data collection for all my projects, small and big. The reason is that unlike your “manual scan” on the SERPs, detailed study of SEO metrics can give you vital clues about competition, and competition analysis is an important part of the drill.

When we have to find out if its really possible to rank for a particular term on Google, we normally check out the competition by doing a simple search. And then, looking at how many pages are listed in the results and looking at the current raking it would be easy to make a decision.

Manually, picking up the details involves going to each site, doing the google queries, getting the numbers right and documenting it.

Luckily, there are easier ways now (been there for quite some time now), like this SEO firefox extension.

Seoquake is a Mozilla Firefox SEO extension for SEOs is a handy tool that will give them quick access to vital SEO details of a website.With SEO Quake, the vital SEO metrics of a website can be viewed right from the SERPs. The link back numbers, Pagerank, Indexed pages, DMOZ presence, age etc will be shown right near the sites listing on Google SERPs.

With SEO for Firefox its easy to find the site details. All you need to do is turn it on, do the Google search for the term you want to find the competition, and save the data.

Competition analysis is easy with SEO Quake Firefox extension. The data is almost accurate, and all you need is to properly document it before you compare then with the competitors.

Download SE Quake Firefox Extension here