My good friend, nearly unknown business success and wildly cool Internet marketer (no pressure) Kenny Goodman posted this to FaceBook earlier today:

"What tools do you use to spy on your competitors (apart from Market Samurai of course)?"

Here's my reply - shared here for the 7 people world-wide that are not yet on FaceBook (hurry up already?!).

"Who cares? Organize right and do the right things and success is guaranteed in time. Measuring the competition is only about gauging how long it will take. Plan for the long term and competition doesn't matter. Moreover, your competition is likely lame anyway, so setting them as your measure of success if in most cases aiming low.

Google is not your competition. Your competition is not your competition. Your only competition is that part of you, your life and your business that results in less of the right effort than is required to get the results you want.

Search is math, but success at search is personal."

To put an even finer point on it ...

• what Google does is known enough and stable enough that you should rarely be thinking about it (more on this in a later post)
• you should *assume* that what your competition is doing is "best practice" - even when it is not - because someone out there is, and they will come our of nowhere to beat you
• so the only thing left is what you do - which is cool, since it is also the only thing you control!

Work on yourself and your business and external factors cease to matter that much.  That's why so much of what Dan Thies and I teach in both The SEO BrainTrust and Link Liberation 2 is about (a) mindset and (b) business process.

But don't we teach how search engines work?  Sure, and better than anyone else.   But knowing is not doing, so our real focus and the reason our customers, clients and partners have been, and continue to be, so successful is that we "get real" about the repetitive actions that are the real cause of success.

Success in anything is a process and success in SEO is no different.

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