What's your best strategy for finding your competitors hottest internal pages? Some of the players in my industry have indexed 1,000 - 10,000 pages... can anyone recommend a good tool to use to find out which ones are pulling in the most traffic?
Just do a Google search for the specific keywords you are targetting in your niche - the top natural listings are your competitors...
The easiest way is to google it and select the top result. If you want a software I personally recommend link assistant, it has a complete package for your seo.
their hottest page..... I want to know which one of their pages is creating the most noise and generating the most traffic so I can mimic and duplicate. Any suggestions?
You wanna duplicate the competitor's page? I don't think that's a good idear, google don't like duplicate content, you can learn their strategy for ranking well. If you wanna know the hottest keywords in your niche, you just need to use googd adwords keyword tools to get them!
Your pursuit makes good biz sense - but right now I know of tools that only let you research and monitor competitor keywords, ranks and adwords ads. Nothing that I know of can possibly track what pages on the inside of a competitor website are getting the highest traffic. You can always research traffic domain-wise by using tools like Compete Pro, Quantcast and crunchbase.
Yeah - generally this is just something you'll pick up on as you emerse yourself into your industry's SERPs. If you're a part of them every day, you'll spot the big players. I wouldn't bother about finding out competitors long-tail terms. Those aren't the ones that make the money.