The question is basically in the title but I will restate it anyways. What are the pro's around here doing to evaluate there compitition before they build a website?
im no pro, but a good bit of advice might be. use dp's keyword suggestion tool and see how many searches your keyword gets, then search google/yahoo/msn for that term and check the keyword density for that term on the top sites, if it is low say about 2/3% then it should'nt be too hard to out rank them with just basic seo work. (this applies more to yahoo & msn tho) but it does work.