One of the biggest influencing factors in how high a site ranks in Google is the number and quality of other sites that link to them – what we call “backlinks”. (Because they’re links back to one particular site, from another site.)
If you want your site to rank higher than your competitor’s site, it’s very useful to see who links back to them. You may be able to get some of those sites to link back to your site as well. (You may get a backlink by leaving a comment on a post, by adding your site to their directory, by joining their association, by writing an article for that site, et cetera.)
To find a sampling of links to any site, you can perform a Google search using the link: operator. For instance, [link:www.google.com] will list a selection of the web pages that have links pointing to the Google home page. Note there can be no space between the “link:” and the web page URL.
If you don’t get many results, perform the same search with and without the WWW in the domain name. (link:www.google.com and link:google.com)