Evaluating Competition Backlinks

So I have been doing keyword research to try to find a niche and I found one with 22,000 global and 5400 local results and 52,000 exact keyword results. Should I be checking for backlinks against the domain or the specific url when assessing the competitors? Your help is appreciated.

Always evaluate your competition.

Do extensive due diligence.

The deeper research you do, the better you will estimate your chances, so yes if you have the time and money to check your competitors, do it!

Yes, I check the top 10 results for my main keyword.
check the following:
links to page, links to domain, page rank, domain age, on page SEO. I also check all of their backlink profiles (to page) to see what percentage of the backlinks point to the target keyword.

obviously most of the above can be automated with market samurai / traffic tracks or something, but I do it manually + ahrefs.

i use Market Samurai to evaluate first page competition, they offer very simple yet valuable insights on key-criterias that take a prime role in determining keyword competitivity, but i leave my backlink profiles to ahrefs... always use Ahrefs to study backlinks.

For on-page SEO, SEO Title/Url competition, interesting ratios such as the Title/Comp measures, Market Samurai is hard to beat