I use market Samurai to look at the top 10 sites and the metrics

Frank

Competitive analysis is to analyze the competition in the market about a specific theme. You can extract the competition level among the organizations.

Competition means (for me) - anywhere that your prospect might spend the money they should be spending with you.

This means different things for different niches.

If I'm selling exotic holidays then competition might mean local holidays. If there are direct competitiors then they're the obvious place to start.

With search engines it's all about search terms so I would create my list of target phrases and see who currently ranks well for them - then they're my competition.

You don't need any tools to check out who's ranking well for the search terms and what links they have etc. so the only focus I put on competitiors relates to seeing if they're doing something that would help me so that I dominate them.

If they are particularly strong then I pick their weakest points and attack there and then build up to the more competitive terms.

Andy

Competitive analysis is simply evaluating the competition. There are a variety of ways to do that, here are tools to evaluate competition Competitive Analysis Tools

Here is some more on competition analysis that isn't specific to internet marketing Staying Ahead of the Competition

We do competitive analysis for site to see ranking of keywords we are using in our site,there are many tools available,but Google ad words is the best tool to analyse keywords competitive analysis.