I use the free version of Traffic Travis as it can list the top 10 or 20 sites for a particular keyword. It can tell you how good the SEO is for each site and the number of backlinks to the page, as well as the site.

Grab market samurai

Don't wrap your brain up too tight with SEO. There are other ways to reach good seo traffic without doing "direct" SEO. Plus, there are a ton of other internet marketing strategies out there that you can use to market your business successfully. It's not hard.

Greetings,
Nice to see that you are interested in getting traffic into your website.
But when you say "can't afford" market samurai, Well let me get things straight.
SEO is not a asset, it is 3rd party traffic which you can't control, which means that you shouldn't use it as your main traffic source. But it is good as extra traffic.
It takes a lot of time and effort to get highly ranked on any relative decent keywords.
Don't get to tight up with optimizing your content to get liked in the algorithms, because they change up to 400 times a year & if your content is bad, by tweaking to get liked by Google, could either get you penalized or affected when they change their algorithm. Which means all your hard work is done for almost nothing and you won't be in the first pages anymore. I really suggest you look at alternative traffic sources first, to build up your email list, which is a real asset you control (you own your email list, no one can take it from you).
Otherwise, I recommend to mix up compete.com/ | alexa.com | Market Samurai .

But remember evaluating the competition is much more than just checking their back-links.
register to their email lists as well to figure out how frequently they email their list is one example of many needed to get a clear picture of the competition.

Hope this helps you a little bit, could almost write a whole book on competition analyzing so better stopping myself before I start brain storming the whole night in this message

First of all check domain authority. Pages with small amount of backlinks can be hard to outrank for only high trust factors that we call authority. Consider the example of wikipedia pages. Sometimes some wiki pages are very tough to outrank even if there are very small amount of backlinks feeding the site. For the term SEO an wikipedia page is on #1 position. Do you think SEO companies didn't try to outrank the page?

To check competition I should say you don't need to subscribe any expensive service at all. If you are not using SEO Moz authority checker plugin then you surely missing a free but very useful tool. So along with SEO spyglass you should use this small beautiful adon.

Well the steps you can follow..

0- Check domain age and relevancy. If the keyword is something like "texas Rangers" and you see their official webpage is on spot one then surely it would be nearly impossible to get #1 rank for that terms. Consider this example for checking webpages are on first page for your keywords.

1- See how strong onpage optimization they have.

2- Check how many quality backlinks are pointing towards the site. How many of them are using the keyword/keywords you are targeting. That can be checked by SEO spyglass easily. Also run do/nofollow checker to check how many of these backlinks are nofollow. The more nofollow backlinks the good you should feel. Use google operators, seo spyglass, scrapebox etc. to check analyze backlinks.

3- Now have a look on all collected parameters after the research. If you see first 3 spots are occupied by 3 authority sites you had better go away and think about another keyword. Probably a long tail keyword which has been less targeted by authority sites would be good for your SEO endeavour.

Many cool answers already but let me sum up what i always do. If I find any sites on first page of Google to have some weaknesses, and I'm sure i can make it better, for example, meta tags, on-page seo blah blah blah, or exact domain name that nobody use, then I have a winnable keyword. Just don't rush things, it will only make it harder. And the following tools can help you find out your true seo competitors who are on the Google's 1st page:

1. Niche Market Finder (Free from SEODEVGROUP.COM - number of google regions are limited)
2. Traffic Travis - quite good just to get the overall idea who your top 10 competitors are
3. Market Samurai > SEO Competitor - very detailed competitor data