Market Samurai SEO Software Review
First I had to download a Google pagerank checking addon, but it doesn't even give you the number, just the bar.
I checked about 10 keywords and looked at the first 4 sites for each, so I looked up 40 sites. It took about an hour and turned up nothing. So an increadible amount of time can be wasted this way.
So the next step was to look through some forums to see what I could find for tools that will help speed up this process of checking out the competition.
Several people on forums recommended this site
http://www.marketsamurai.com/
Gave them my email and they have several videos on how to use their software, checked out one and it said that most websites fail because they don't take the time to check out the competition before they launch their web site. Sounds like exactly what I am looking for.
From the videos it appears that market samurai will check the page rank of the top 10 sites on google which is what I was most interested in. It will also tell you how many back links each of these sites have, which is also useful information, then it will go even farther and tell you what page rank the sites linking to it have.
So it really gives you all the information you could ask for as far as looking at your competition.
You do have to click on each keyword to see this information, but that should not take all that much time.
The general video tells you everything you need to know, then if you don't know anything about SEO, for example on page and off page, it has detailed videos that will go through everything you need. So even if you don't know anything basically watching their videos will teach you all you need to know to get up to speed.
so far I am very impressed.