I have heard of ahrefs..... but I think this is more for backlink checking correct? Was wondering what the best software would be to use for looking over a webpage(competitors,possible client, etc) and evaluating these keywords/rankings/results/etc. Thanks
To see the competitors with the keywords you snap you can use google adwords, there you will see the number of competitors is high, medium or low. and try to install seoquake extensions, the extensions will help you to see the pagerank, alexa, bing index and others.
You need two things, keyword tool, backlink checkers... This will give you an overview of your competitors, you can also use Google search engine to find strength of your competitors too.
Unfortunately, there isn't a good keyword research tool that pulls all of these important metrics together and makes it easy to do your analysis and take action. That's why I'm developing my own tool. It will be commercially available. What exactly are you trying to accomplish? How are you trying to accomplish it? I'll be happy to consider your needs when developing out the feature set of my keyword tool.
Of course Adword is keyword tool now keyword planner is awesome tool to find competitive and higher rank keyword. Its more awesome if you want to start PPC advertising on any ad network, but it has some limitations too. Tool will give you informations only about search volume and advertising bid in a specific geo location or expected traffic using a keyword. Then you need little investment to find some other pro/free software/tool to find linking, solid meta data and other SEO strategies for that specific keyword, there are tons of such tools available. But which one is going to be best for you you have to do Google search or ask experts.
In my own experience, Long Tail Pro or Market Samurai are the two best keyword research software. I have been using them for a year, and I am totally satisfied. Compare between the two, I am in favour of LTP as it is simpler to use. Of course I am using the platinum version. But the software itself is not enough, you should use a backlink explore such as ahrefs or majesticseo for researching kw also. I myself prefer ahrefs. This is to check deeply if your top 5 competitors are really strong or not. And you can beat them or not. Another advice is that the best way to research keywords is not to relying on software. Because everyone is using software, everyone is getting the same keywords. And that means a lot of competition. The best kw is often coming up from your own thought, the idea is important. If you can just come up with an idea that no one else does, that means an untapped niche, and that is the gold mine. So take the time to think about your keyword idea.
Sounds like AHREF's and Long tail keyword pro it is. With some SEOquake extentions to see the competition when I search for the keywords myself through google.