By just looking at one or all of your competitors sites, you can find a lot of very interesting things and learn a lot. This is why competitor analysis really should be in everybody’s strategy. How can you stay in a market if you do not know your competitors well!
A lot of companies tend to ignore that and just only mind their business. But if one day a competitor starts stealing their customers because they are offering a better service, something new, or simply something cheaper, then this might just crash the company.
It is vital in most cases to know what your competitors do, how they work and what they offer. Knowing that a competitor is offering a particular product or service that you do not have will surely help you counter-attack and avoid you losing customers.

For a company or a website, competitor analysis has very important roles.
It is helping the company understand what are their strengths or weaknesses compared to their competitors.
It also help understand better what is going to be your competitor’s strategy and how they have been working so far.
But it also help you find out what you could do to get a competitive advantage or simply see what possible return on investment you will get.

Looking at one of your competitor’s site, there is lot you can learn if you look right. There are now plenty of software you can use to make the task easier. The best thing to do really is to use a software and also do it manually to make sure nothing was missed. There are things like the design or colours that a software will not pick up.
The main elements to look at in a site are which keywords are being targeted for each page and if the pages have been properly optimised. But you also need to look at the number of inbound links the site has and where they come from. By doing that you may find a few interesting sites worth asking to put a link to your site.
After that, you can also look at the services offered, the design and if there is any fun content on it that you could use. A poll or a competition on a site will certainly bring traffic and if your competitors are doing it, why not you!
It is obvious that you should not copy word for word what your competitors are doing. You need to be creative and adapt what you have seen to make it better on your site.
An SEO company will usually offer competitor analysis alongside SEO services.