Analyzing online ventures concerning your niche is as necessary as online marketing itself.  To have a strategic SEO implemented, you will need to first track how your competitors are doing online. There could be several aspects for analyzing e-businesses competing with you, and you need to track at least the main ones carefully to evaluate your competitive environment. You can use several free online tools performing several different metrics to check performance of your competitors’ websites.

On-site analysis

• Adopt a bot’s perspective in checking out the on-page factors of your competitors’ websites. If it’s Flash-based or picture-rich, it will be easy to outrank.
   
• Look for the presence of a particular competitive keyword on their page. Check its frequency and the exact places it appears, especially in the titles, heading tags, meta keywords, meta description, strong tags. This will give an idea of their on-page keyword-specific SEO efforts.
   
• Evaluate their navigation structure, placing of the anchor text or hyperlinks to promote keyword phrases or services.
   
• Check their URL structure to analyze if they have mixed a keyword phrase well.
   
• See what’s their page rank. Though by smart on-site SEO, it’s not difficult to beat a high PR site on a targeted keyword. Still if there are too many competitors with high PR sites, it indicates that the industry is highly competitive. Also, a high PR gives a marketing pitch to the site, reducing the necessity of investing high on PPC ads.
   
• Check how much of the web content has been indexed by Google. Type in the search bar “site:competitorname.com” and you will get all the site pages that have been indexed.

Off-site analysis

• Get a sense of the search engine popularity of the competitor’s site by checking the amount of backlinks their site has. Use a free tool such as Backlink Watch.
   
• Check their organic results and PPC marketing.
   
• Use browser add-ons or free e-metrics or web analytics tools of good quality such as Alexa, The Wayback Machine, or Quantcast.com and get the traffic details, keyword report, link reports, and many other performance factors of your competitor’s site.
   
• Go across your competitor’s Facebook and Twitter profiles to analyze their social media reach.

You must keep evaluating your competitors’ web strategies as that will help you lay an effective strategy to outrank them in the online battlefield and raise your sales volume.