It’s super important to do user/market segmentation.  You may think you compete with a company on all fronts, but you may be able to target different user bases and market segments once you have done the competitive analysis.

There are lots of free resources on the Internet that you can use to do competitive analysis yourself.  Let’s say your main competitor is The Motley Fool:

• use QuantCast to see The Motley Fool’s user segmentation, monthly traffic figure, the traffic trend, what other sites, and what categories of sites The Motley Fool’s visitors are likely to visit.
• use Google Web Site Trends to see what search terms drive users to The Motley Fool, the traffic trend, which regions or countries drive most of the traffic,  and what other sites The Motley Fool’s visitors are likely to visit.  Some shortcomings of Google Web Site Trends are that it doesn’t work on sub-domain(eg:  mail.yahoo.com), and it doesn’t have any stats for Google itself.  If you already signed in with your Google account, the traffic figure in absolute value is also shown.  You can also compare traffic on different web sites:

• Use Compete to see traffic snapshot.  The free version of Compete doesn’t give out much good stuff though.
• Definitely check out Competitive Intelligence Analysis: Google Trends for Websites

One of the nicest things using these tools is the ability to find out more sites that are related or similar to your competitor.   Often, we find lots of sites that we didn’t know about.

That’s it for this post.  We’d love to hear how you are doing competitive analysis.