Competitive analysis can be defined as a statement of the business strategy and its relation to the competition. Its sole purpose is to determine the strengths and weaknesses of the competitors within your market, the strategies that will provide you with a distinctive advantage and the walls that can be created in order to prevent competition from entering your specific market.
The most important step in a competitor analysis is to identify the current and potential competition. There are essentially two ways you can identify the competition. The first is to look at the market from the customer's viewpoint and group all your competitors by the degree to which they convince their customer to buy their products. The second method is to group competitors according to their distinctive competitive strategies so you understand what motivates them.
Below are list of available tools for competitive analysis.
Search results – what TYPES of websites are ranking for your targeted
keywords? What are their competitive advantages ?
How can you pull their idea or ideas from other popular sites to push
your own brand?
SEO for Firefox – This free tool layers link profile data, site age data, and data about citations from social news sites over the top of Google’s or
Yahoo!’s search results to give you a more complete profile of the competitive landscape. SEO for Firefox requires using Firefox web browser.
Top 10 Analysis Tool – toll that shows data similar to SEO for Firefox, but puts all the data on one page.
http://www.webuildpages.com/cool-seo-tool/
Alexa – Shows traffic trends. A tool that is HEAVILY biased toward
internet marketing and webmaster related websites.
http://www.alexa.com/
Google Trends – Shows a list of competing brands and the markets they are dominating growing in mindshare and search volume.
Blog search and news search engines – are bloggers and traditional news outlets discussing competitors?
Compete – A tool similar to Alexa, but not as biased toward internet marketing related websites. Compete.com also offers a search analytics tool
http://searchanalytics.compete.com/
which allows you to view keywords that competing businesses rank for.
Quantcast – Similar to compete, but shows more in depth demographic
information.
http://quantcast.com/
These tools are a sure way to get into competition when used properly.
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