In continuation with my earlier article on SEO keyword research tools, in this article I discuss the Competitive Research Tools that are available for free.

Alexa – Alexa provides a lot of details but it is biased towards webmasters. Even then it gives us an approximate idea. Alexa provides the % age of internet users on a daily, weekly, monthly, and three monthly basis. It provides a web sites’s worldwide rank, the top search queries… I have used Google.com in the below mentioned example:-
How does all this information help you?
It gives you a reasonable idea of the wedsite traffic, the website’s popularity all over the word, the top search queries that the visitors use to find the website…this data will help you fine tune your website and provide you insights on your website traffic too.

Quantcast – In addition to the monthly traffic, Quantcast provides very detailed demographics report.It is excellent!
Quantcast also provides a detailed list of sites and categories that visitors who visited this site visit.

How will it help you in your Analysis?
To begin with, the demographics provide you with a fairly good idea about the profile of the visitors visiting the site, what are their interests, and what other sites do they visit. You can compare your website’s demographics against your competitors and get a lot of insights.
  
Google Insights – As the name suggests, Google Insights is indeed very insightful. On searching with keywords that you wish to compare, Google insights displays a graph that maps the worldwide interest in the keyword over time. It lists the top 10 locations (regional interests) that is searching for the keyword(s) and search terms which includes top searches and rising searches.

How is it helpful for you?

Not only does it show the regional interest in the particular keyword(s) that you are searching with but alos gives you an idea of
the most searched terms associated with that keyword and most importantly which search terms are on the rise!

This will certainly help you as a starting point and also to optimize your website further.

Archive.org -(Wayback machine)
Amazing website, I love the name…our new age time machine that takes us back…way back and you can find out what the website looked like way then… how many times it changed it’s design…some websites have changed beyound recognition!

The way back machine helps you keep track of how your website or your competitor’s website looked back then and what changes have happened, have the changes helped?

Go ahead use the way back machine, get some interesting insights as well as have some fun… it is really great!