Competitive analysis, as the name implies, is an exploration of the companies in a given industry sector or market niche that are competing with your company’s products or services for market share. The analysis may be an in-depth exploration of the top five competitors, or a larger number of competitors could be examined (typically with less depth in the analysis). In most cases, the client will have identified the target competitors for you. While this article focuses on competitive analysis in the for-profit arena, it is worth noting that non-profit organizations can benefit equally from this analysis (which they might term a comparative analysis, if they viewed the other organizations as working toward a common goal with them)

Our competition analysis begins with defining your market. Are you garnering business locally, nationally or globally? Where you do the most sales now or where you want to do the most sales in the future is where we want to focus our research. However, it is beneficial to do a tiered approach as well. Once we have defined the market, we plug away, tirelessly combing through websites to give you keywords, tags and site rankings. Once we have gathered as much valuable data as we can, we'll create a report that identifies what your competitors are doing as well as areas where we can improve your existin web site or areas we will concentrate on developing with your new web site.

Even the simplest competitive analysis displays two critical dimensions: the competitors and the criteria, or what we’ll call the competitive framework. The purpose of the competitive framework is to present the data in a way that makes it easy to compare the various sites across the different criteria.