For those of you who want an easy way to see how your site compares to your competitors in terms of traffic and reach, here are the top traffic benchmark tools – and best of all, they’re free (well for the most part – many offer premium services too).

Descriptions below are taken from the respective tool’s website – so any ridiculously impressive claims are purely the opinion of the site’s copywriter. But they’re listed here because they’re worth your attention (in my opinion).

Compete.com
Compete.com is the only online competitive intelligence service that combines site and search analytics in one site to help you quickly master online marketing. With Compete.com, you can identify rival search marketing strategies to take your SEM and SEO efforts to the next level, and stay on top of rivals with site metrics and audience profiles.

Quantcast
Quantcast is a new media measurement service that lets advertisers view audience reports on millions of websites and services. Only Quantcast combines directly measured audience data with panel-based estimates to deliver accurate third-party metrics and easy-to-read profiles on digital media properties.

Alexa
Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources. The information is sorted, sifted, anonymized, counted, and computed, until, finally, we get the traffic rankings shown in the Alexa service.

Google Trends
With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched on Google over time. Google Trends also shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most. [it now includes website comparison based on the same technology]

So without further ado…get going. See how your site compares to your nemesis. If you don’t even rate on their charts – then you’ve got some serious traffic generation work to do!