The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) just announced that it will feature a free online resource tool designed to help business opportunity, franchise and other small business owners succeed by providing them with highly specific information about their industry and marketplace. It’s called SizeUp.

“SizeUp empowers businesses to make smarter choices by providing many of the same demographic, industry, business, geographic, competitiveness, and cost-of-business data that huge corporations use every day,” according to SizeUp’s CEO, Anatalio Ubalde. It is designed to help small business owners compete by making them “smarter, more profitable and more competitive.”

By crunching millions of data points from a variety of public and private-sector sources, SizeUp provides crucial information to small business owners in three key ways:

1) It enables them to map out their competition and make a concrete plan grounded in supply and demand parameters as they relate to their marketplace,

2) It allows them to compare their performance to that of their primary competitors in very defined ways, and

3) SizeUp helps business owners find the best places to advertise that will yield the most positive results.