Every local business owner has Googled their competitors at least once. Maybe you noticed they’re ranking above you. Maybe they have more reviews. Maybe their listing looks more complete and you can’t figure out why.
Here’s the thing most people miss: almost everything your competitors are doing on Google is public information. Their Google Business Profile, their reviews, their website, their directory listings, even their ad spend patterns. You don’t need special tools or a marketing degree to see it. You just need to know where to look and what to look for.
I do this for every audit I run. Before I tell a business owner what to fix, I look at what their top 3-5 competitors are doing right. The gaps between you and them are your roadmap. Here’s exactly how to run that analysis yourself.
Step 1: Search like a customer
Open an incognito browser window. This is important because Google personalizes results based on your search history. Incognito gives you a clean view of what a real customer would see.
Search for your primary service plus your city. “Plumber San Antonio.” “Roofer near me.” “HVAC repair 78209.” Try 3-4 variations.
Write down who shows up in the Map Pack, the three business listings with the map at the top. Those are your real competitors in Google’s eyes, regardless of who you consider your competition in the real world. The businesses in the Map Pack are the ones Google has decided are the most relevant, most trustworthy, and most deserving of visibility. That’s who you need to study.
Also note who shows up in the regular website results below the map. Sometimes different businesses dominate the map versus the organic listings. Both matter, but the Map Pack captures about 42% of all clicks, so that’s where the money is for most service businesses.
Step 2: Audit their Google Business Profile
Click on each competitor in the Map Pack and open their full Google Business Profile. Here’s what to check.
Business description. How long is it? Are they using all 750 characters? What keywords did they include? Are they mentioning specific services and cities? Compare theirs to yours. If theirs mentions 8 services and 5 cities and yours is two sentences, that’s a gap. I wrote about how to write a GBP description that gets clicks if you want the full breakdown.
Photos. Count them. Businesses with 100+ photos on their Google profile get 520% more calls than the average listing, according to BrightLocal. Check whether their photos are recent. Are they posting job site images, team photos, before-and-after shots? If they have 60 photos from the last year and you have 4 from 2023, you’ve found one of the reasons they’re outranking you.
Posts. Scroll down to their recent posts. Are they posting weekly? What kind of content? Offers, updates, completed projects? Weekly posting is one of the easiest signals to maintain, and it tells Google the business is active. If your competitor posts weekly and you don’t post at all, that’s a signal gap.
Services and products. Check whether they’ve listed their services in both the Services section and the Products section of their profile. This is a tactic most businesses miss. Listing services as products doubles your visibility in Google, including Shopping carousels. If your competitor is doing this and you’re not, that’s free real estate they’re claiming.
Hours. Are their hours accurate? Do they list special hours for holidays? This seems minor, but Google rewards completeness.
Step 3: Count and analyze their reviews
Reviews account for about 20% of what determines local rankings. Here’s what to look at beyond the total count.
Review velocity. Don’t just look at the total number. Look at the dates. How many reviews did they get in the last 30 days? The last 90 days? A business getting 4 new reviews a month will outrank one sitting on 300 stale reviews from two years ago. Google watches the trend line.
Average rating. What’s their star rating? If they’re at 4.8 and you’re at 4.2, that affects both rankings and customer decisions. 68% of consumers won’t use a business below 4 stars.
Response patterns. Are they responding to reviews? How quickly? What do their responses look like? Businesses that respond to every review, positive and negative, send a signal to both Google and potential customers. If they’re responding with personalized messages and you’re either not responding or using the same canned reply every time, that’s a trust gap.
Keyword mentions. Read through their 5-star reviews. Do customers naturally mention services and locations? “Great roof repair in Boerne” is a review that contains keywords Google notices. You can’t control what customers write, but you can notice if your competitor’s reviews are rich with service and location mentions. That tells you their review system is working well.
Step 4: Study their website
Open your competitor’s website and look at the structure, not the design.
Location pages. Do they have individual pages for each city they serve? Count them. A competitor with 15 city-specific pages is visible in 15 cities. If you have one “Service Areas” page that lists 15 cities in a bullet list, you’re invisible in all of them. Each city needs its own page with unique content.
Service pages. Do they have a separate page for each service, or one generic “Services” page? Individual service pages rank for specific queries. A page titled “Water Heater Installation San Antonio” will rank for that search. A bullet point on a general services page won’t.
Content. Are they publishing blog posts or articles? How often? What topics? Look at whether their content answers specific questions customers ask. Content like “How Much Does a New Roof Cost in San Antonio?” targets a real search query. Content like “The Importance of Quality Roofing” targets nothing.
Page speed. Run their site through Google’s PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev). Then run yours. If their site loads in 2 seconds and yours takes 6, that’s a ranking factor and a customer experience problem. Slow sites lose customers.
Step 5: Check their citations
Citations are mentions of a business’s name, address, and phone number on other websites. They account for about 7% of local ranking factors, and consistency matters more than volume.
Search Google for your competitor’s exact business name in quotes. See where they show up. Yelp, BBB, Angi, Thumbtack, Facebook, Nextdoor, industry directories. Make a list. Then search for your own business name and compare.
If your competitor is listed on 15 authoritative directories with consistent information and you’re on 5 with inconsistent details, that’s a fixable gap. The directories that matter most: Google, Apple Business Connect, Yelp, BBB, Angi, Thumbtack, Facebook, Nextdoor, and whatever industry-specific directories exist for your trade.
Step 6: Look at their ads (optional)
If your competitor is running Google Ads, you can see some of it. Search for your service keywords and notice whether they appear in the paid results at the top. Google also has an Ad Transparency Center (adstransparency.google.com) where you can search for any advertiser and see their active ads.
This won’t tell you their budget or targeting, but it tells you whether they’re spending money on paid search and what messaging they’re using. If they’re running ads and you’re not, they’re capturing clicks from people who might otherwise find you organically. If they’re not running ads, that tells you they’re relying on organic visibility, which means beating them there is the whole game.
What to do with what you find
The point of this exercise isn’t to copy your competitors. It’s to find the specific gaps between what they’re doing and what you’re doing. Those gaps are your action list.
If they have 80 reviews and you have 12, build a review system. If they have 15 location pages and you have zero, start building them for the cities where you do the most work. If their Google Business Profile is complete and yours has empty fields, spend 30 minutes filling everything out.
Most of the time, the competitor who’s outranking you isn’t doing anything sophisticated. They’re doing the basics consistently. And once you can see exactly which basics they’re doing that you’re not, the path forward gets simple. Not easy, but simple.
If you want to skip the manual work and see your gaps mapped out automatically, I built a free audit that checks the things Google actually cares about. It shows you where you stand and where the opportunities are. Takes 30 seconds.