Competitor Analysis
How to build an honest picture of your online competition, and turn it into three decisions worth acting on.
One afternoon · PDF
- 1Why your list is probably wrong
The competitors you name from memory usually aren't the ones winning your searches.
- 2Build the list
Search the way a customer does and record who actually shows up, not who you assume.
- 3What to record for each one
Capture their offer, pricing signals, reviews, and response speed in one place.
- 4Read their reviews, especially the three-star
Three-star reviews reveal the real gaps you can beat them on.
- 5Find out who publishes prices
Whether rivals show prices tells you how to position yours.
- 6The response-time test
Contact a few and time the reply. Speed is often the whole game.
- 7Turn it into three decisions
Boil the research down to three concrete changes worth making.
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Ask most owners who they compete with and you get the same three names. The business across town. The person who used to work for you. The franchise with the wrapped vans.
Those are your rivals. They are not necessarily your competitors. Your competitors are whoever shows up when a customer in your service area searches for what you do, and that list is usually different from the one in your head.
This free tool builds the real list.
What This Tool Actually Checks
You give it your trade and your service area. It looks at who is visible to a customer searching for your service in that area and returns the businesses that are actually capturing that attention.
It looks at who ranks in local map results and organic results for the searches your customers make. It looks at review counts and ratings, because in home services those two numbers decide more purchases than anything on a website. It looks at whether each competitor has a real website with service pages or just a listing. And it flags the national and franchise players operating in your zip codes, who often outrank every local shop without anyone in town noticing.
You enter your email to get the report.
How to Set It Up So the Answer Is Right
Two inputs decide the quality of the output.
Be specific about your trade. "Cleaning" and "commercial janitorial" produce completely different competitor sets. "HVAC" and "HVAC replacement" do too. If you make most of your money on one service, run it on that service first.
Be honest about your service area. Not the area you would drive to for a big enough job. The area where the majority of your work actually happens. If you run three distinct territories, run the tool three times. Competition in an inner-ring suburb looks nothing like competition thirty miles out.
How to Read the Output
You get a ranked list, and each name will fall into one of three buckets. Sorting them into those buckets is the work.
Businesses like yours. Local, similar size, similar service mix. These are the ones you compete with on price, availability, and reputation. Compare your review count and rating against theirs. In home services, the shop with 180 reviews at 4.7 beats the better technician with 22 reviews almost every time.
Businesses bigger than you. Franchises, regional players, private-equity-backed roll-ups. You will not outspend them. You can beat them on response time, on getting a human on the phone, and on the customer knowing your techs by name. Look at what they are visibly bad at in their reviews, because that is your opening.
Businesses that are not really competitors. Directory sites, lead aggregators, national booking platforms, and shops that appear in results without serving your area. These occupy positions you cannot take, and you should stop measuring yourself against them.
Also note what is missing. If a service you offer returns no strong local result, that is an underserved search. Those are the cheapest customers you will ever get.
What to Do With It This Month
Three moves, in order of return.
Fix your review gap first. Look at the review count of the top three names on your list. If you are materially behind, that is your highest-return project, and it is a process problem rather than a marketing problem. Automatic review requests after every completed job close the gap faster than anything else. That is a standard part of a North Star build.
Second, look at what they have pages for that you do not. If four competitors have a page for a specific service and you have one paragraph on your homepage, you are invisible for that search.
Third, check response speed. Call two of the competitors on your list at 7pm and see what happens. If they answer and you do not, that is the whole competition on emergency work. If that is your gap, our after-hours answering add-on is the fix, and it is listed on pricing.
Run It On Your Main Service
Enter your trade and your service area and see who is actually taking the calls you want. Free, and no call required.
While you are looking at how you show up, the social media review tool covers the other half of how customers check you out before they dial.
Common questions
Your own search results are shaped by your location, your history, and your logged-in account. What you see is not what a customer three towns over sees. The tool checks from the customer's position, not yours.
Twice a year is plenty for most shops. Local results move slowly. Run it again if you expand into a new territory or add a service line.
That is common in some trades and it is not a death sentence. Franchises are strong on visibility and often weak on scheduling flexibility, tech continuity, and getting a person on the phone. Compete where they are structurally slow, not where they are structurally strong.