If your business ranks well for broad service terms but vanishes the moment someone searches with a town or city attached, the problem usually sits in local signals rather than your website copy alone. Local search ranks businesses differently from standard organic results, and the companies sitting above you in Google Maps have made a set of decisions you can inspect, measure and improve on.
A local SEO competitor analysis means studying the businesses that outrank you in local search. That is the whole exercise. It is not about copying them. It is about understanding the gap between where you are and where you need to be, then closing that gap with deliberate work.
What follows is the process we run at Wicked Spider, a Scottish SEO and web design agency based in Greenock, when we audit local visibility for construction, engineering and trade businesses across Scotland and the UK.
Before you look at a single competitor, decide what you are competing for. Local visibility is not one ranking position. It is dozens, spread across service terms, locations and devices.
Build a short list of the searches your customers realistically type:
Keep the list to a manageable size, perhaps ten to twenty phrases, and note which ones bring in real enquiries rather than traffic that never converts. The rest of this analysis hangs off that list.
Search your main keyword in Google Maps and record which businesses appear in the top three results. That top-three spot on Google Maps and in local search results is highly sought after and, depending on the keyword, fiercely competitive, so the businesses holding it are your genuine rivals for that search.
Repeat the search for each phrase on your list. You will usually find a rotating cast rather than one dominant competitor, which tells you something useful: certain businesses are strong in particular areas or for particular services, and nobody is unbeatable everywhere.
Also check the same search from a few different postcodes or towns. Local results shift with the searcher’s location, so a competitor who beats you in one town may not appear at all in the next.
The profile is where most local ranking battles are won or lost. Work through the top three for each keyword and compare them honestly against your own listing.
Check the primary category each competitor has selected and the secondary categories behind it. Then look at how they have filled out their services or products list. A business with the correct primary category and a well-populated service list gives Google far more to match against a searcher’s wording than one with a bare profile.
Research your local competitors on Google Reviews and look at what is actually being written, not just the star rating. Which services do reviewers name? Which towns and job types come up repeatedly? Reviews feed keyword context into a profile and they influence the click decision once you appear. Note the volume, the recency and how consistently the business replies.
Compare how thoroughly each competitor has built out the rest of their profile: photographs, opening hours, service areas, business description and any regular posting. Completeness is one of the few areas where you can draw level quickly, because it depends on effort rather than budget.
A strong listing sending traffic to a weak page wastes the visibility. Local competitor analysis covers the SEO factors behind the map result as well as the listing itself, including keywords, on-page optimisation and backlinks.
For each competitor, look at:
You are looking for structural differences. If three competitors all run separate pages for separate services and you run one page listing everything, that is a gap you can close.
Links still shape which pages rank, including locally focused ones. Use tools such as Ahrefs or Semrush to analyse your competitors’ backlink profiles, then identify their link sources and assess the quality of those links.
Pay attention to the type of site linking to them. Trade associations, local directories, suppliers, industry publications and regional news outlets all carry different weight, and links from genuine, relevant sites are worth far more than anything bought in bulk. Note which sources keep appearing across several competitors. Those are the realistic targets for your own outreach.
Rankings in local search change street by street, which single-point checks cannot capture. Grid-based reporting solves this by testing your keyword from many points across a map area and showing how visibility falls away as you move outward.
Local Falcon’s Competitor Report is one example of a visual local SEO competitor analysis tool that compiles and lists map grid data for your competition. Other platforms offer tracking across locations and devices with competitor comparisons and trend visualisation, and some Google Business Profile tools add a Local Scan option that analyses competitor profiles directly from a Google Maps search.
Whatever you use, the value is the same: you see precisely where a competitor dominates, where you are close and where you are absent. That turns a vague sense of losing into a mapped list of areas worth targeting.
By now you should have evidence in four buckets: your competitor’s profile strength, their on-page structure, their link sources and their geographic coverage. Turn that into actions ranked by effort against likely return.
Then measure. Without tracking, you will not know whether a change worked or whether a competitor simply changed something of their own.
The biggest error is treating the top-ranking competitor as a template. Their profile, pages and reviews suit their business, their history and their customer base, not necessarily yours. Replicating their category choice or page structure blindly can pull your listing away from the searches that actually bring you enquiries.
Two more traps are worth flagging. First, checking rankings once from your own office and drawing conclusions from a single result, when local results vary by location. Second, focusing only on the business link and ignoring the page it points to, which is often where a well-ranked competitor is quietly converting better than you.
Local search results move. New competitors appear, established ones lose momentum, and Google’s own preferences shift. Revisit your competitor set at sensible intervals, particularly when you notice enquiries dipping or a new business appearing repeatedly in your map results. The goal is not a one-off report but a habit of checking where the gap sits and whether your last round of changes closed it.
If you would rather hand the whole process over, our fixed-price local SEO work covers competitor analysis, Google Business Profile optimisation and the on-page changes that follow from it, built around the enquiries you actually want rather than traffic for its own sake.
It means studying the businesses that outrank you in local search results and Google Maps. You examine their Google Business Profiles, the pages their listings link to, their backlinks and their geographic coverage, then compare all of that against your own. The purpose is to understand the gap between your current visibility and where you need to be, and to close it deliberately.
Google Maps and Google Reviews cover the basics and cost nothing. Ahrefs and Semrush are widely used for backlink analysis, letting you identify competitor link sources and judge their quality. Grid-based platforms, including Local Falcon’s Competitor Report, compile map grid data for your competition so you can see ranking patterns across an area rather than from one point.
Yes, up to a point. You can search each target keyword in Google Maps, record the top three businesses, and compare their categories, services, reviews and linked pages by hand. Some Google Business Profile tools include a Local Scan option that analyses competitor profiles from a Maps search. You will miss detailed backlink and grid data, but the profile and on-page gaps are still clear.
Common reasons include a better-matched primary category, a fuller service list, more recent reviews, dedicated service and location pages, and stronger relevant backlinks. Proximity to the searcher also plays a part. Because results shift with location, a competitor may beat you in one town and be invisible in the next, so check from several places before deciding what to fix.
No. A local SEO competitor analysis is not about copying your competitors. It is about understanding the gap between where you are and where you need to be. Their setup reflects their history, customers and service mix. Use their strengths to identify opportunities, then decide which ones suit your business and your most valuable enquiries, and prioritise those first.
