How to Size Up Your Local Competitors Online in One Afternoon

You probably know your competitors from the street: who's busy, who's cheap, who has the nicest trucks. What you may not know is how they look to someone searching on a phone at 8 p.m. That's where more and more customers make their first decision.

You don't need an agency or paid software to get a useful picture. You need about three or four hours, a notebook or spreadsheet, and a handful of free tools. Here's how to spend that afternoon.

Hour one: decide who counts as a competitor

Open a private or incognito browser window and search the way a customer would: your service plus your town (for example, "plumber Dover" or "dentist Smyrna"). Then try two or three variations, such as "near me" and your county name.

Make a list of the five or six businesses that appear most often. Include the paid results at the top and the map results, which are listed separately. Don't worry if some surprise you. The businesses Google shows are the competitors that matter online, even if they aren't the ones you think about offline.

Set up a simple table with one row per competitor and these columns:

• Website address
• Looks professional on a phone? (yes/no/notes)
• Google listing: review count and average rating
• Running ads? (Google / Meta)
• What they say makes them different
• Anything you'd steal, anything you'd avoid

You'll fill it in over the next few hours.

Hour two: review their websites

Visit each competitor's site on your phone first, then on a computer. Spend about ten minutes on each and answer three questions:

• Can I tell what they do and where? Note how quickly it becomes clear.
• Is the next step obvious? Look for a phone number, a quote form, a booking link.
• Does it feel current and trustworthy? Check for real photos, reviews, up-to-date hours.

Then run each address through PageSpeed Insights and note the mobile result. You aren't looking for exact numbers to brag about. You want to know whether your site is faster or slower than the people it's competing with. Run your own site too, so you have a comparison.

Note what they do well. If a competitor's site clearly explains their process in four steps, that's something your customers evidently find useful.

Hour three: look at their Google listings

Search each competitor by name and look at their Google Business Profile, the panel with the map, reviews and hours. Record:

• The number of reviews and the average rating
• How recently they last received a review
• Whether the owner replies to reviews
• How complete the listing looks (photos, services, description, hours)

Then do the same for your own listing and compare honestly. Reviews tend to matter most here, because they're visible and customers weigh them heavily. If you're well behind, a simple, consistent habit of asking happy customers for a review is the cheapest fix there is. (Our guide to Google Business Profile covers this in more detail.)

Hour four: see what ads they're running

You can see competitors' advertising for free, because both big platforms publish ad libraries.

• Google: Search the Google Ads Transparency Center for a competitor's business name to see the ads connected to that advertiser.
• Facebook and Instagram: Search the Meta Ad Library for the competitor's business name to see the ads they're running across Meta's platforms.

Look for patterns, not secrets. What offers do they lead with? Do they promote one service heavily? Are the same ads running for months, or constantly changing? A business running the same ad for a long time suggests, but does not prove, that it's working for them. These libraries show you the ads, not the results.

If a competitor has no ads at all, that's information too. It may mean customers searching your area are less crowded than you feared.

Bonus: check how they get found

If you have an account with Google Search Console for your own site, use it to see which searches already bring you visitors. Compare those to the phrases you searched in hour one. Gaps between "what people search" and "what my site shows up for" are your opening.

You can't see a competitor's Search Console, and you shouldn't expect to. What you can do is search for their services yourself and note which of their pages appear.

Turn your notes into three decisions

At the end of the afternoon, resist the urge to fix everything. Read your table and pick three things:

• One thing you're clearly behind on. Often this is review count, mobile speed or a hidden contact button.
• One thing you're already better at. Make it more visible on your homepage and your listing.
• One gap nobody is filling. Maybe nobody explains pricing, or nobody mentions your neighborhood, or nobody shows real project photos.

Schedule the first fix this week, and repeat the exercise in six months. Competitors change.

For a more structured version, our free guide Know Your Competition: A Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing & Competitor Analysis walks through the same process step by step, with a worksheet to fill in. It's free when you sign up for the free website and competitor analysis.

Rather have someone else do it?

An afternoon is a fair trade for a small business owner who likes to dig in. If you'd rather spend it with customers, we'll do the research for you. Request our free website and competitor analysis. Our research team reviews your site and your local competitors, and then we go through the findings with you on a free Zoom consultation scheduled within one week. There's no cost and no obligation, and you keep the findings either way.

Richard runs Pulsar Strategies, a digital marketing and web design agency for small businesses based in Smyrna, Delaware.