Most business owners have a rough sense of who their competitors are, but rarely take a close look at what those competitors are actually doing in their marketing. Here's a simple way to check, and what to look for.

Check their Google Business Profile

Compare it to yours. Do they have more reviews? More recent reviews? More photos? A more complete services list? This is one of the easiest things to check and often reveals the biggest gap.

Search your own service and see who shows up

Search "[your service] near me" the way a customer would. Who's ranking above you? Click through to their site. What does their homepage say in the first five seconds that yours doesn't?

Look at their ads

If they run Google or Meta ads, you can often see them directly (Meta has an Ad Library anyone can search for free). What are they promising? What's their offer? Are they running a guarantee or promotion you're not?

Read their reviews, good and bad

Reviews tell you what customers actually care about in your industry, and where competitors are falling short. A pattern of complaints about slow response time or unclear pricing is useful information for your own positioning.

What to actually do with this

The point isn't to copy a competitor, it's to find the gap. If every competitor in your space has weak Google Business Profiles, having a genuinely complete one is a real edge. If competitors are all making the same generic promise, a specific, honest one stands out.

Do this check every few months, not once and forget it. Local competition shifts, and what worked as a differentiator a year ago might be table stakes now.

If you want a second pair of eyes on where you actually stand against the competition, that's part of what we look at in a free audit. Book a call and we'll walk through it together.