How to Compare Your Business to Competitors on Google (Step-by-Step)

This guide walks you through how to compare your business to competitors on Google — step by step, metric by metric — so you can see exactly where you're behind, where you're ahead, and where the biggest opportunities are to close the distance.

You'll need about 30 minutes, a notepad (or spreadsheet), and an incognito browser window.

Step 1: Identify Your Real Competitors

Your SEO competitors aren't necessarily your business competitors. They're the businesses that show up when someone searches for what you do in your area.

Open an incognito browser window and search three to five of your most important keywords — the searches a potential customer would actually type. "Plumber near me," "roof repair [your city]," "AC installation [your city]."

For each search, write down the businesses that appear in the map pack (the three listings with the map) and the top five organic results below it. After searching all your keywords, you'll see the same handful of businesses appearing repeatedly. Those are your real SEO competitors — typically three to five businesses that you need to study closely.

Step 2: Compare Google Business Profiles

For each competitor, click into their Google Business Profile and record the following:

Primary category. What category are they using? If they're using "Emergency Plumber" and you're using "Plumber," that's a relevance gap on the single most important map pack ranking factor.

Review count. Write down the exact number. Don't round. You need to know whether the gap is 50 reviews or 250.

Average rating. Note it to one decimal place. A 4.9 versus your 4.7 is meaningful. A 4.8 versus your 4.8 is not.

Most recent review date. When was their latest review posted? This week? This month? Three months ago? A competitor getting fresh reviews weekly has a velocity advantage over one that hasn't been reviewed recently.

Photo count. Click into their photos and note the total. Also note when the most recent photos were uploaded — recent uploads signal an active profile.

Services listed. How many individual services do they have listed in their GBP Services section? Count them. If they have 15 services listed with descriptions and you have 3, that's a discoverability gap.

Posts. Scroll down on their profile. Are they posting updates? How recently? How frequently?

Business description. Do they have one? Is it filled with relevant services and location information, or is it generic?

Record all of this for each competitor and for your own business. Put it in a simple spreadsheet with your business in the first column and each competitor in the following columns.

Step 3: Compare Websites

Now click through to each competitor's actual website. You're measuring structural differences that affect organic rankings.

Total indexed pages. Go to Google and type site:competitorwebsite.com for each competitor and for your own site. Write down the number of results. This tells you how many pages Google has indexed — and a competitor with 55 pages has dramatically more keyword surface area than you do with 8.

Individual service pages. Does each competitor have a dedicated page for each service they offer, or one combined "Services" page? Count the individual service pages. This is the number one organic local ranking factor — the competitor with 15 service pages is competing for 15 different keywords while you compete for one.

Location pages. If they serve multiple cities, do they have city-specific landing pages? Count them.

Blog posts. Do they have a blog? How many posts? How recent is the latest one?

Title tags. Right-click on their most important pages, select "View Page Source," and search for <title>. Note how they've structured their titles. If their homepage title says "Emergency Plumber in Houston | 24/7 Service | Company Name" and yours says "Home | Company Name," that's an optimization gap you can see in plain text.

FAQ content. Do they have FAQ sections on their pages or a dedicated FAQ page? This content targets long-tail question searches and can be enhanced with schema markup for rich results.

Schema markup. Right-click on their homepage, view source, and search for "schema" or "LocalBusiness." If they have structured data and you don't, they're communicating with Google more precisely than you are.

Step 4: Compare Review Profiles

You already recorded the total review count in Step 2. Now go deeper.

Review velocity. Look at the dates of their last 10 reviews. How spread out are they? If 10 reviews span the last two weeks, they're generating reviews aggressively. If 10 reviews span the last six months, they're coasting.

Calculate an approximate monthly velocity for each competitor and for yourself. This is the number you need to beat — not their total count, but their monthly pace.

Review responses. Scroll through their reviews. Is the owner responding to every review? Only some? None? Note the response pattern and compare it to yours.

Review content. Read a few of their reviews. Are customers mentioning specific services? Specific locations? Reviews that include "they fixed our AC unit the same day" are adding keyword-relevant content to the profile. If their reviews are detail-rich and yours just say "great service," that's a content quality gap.

Step 5: Compare Backlinks

This requires a tool. The free tier of Ubersuggest or a free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools account will show you the basics.

Referring domains. How many unique websites link to each competitor? This is the most important backlink metric. A competitor with links from 60 different websites has a stronger authority signal than one with links from 10.

Link sources. Look at where their links come from. Chamber of commerce? Local news? Industry associations? Better Business Bureau? Manufacturer directories? Each of these is a link you could potentially earn too.

If you don't want to use a tool, a quick Google search for "competitorwebsite.com" -site:competitorwebsite.com will show you pages across the web that mention or link to them. It's not comprehensive, but it reveals the most visible link sources.

Step 6: Build Your Gap Analysis

Now organize everything into a comparison table. Here's the format:

Fill in every cell. The gaps become immediately obvious. Red flags jump off the page — the competitor with 280 reviews when you have 45, the competitor with 40 website pages when you have 6, the competitor posting on GBP weekly when you haven't posted in a year.

Step 7: Prioritize Your Actions

Not all gaps are equal. Prioritize based on impact and effort:

Fix this week (high impact, low effort): GBP category corrections, missing services, uploading photos, updating your business description, responding to unresponded reviews.

Fix this month (high impact, medium effort): Starting a review generation system, beginning to build service pages, setting up weekly GBP posting.

Fix over 2-3 months (high impact, high effort): Completing all service pages, building location pages, earning backlinks, adding schema markup.

Ongoing (compounding impact): Maintaining review velocity, weekly GBP posts, monthly content additions, quarterly competitive re-checks.

Step 8: Monitor Over Time

A one-time comparison is valuable. Ongoing monitoring is what produces sustained results.

Rankings shift. Competitors make changes. New competitors emerge. A monthly check of your key metrics versus your competitors' keeps you honest about whether you're closing the gaps or whether they're widening again.

Set a recurring monthly reminder to re-check review counts, review velocity, and any visible changes to competitor profiles and websites. A quarterly deep dive — repeating this full comparison process — catches structural changes you might miss in monthly spot-checks.

The businesses that consistently rank at the top of local search aren't just the ones that did this comparison once. They're the ones that built a habit of monitoring their competitive position and responding to changes before those changes became insurmountable gaps.

The Shortcut

This entire process takes about 30 minutes per competitor when done manually. For three competitors, that's about 90 minutes of clicking, counting, and note-taking. It works, but it's tedious — and it only captures a snapshot of one moment in time.

Competitive analysis tools that pull all of these data points automatically and present them in a side-by-side comparison save time and catch details you'd miss manually. They also make ongoing monitoring practical by tracking changes over time rather than requiring you to repeat the manual process every month.

Whether you do it manually or with a tool, the point is the same: you can't close gaps you can't see. A structured comparison between your business and the competitors outranking you reveals exactly what needs to change — and in what order — to start moving up.