That's not a guess. That's how Google works. The businesses at the top of search results and the map pack aren't there by accident. They did specific things to get there, and you can see exactly what those things are if you know where to look.
This guide breaks down how to see what competitors are doing SEO-wise — without needing a marketing degree or a $200/month software subscription. Everything here applies to local businesses: plumbers, roofers, HVAC companies, attorneys, dentists, landscapers, and anyone else competing for customers in a specific area.
By the end, you'll know how to spy on competitors on Google, identify what's giving them an edge, and start closing the gap.
Start With What Google Is Already Showing You
Before you touch any tool, Google itself gives you a surprising amount of competitive intelligence for free. Most business owners skip right past it.
Search Your Own Keywords
Open an incognito or private browser window (this prevents your personal search history from skewing the results) and type in exactly what a customer would search. If you're a roofer in Dallas, search "roofer Dallas" or "roof repair near me" while your location is set to your service area.
Write down the businesses that appear in three places: the map pack (the top three listings with the map), the organic results below it, and any ads at the very top. Those are your real SEO competitors — not necessarily the companies you compete with for jobs, but the ones competing with you for the customer's attention before a phone call ever happens.
Do this for five to ten keyword variations. You'll start to see the same handful of businesses appearing over and over. Those are the ones to study.
Look at Their Google Business Profile
Click on each competitor in the map pack and spend a few minutes on their Google Business Profile. You're looking for patterns:
How many reviews do they have, and how recent are the latest ones? A business with 340 reviews and three new ones this week is doing something intentional to generate reviews. A business with 40 reviews and nothing in the last six months is coasting.
Look at their photos. Are they posting professional images of completed work, team photos, and before-and-after shots? Count them. Businesses with 100+ photos consistently outperform those with the default handful.
Check if they're making Google Business Profile posts. Scroll down on their profile — you'll see recent updates, offers, or project highlights. Businesses that post weekly are signaling to Google that their profile is active and maintained.
Note their business categories too. The primary category is the single biggest factor in map pack rankings. If every competitor ranking above you uses "Emergency Plumber" as their primary category and you're using "Plumber," that's a concrete change you can make today.
Analyze Their Website Like a Customer (Then Like a Marketer)
Now click through to each competitor's actual website. You're doing two passes here — first as a potential customer, then as someone studying their strategy.
The Customer Pass
Does their website load fast on your phone? Is it easy to find what services they offer? Can you call them with one tap? Is there a clear reason to choose them over you?
If their site answers these questions better than yours does, that's a problem — not just for SEO, but for converting the visitors you do get into calls and leads.
The Marketer Pass
This is where you get specific about what's giving them an SEO advantage. Look at:
How many pages they have. Go to Google and type site:theirwebsite.com and note the number of indexed pages. A competitor with 85 indexed pages has dramatically more keyword real estate than one with 12. Count how many of those are dedicated service pages versus blog posts.
Their service page structure. Do they have a single "Services" page listing everything, or do they have an individual page for each service? The businesses ranking at the top almost always have separate, detailed pages for each service — "drain cleaning," "water heater repair," "slab leak detection" — each one targeting a different keyword that customers actually search for.
Their location strategy. If they serve multiple cities, do they have city-specific landing pages? A page titled "Plumbing Services in Katy, TX" with locally relevant content tells Google exactly where they provide service and helps them rank in that area's local results.
Their title tags. The title tag is the blue clickable text in Google's search results. Right-click on any of their pages, click "View Page Source," and search for <title>. You'll see exactly how they've structured their page titles. If their title says "Emergency Roof Repair in Fort Worth | 24/7 Service | Company Name" and yours just says "Home | Company Name," that's a competitive gap you can measure in clicks.
Their content depth. Open their most important service page and their blog. How much content is on the page? A 300-word service page ranks very differently than a 1,200-word page that covers the topic thoroughly, includes FAQs, and demonstrates expertise. You don't need to count every word — just compare. Is their content thin or substantial?
Check Their Reviews and Reputation Signals
Reviews are one of the strongest ranking factors for local search, and they're also the easiest competitor signal to quantify. For a proper competitor analysis of any local business, reviews should be at the top of your list.
Here's what to compare:
Total review count. How many Google reviews does each top competitor have versus you?
Review velocity. How quickly are they accumulating new reviews? A business getting five new reviews a month is going to compound their advantage over a business getting one every couple of months.
Average rating. This matters, but less than you might think. A 4.7 with 280 reviews outranks a 5.0 with 14 reviews almost every time.
Owner responses. Are they responding to every review? Google has confirmed that responding to reviews improves local visibility. Scroll through their reviews and see if the owner or manager is replying — and whether those replies are thoughtful or copy-paste boilerplate.
Review content. Look at what customers are saying in their reviews. Are reviewers mentioning specific services? When a review says "they fixed our tankless water heater the same day we called," that review is naturally adding keyword-relevant content to that business's profile. Some businesses coach customers to mention the service in their review. It works.
Look at Their Backlink Profile
Backlinks — other websites linking to a competitor's site — are one of the hardest ranking factors to see without tools, but also one of the most powerful.
For a quick free check, search Google for "theircompanyname.com" -site:theircompanyname.com. This shows you pages across the internet that mention or link to them. You'll typically find directory listings, news mentions, sponsorships, blog features, and partner links.
If you want more detail, free tiers of tools like Ahrefs Webmaster Tools or Ubersuggest will show you a competitor's backlink count, referring domains, and where those links are coming from. You don't need to pay for the full suite — the free versions give you enough to understand the landscape.
What you're looking for:
Referring domain count. If a competitor has links from 85 different websites and you have links from 12, that's a major gap. Not all links are equal, but volume of unique linking domains is strongly correlated with rankings.
Local link sources. Are they getting links from local news outlets, chamber of commerce sites, local blogs, or community organizations? These local links carry extra weight for local SEO and are often the most realistic links for you to also earn.
Industry directories. Check if they're listed on industry-specific directories you're not on. For home services, that might be sites like Houzz, HomeAdvisor, or industry association pages.
Use Free Tools to Go Deeper
You don't need to spend $200/month to spy on competitors on Google. Several free tools give you actionable intelligence:
Google Search Console (for your own site) shows you which queries you're appearing for and your average position. Compare this against what you see competitors ranking for.
Google's "People Also Ask" and autocomplete suggestions reveal the questions and searches your competitors are likely targeting with content. Type your main keyword into Google and note every question that appears in the "People Also Ask" box. If a competitor has content answering those questions and you don't, there's your content gap.
Google PageSpeed Insights lets you test any URL. Run your site and your competitors' sites through it. If they're scoring 85 on mobile and you're at 40, page speed may be a factor in why they rank higher.
Schema markup checker (search "schema markup validator" in Google) tells you whether competitors have structured data on their pages. Schema helps Google understand page content and can generate rich results — stars, FAQs, service listings — that increase click-through rates in search results.
Chrome extensions like GMB Everywhere let you see competitor Google Business Profile data — categories, review counts, posting frequency — right in Google search results without clicking into each profile individually.
What to Do With Everything You Find
Data without action is just trivia. Once you've done a competitor analysis for your local business, organize what you found into three buckets:
Quick wins you can do this week. Updating your Google Business Profile categories, responding to all your reviews, fixing your title tags, adding missing alt text to images. These are changes that cost nothing but time and often produce noticeable results within weeks.
Medium-term projects. Building out individual service pages, creating city-specific landing pages, writing content that addresses "People Also Ask" questions, improving your site speed. These take more effort but close the structural gaps between your site and the ones outranking you.
Long-term strategy. Building a review generation system, earning backlinks from local sources, creating consistent content, and monitoring competitors over time so you can react when they make moves. This is where competitors get frustrated and quit — which is exactly why the businesses that stick with it end up dominating their local search results.
The Hard Truth About Competitor Analysis
Knowing what competitors are doing is the easy part. The hard part is consistently executing on what you find — while also running your actual business.
Most business owners do this research once, implement a few changes, get busy with jobs, and never revisit it. Meanwhile, the competitors at the top of Google are making incremental improvements every single week. They're getting new reviews, publishing new content, updating their profile, and building links. Not because they have more time than you — because they've made it a system or hired someone to handle it.
The gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it consistently is where most local businesses lose the SEO race. Whether you handle it in-house, hire someone, or use a service that automates the tracking and execution — the businesses that win in local search are the ones that treat it as an ongoing operation, not a one-time project.
Frequently Asked Questions
How often should I check what my competitors are doing?
At minimum, once a month. Rankings shift, competitors make changes, and Google rolls out updates regularly. Ideally, you'd have a system that monitors competitor activity automatically and alerts you when something significant changes — a spike in their reviews, new pages on their site, or a ranking jump.
Can I see exactly which keywords my competitors rank for?
Yes. Tools like Ubersuggest, SE Ranking, and the free tier of Semrush let you enter a competitor's domain and see their ranking keywords. For local businesses, pay closest attention to keywords with local intent — the ones that include your city, "near me," or specific services.
What if my competitor is ranking because of their business name?
It happens. A business named "Dallas Emergency Plumber" has a built-in keyword advantage over "Smith & Sons." If this is your situation, you can file a DBA (doing business as) to legally adjust your business name to include relevant keywords, then update your Google Business Profile accordingly. It's one of the most underused local SEO tactics.
Is it worth paying for SEO tools to monitor competitors?
It depends on how seriously you're competing. Free tools can tell you a lot, but they require manual effort every time you want to check. Paid tools automate the tracking and catch changes you'd otherwise miss. If you're in a competitive market and SEO is a meaningful source of leads for your business, the investment typically pays for itself.
My competitor has way more reviews than me. Can I still outrank them?
Reviews are important but they're one factor among many. Businesses with fewer reviews can outrank those with more by having stronger on-page optimization, better content, more backlinks, or a more completely filled-out Google Business Profile. Ideally, you're closing the gap on all fronts at once rather than relying on any single factor.
How do I know if a ranking change is because of something my competitor did versus a Google algorithm update?
If your rankings change but you didn't change anything on your site, check whether multiple competitors shifted positions at the same time. If everyone's rankings shuffled simultaneously, that's likely a Google algorithm update. If one competitor jumped while everyone else stayed the same, they probably made a change to their site or profile that Google rewarded.