Local SEO Competitor Analysis

Local SEO Competitor Analysis

Coming to online visibility and local SEO, competitor analysis is a necessity. Competitive analysis is an integral part of any marketing campaign as it keeps your business ahead of your competition and enables maintaining a consistent web presence. For local SEO, the competitive analysis aims at helping your business to get found in Google Maps as well as Google Organic, when search intent is locally driven. Local competitor analysis includes all businesses that rank for your target (local) keywords in maps and organic results (including the local pack).

Understanding and responding to rivals’ strategies, strengths, and weaknesses is the cornerstone of winning a local SEO campaign. Conducting a thorough competitor analysis and using findings to gain an edge in local organic search, drive targeted traffic, and improve the bottom line.

Identify Local Online Competition

Determine whether you can learn and apply anything from how their web presence is structured, as a business you consider a competitor offline, may or may not be a competitor online. At the local level, you may very well find large players such as big box stores or e-commerce offerings appearing in the search results.

Learning from a tactical perspective, you need to understand what and who you are up against to develop strategies for a given keyword or topic. Understanding who the competitor is and how far ahead they may or may not be would help you determine where to focus your attention.

Position of strength: Those areas where the business has established some authority and visibility relative to your competitors.

Alternatively, SEO tools like Ahrefs or Semrush will call out domains/websites, i.e., competitors found to be ranking for the same keywords your domain does. These tools provide a wealth of content and keyword gap information, which will be used for much of the analysis outlined below.

3 steps to identifying your local competitors :

Step 1: Identify your top non-branded keywords

Step 2: Check top organic results and paid ads

Step 3: Check your Google My Business listing

Learn a lot about the market of each locality that your business operates in from the online presence of your local competitors. Important things that you can learn from your competitors include the maturity of each market, the most important keywords in each market, and the strategies working best in each market.

Key Areas of Local SEO Competitor Analysis

1. On-Page SEO Analysis

On-page optimization is an incredibly broader field, and there are many different strategies you can deploy to help your site rank better in local search results. Further, on-page SEO is an umbrella term covering all the different actions that can be carried out on a website to help it perform better in search. It can be further split into technical and non-technical activities.

Competitor analysis begins with a review of competitors’ websites to see how they may be able to outrank you and/or what they may be trying to rank for. Examining the primary website content of any competitors outranking your website, emphasizing relevant keywords for which you want to be found.

Keywords they use in their titles, page headings, and link anchor text are presumably the keywords they have optimized for. While reviewing a competitive website or content, the assumption is that it was created and published with SEO in mind.

Analyzing the structured data/schema markup aids search engines in understanding the context of their content. Tools such as Google’s structured data testing tool help with this.

Running a Google PageSpeed Insights study on any of the competitors’ ranking pages, as well as your own, to evaluate their website’s usability and mobile friendliness and identify any discrepancies. It should go without saying that a mobile-friendly website is crucial for local SEO since Google prioritizes mobile-first indexing.

2. Google Business Profile (GBP) Optimization

Google Business Profile is a free feature from Google that helps business owners manage their online presence across the search engine and its growing portfolio of utilities, including Google Maps. Seasoned SEO professionals use GBP to leverage a location-based strategy.

As per a survey of SEO professionals by Brightlocal, GBP optimization is the most valuable local SEO service, followed by creating content and web design. For many businesses, their GBP is as (if not more) important than their website. As such, reviewing your competitor’s GBP reveals how often you need to post content or how many reviews need to be compete.

3. Local Citation Analysis

Your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) appearing in citations aids in strengthening local SEO, confirming geographic relevance to Google. Coming to establishing local authority and visibility, local directory submission still matters.

You can conduct an incognito search and review local directories, or use tools such as Whitespark or BrightLocal for identifying where your competitors are listed. Do focus on consistency and accuracy of NAP information. However, inconsistent citations can confuse search engines and negatively impact rankings.

4. Local Link Building Analysis

Building relationships with local influencers and businesses aids you in acquiring high-quality local backlinks. Tools like Ahrefs or Semrush are used to analyze your competitors’ backlink profiles.

Review your competitor’s website to see if they have established local partnerships, and then see if those partners have linked to or mentioned them on their sites.

5. Review And Reputation Analysis

Reviews are important for establishing customer trust and, by extension, local search authority and rankings.

Furthermore, reputation analysis helps small businesses to understand how people feel about them and determine what they can do better to address this sentiment, as a glowing reputation can boost sales, customer loyalty, and awareness of your client’s brand. However, a poor reputation can do quite the opposite. By conducting regular reputation analysis, SMBs can stay ahead of potential risks and take steps to a better image.

6. Local Content Strategy

Local content marketing attracts and engages customers and prospects in a business neighbourhood, city, or region. 84% businesses say they see a positive impact or revenue when they localize their marketing content. examples of local content are blog posts and social media posts about local events or news.

Businesses can also partner with influencers or do guest posts on other business blogs to expand visibility and foster connections. Content is a well-planned and effective content marketing strategy can set a local business apart. Creating and sharing relevant, high-quality content that your customers and prospects want to read, like, and share is key to providing expertise while building authority and trust